What does it take to defend a democracy? Ask the people of Mariupol, a city whose name is already synonymous with the extraordinary price people will pay to stand up to overwhelming force. A month after the first artillery assaults on a place I knew as a bustling port city, it is now reduced to a shell of destroyed buildings and besieged residents, risking their lives to scavenge for food for the children, cut off from the outside world and whose last defence against a pitiless aggressor is the refusal to capitulate.
The stories of heroism and despair are already hard to read, but too important not to know about. Since the invasion the ferocity of war in Ukraine has shown the face of bravery — especially its stubborn, diehard leader Volodymyr Zelensky upbraiding a feeble West for its equivocations and its tendency, even now, to will the victory of plucky Ukraine against Moscow but flail when it comes to the scale of support.
