This is an opinion column.
We were all there at the Battle of Irpin. We watched on television as the refugees from Russian shelling struggled across the river on a single plank, beneath the broken bridge, carrying whatever pets and possessions they could.
When I saw that history happening, I decided it was not passing me by. I was not going to let the finger point at me for doing nothing, the way it pointed at Birminghamians of good conscience when the bomb went off in 1963. I was going to Ukraine to do what I could.
A year later, I was in Kyiv when a Russian missile attack killed 11-year-old Viktoria Ivashko—a little girl the same age as Denise McNair. I thought there must be some connection between these incomprehensible springes of evil that keep us divided against our better angels, and some common escape from their snare.
For ten years before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, driven by other injustices I witnessed, I devoted myself to investigating government corruption in Georgia. The year before the invasion I spent briefing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on the equally unpopular subject of Georgians cooperating, wittingly or unwittingly, with Russian intelligence attacks on Georgia elections in 2016. Back then, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp served as spokesman for Putin state propaganda denying Russian hacking—which has since been proven to have happened.
So, after February 24, it was not that much of a leap (well, maybe it was) for me to head straight to where it all began: Putin ordered the Russian central intelligence directorate (GRU) attack on US elections in 2014, in retaliation for US sanctions imposed on Russia for the invasion of eastern Ukraine the same year. Putin ordered that undeclared war in response to Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of February 2014.
“The Maidan” was the public uprising in which the people of Ukraine rejected the Putin puppet government of Viktor Yanukovych, advised by the American political operative, who went on to become Donald Trump’s campaign director, Paul Manafort. Manafort was paid millions by Russian oligarchs to establish pro-Putin regimes, not only in Ukraine, but on every continent.
But for all of Manafort’s spin-doctoring, the people of Ukraine braved Russian snipers and Yanukovych’s police goons and went to the streets to demand their freedom from Moscow’s domination, an end to the accepted corruption of the Soviet era, and acceptance of their right of self-determination to join the Western democracies, a coalition traditionally led by the United States.
Birmingham attorney Stephen Humphreys has spent most of the last year in Ukraine mainly working on war crimes investigations, volunteering to help train Ukrainian armed forces, and teaching law and history at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.
What Manafort could not gain him by guile, Putin—in a move described by Trump as genius-- determined to seize by force. During many months spent in Bucha and Irpin, I have seen and heard the witness of women raped, civilians bound and executed, and unspeakable tortures in the service of a single man’s ambitions to lead an empire.
Since the dark days of February and March of 2022, after the Russian withdrawal from the region north of Kyiv, I have taught in the university at Irpin, the steel beams of its administration building still scorched, melted, and twisted into a frozen choreography of human depravity and spiritual devastation.
I have seen the anti-aircraft batteries light up outside my window. I have witnessed Russian cruise missiles shot out of the sky above me. I had one land two blocks away from me – on a children’s playground in a park beside Taras Shevchenko University.
I have seen a country exhausted by this carnage, families separated, relationships dissolved as wives and children flee abroad, universities operating without electricity, resigned humor about the constant air alerts, careers on hold, accomplished medical specialists and attorneys eating military rations and receiving military salaries, but somehow life goes on in the cities and the villages.
Throughout it all, despite the suffering and the sacrifices, one thing I’ve seen here in Ukraine is a camaraderie of spirit, a feeling that everyone is on the same team, the underdog who can pull off the upset, a team with a spirit that cannot be beaten. It’s something I have not seen in the United States since Newt Gingrich declared a second civil war in America, a country divided, with divisions Putin has explicitly directed his military intelligence to exploit by feeding conspiracy theories to the Mo Brooks and Marjorie Taylor Greens.
We think we invented it in 1776, but maybe we have forgotten what it is like to bind together and sacrifice everything for a common national ideal and identity, until the Ukrainians showed us how it is done in 2023—by refusing to surrender their freedom. Ukraine did not collapse in three days as predicted. Instead, Ukrainians stood together with incredible resolve by the suffering civilian population, like the one that crossed the Irpin River, and with amazing initiative and ingenuity on the battlefield that Putin’s old Soviet war crimes machine cannot match.
I am gratified that, like the traveler in our old folk song, I came from Alabama and was able to find via many signs and wonders ways to help Ukraine defend itself and spread its message: from assisting war crimes and other criminal investigations to teaching Civil Rights history at Taras Shevchenko University, from advising the Ukrainian parliament to volunteering at the territorial defense training center—where I see the resolve in the faces of the young Ukrainian men and women who step up to defend their country from becoming part of Putin’s mafia state tyranny.
I recognize in their faces what Americans are supposed to be, a reminder of how we are supposed to lead. If Putin’s reign of lies and terror is ever ended, it will be because of Ukraine. If Americans join together like Ukraine has done, and restore a sense of shared truth, united purpose, and common decency--to save our democracy--it will be thanks to Ukraine, the new land of the free and home of the brave. Ukrainians are standing up to Putin’s attack on their homeland, while we are still arguing about whether Russia’s attack on America actually happened, along with other Qanon theories.
I thought I came here as part of an American effort to save Ukraine, but this is what I learned: it is Ukraine that will save America.
Birmingham attorney Stephen Humphreys has spent most of the last year in Ukraine mainly working on war crimes investigations, volunteering to help train Ukrainian armed forces, and teaching law and history at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv.