Five years. Five years of war, and do you know what the American news cycle has given the Ukrainian people lately? A mention here and there when someone wants to talk about what Putin needs. A shrug dressed up as geopolitics. And now — now that our government has handed Russia a lifeline by lifting sanctions on their oil while bombs are falling in a different time zone — Ukraine has basically disappeared from the conversation entirely. The Iran war has seen to that quite nicely, hasn’t it.
Auntie sees you, Ukraine. She hasn’t forgotten. And she’s not going to let you forget either, my loves, because these people deserve better than to become a footnote.
Let’s start with the name, because it matters more than you’d think. His name is Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Two Y’s at the end — that’s not a typo, that’s a choice. That’s the Ukrainian transliteration, not the Russian one, and the man put it on his passport that way on purpose. Same reason the capital is Kyiv and not Kiev. Same reason this whole war exists — because Ukraine has been trying to write its own story for decades, and a certain neighbor keeps trying to take the pen away. Even the spelling is an act of defiance. Auntie respects that enormously.
Now. Before he was the president of a country at war, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a comedian. He played a fictional president on a television show. The show was called Servant of the People. He was so good at playing a decent leader who told the truth that his actual countrymen elected him to do it for real. You could not make that up. And then — then Russia invaded, and the man who used to make people laugh stood up in Kyiv in a green sweatshirt and told the world he was staying. Not fleeing, not negotiating his exit, not taking the very gracious American offer of evacuation. Staying. “I need ammunition,” he said, “not a ride.”
Say that out loud and let it sit for a second.
I need ammunition. Not a ride.
Auntie has said a lot of things in her time. She has never said anything that good.
He has been to the front lines. He has buried people. He has given addresses from underground bunkers and from the streets of his capital city and from the steps of parliaments across Europe, and every single time he has stood up straight and told the truth about what is happening to his people. He went to Washington last February to try to sign a minerals deal — a deal that would have benefited the United States enormously — and he was ambushed in the Oval Office by two grown men who called him ungrateful, questioned whether Ukraine deserved to survive, and then had him escorted out of the building. The joint press conference was canceled. The deal fell apart. And Zelenskyy went to London, where Keir Starmer embraced him on the steps of Downing Street. He went to Paris, where Emmanuel Macron told him, clearly and on the record, that there is an aggressor and a victim in this war and France knows which is which. The Eiffel Tower lit up blue and yellow that night.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said something after that Oval Office catastrophe that Auntie has written on a piece of paper and stuck to her refrigerator. “Today it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” A Ukrainian blogger said his country was “the coolest country in the world right now — again.” And one Ukrainian soldier — one of the men still in the trenches while all of this was happening — sent a photo of a Russian drone strike on his position and said, simply: “I think I need more ammunition because there will be no peace agreements.”
These people are still fighting. They are still there. They have been there for five years.
Let Auntie tell you a little about what the Ukrainian people are made of, babies, because the media has forgotten to mention it. They are a people who have buried their children and gone back to work rebuilding the next morning. They are a people who turned a comedian into a wartime president and then rallied behind him when the most powerful man in the world tried to humiliate him on live television. They are a people whose soldiers, when asked to comment on the Oval Office disaster, said they were in shock but added — and this is the part that breaks Auntie’s heart in the best possible way — “in my opinion, Russian forces are running out of steam, because they keep getting their asses kicked here.” From the front line. Under active shelling. That’s what they sent.
Ukraine has not had it easy from this side of the ocean, my loves, and Auntie is not going to pretend otherwise. The United States cut military aid. Redirected twenty thousand anti-drone interceptors made specifically for Ukraine — sent them to Israel and U.S. forces in the Middle East instead. The Trump administration lifted sanctions on Russian oil, handing Putin a war chest right when it hurt most. What was supposed to be fourteen billion dollars in military assistance has become four hundred million. You do that math. Zelenskyy called the sanctions lifting “not the right decision” and said plainly that it “does not help peace.” He was right. He’s been right about most of it. He’s been right for five years while people with “nice oceans” between them and the war told him he didn’t have the cards.
He has the cards. He’s just not getting the hand he was promised.
Europe, to its great credit, has stepped up in ways it never had to before — ninety billion euros in loans, peacekeeping commitments, rearmament on a scale not seen since the Second World War. Macron has visited Zelenskyy twelve times. Twelve. Some of us could stand to count our own visits and feel a little sheepish. But the United States — the country that handed Ukraine a Budapest Memorandum in 1994 and promised to protect its sovereignty in exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons — has been busy lifting sanctions, redirecting interceptors, and having Zelenskyy thrown out of the Oval Office.
We owe them better than this. That’s not politics, babies, that’s basic human decency.
Zelenskyy is still there. He is still standing in Kyiv. He is still, at this very moment, trying to negotiate a peace deal that doesn’t hand his country’s future to a man who has broken his word twenty-five times and counting. He still believes — and this might be the most remarkable thing about him — that the United States will come back to its senses. “It’s crucial for us to have President Trump’s support,” he said after being told to leave the White House. “He wants to end the war, and no one wants peace more than we do.” That is not the statement of a man who has given up. That is the statement of a man who has been forged in something the rest of us can barely imagine, and who is still choosing, every single day, to believe that decency is worth fighting for.
Now. The silly insult portion of our broadcast, because Auntie always delivers:
JD Vance, you tinpot little hall monitor in a suit two sizes too big for your principles — the man you lectured about gratitude was standing in a warzone while you were still figuring out how to spell “diplomacy.” Sit down.
And now the blessing, my loves, because that’s why you came.
May you find, in the next hard week, one moment that reminds you what it means to stay. Not because it’s easy. Not because anyone’s coming to rescue you. But because you are the coolest country in the world right now — even if that country is just the four walls of your kitchen, your group chat, your little corner of resistance in whatever Gilead you’re navigating. The Ukrainians haven’t left. Zelenskyy hasn’t left. Auntie hasn’t left.
And neither have you. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
Tits up, elbows out, babies. Auntie’s got the shillelagh, and she knows which direction to point it.
Auntie Fah is broadcastin’ live, independent, and entirely reader-supported from somewhere in Gilead with a strong cup of tea and a list. Everything she says is fact-checked, even the parts that sound like she made them up — she didn’t. If you want to keep the lights on and the kettle hot, buy us a cuppa at buymeacoffee.com/unfugginbelievable. Stay ungovernable.
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