Independence Has to Be Earned

None of what follows is an argument against the feeling. Today the feed is full of embroidered shirts, tears, we cannot be broken, we pay for independence in blood. It comes from the heart, and I know that completely. But I cannot celebrate while the country is in ruins, while the best of us go into the ground or abroad, and while corruption has eaten through enough of the structure that building anything at all begins to feel futile.

We are thirty-five years old. Once a year we could afford one uncomfortable question: what exactly are we proud of?

That European countries have to finance our Patriots and order them from an American manufacturer? That we buy electricity from Hungary, the same Hungary that keeps our door to Europe bolted shut? That pensions and public-sector salaries are closed out of grants from European and American taxpayers? That the rate of our own currency is not decided in Kyiv? That we sit on some of the richest rare-earth deposits in Europe and cannot extract them ourselves to earn the country a single hryvnia? Or that in thirty-five years what we have learned to do best is lose our gene pool, drown in rows of condolences, and go on stealing from ourselves?

Or are we proud that we held, that in our first real fight we managed to hit back at the strongest boy in the village?

We did. We held. That is true, and it is an enormous truth, and I will not let anyone devalue it. But that boy went on to cut down half our family. And we are still standing at his fence, asking the neighbours for money for bandages, for electricity, for ammunition. That is not victory. It is survival.

Pride is a product of your own strength, your own agency and your ability to earn. When you depend entirely on someone else's wallet, someone else's goodwill and someone else's military deliveries, beating your chest is not patriotism. It is infantilism.

Perhaps Ukraine does not need to be declared great every 24 August. Perhaps it needs to be accepted as it is: wounded, robbed, dependent, leaving. And simply loved. Real love has one condition. It does not lie. It sees the person as they are, unadorned, ill, knocked off their feet, and stays anyway. People do not lie out of love. They lie because they are afraid to look at the truth.

There is a formula being drummed into us: the more of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sisters die, the more we deserve our independence. Stop. That is not a formula for independence. It is a formula for writing off a nation.

Blood is a price, not a merit.

A price does not entitle anyone to an unlimited line of credit, and it does not substitute for work.

Strong minds, talent, enormous potential. Thirty-five years of those words is enough to make you ill. Everyone appears to understand this, so I will say it directly: nobody owes us anything. We will not be taken into Europe or NATO as we are today, because no family takes in someone who cannot answer for themselves. We have drowned in blood, corruption and disorder.

So the poetic register has to end, along with the substitution of terms and the self-deception. Growing up is not pathos. It is specific.

Stop confusing sacrifice with merit. Take the hard decisions, each of us at our own level, without delegating responsibility upwards or downwards. Start earning as a country, and build an economy that pays for its own army out of its own revenue. Make theft during a war politically fatal: no bail, no quiet arrangements, no emigration of the accused. Stop trading raw material and make the jump into energy, technology and defence manufacturing. And make the country somewhere people return to by calculation rather than out of patriotism.

Between our belief in a strong Ukraine and the day we are actually living lies a hard reality. It has to be reckoned with, and it does not permit anyone to relax.

So: happy Independence Day, the independence we have still to earn.