The absurdities of this historical moment, as embodied by President Zelensky, point us to the deeper truths of Ukraine’s messy identity, which is proving to be a more powerful construction than Putin’s authoritarian nostalgia. //

Ukrainians voted for a mixture of Benny Hill and Boris Johnson, and somehow wound up with Churchill. //

It is surely no accident, comrades, that the “neo-Nazi” Ukraine that Putin desires to subjugate and cleanse for the sin of resisting his embrace, is led in battle by a president, a minister of defense, chief of administration, and a mayor of Kyiv who all have Jewish blood and roots. All of which signals the ratification of a country that does not look back to any hoary, folk conception of Ukrainian political ethos, but rather to the internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and historicity of a particular Ukraine in reality. This modern vision of Ukraine has won, regardless of the destruction that the superior weaponry of a demoralized and disorganized Russian army inflicts on it. It is proving so with a heroism much more universal than the doomed and narrowly anti-imperialist heroism of a Khmelnytsky or a Petlura.