Four years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was a high school student. It was after 9 p.m. here. In Kyiv, it was already morning—missiles before sunrise, frantic messages. Are you safe? The question has not gotten easier with time.

If not for a gap year, I would be preparing to graduate from Bowdoin now. Instead, as a junior, I mark my college years against the war’s duration: four academic cycles, four winters, one assault.

There has been no shortage of commentary. The war is called the largest in Europe since World War II. Analysts debate its meaning, Western fatigue and whether the U.S. has vital interests at stake. The consensus in Washington,  D.C. holds that Russia has the advantage, that Ukraine must accept territorial compromise, that continued support is futile. But abstraction feels obscene in the fourth winter—the deadliest so far, with more total casualties and more civilian deaths, almost exclusively Ukrainian, than any previous year.

For weeks, temperatures have fallen to around negative 13 degrees Fahrenheit at night. In some cities, electricity and water are available only a few hours each day; a friend’s 84-year-old grandfather, living on the tenth floor of a 16-story building, descends dark stairwells when the power cuts out to charge his phone or collect hot water from emergency tents—then climbs back up the stairs.

When I check in with family and friends in Ukraine, the exchange remains simple and strained. How are you?

What has changed this year is not the brutality of the war but the direction of concern.

In recent months, federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. Official explanations were quickly contradicted by public evidence. The response was protest, confusion and a growing sense that lethal force against dissenters no longer requires plausible explanation. In the days after, my phone buzzed—not with updates from Ukraine but with messages.

How are you holding up? What are people saying? Are you safe?

There is a sad irony in being asked that question by someone who sleeps in a trench or in a city apartment without heat as bombardment continues outside.

One friend serving at the front told me something simple: Opposing brutality and lawlessness, wherever it appears, is the only way forward. He did not say this with moral superiority. He said it with fatigue.

Ukraine is not without flaws. Yet even under martial law and despite lingering Soviet-era institutional weaknesses, Ukrainian watchdog agencies expose major scandals publicly, journalists criticize officials openly and political arguments spill freely into the press—reminders of what must be protected for disagreement to remain possible.

Meanwhile, at home, dissent increasingly feels polarized rather than principled. In Brunswick, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s operations near campus have prompted the College to issue safety guidance—a response marked by steadiness and care, a reminder that institutional responsibility is still possible. That a liberal arts campus in Maine must now navigate federal enforcement as a threat is its own kind of collapse. Nationally, criticism is often framed as betrayal, and institutions meant to ensure accountability—oversight boards, Inspectors General and the rule of law appear fragile.

And still Ukrainians tell me not to give up on America.

When I voice frustration, they answer with stubborn faith: America is still worth the work. We will win, and you will win, they say. The confidence is generous. It is also unsettling—particularly when the language of inevitability has begun to replace the language of principle in Washington D.C. Studying history, I think of President Abraham Lincoln’s warning that President Thomas Jefferson’s principles would stand as “a stumbling block to all those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.” It once felt like a settled inheritance. Now it reads like a live question, and Ukrainians seem more certain of the answer than I am.

Four winters in, the hardest questions about democratic endurance are not asked from safety. They are asked from trenches, from blacked-out apartments, from stairwells climbed in the dark and directed, with patience and exhaustion, at us.

Are you safe?

Volodymyr Zadorojny is a member of the Class of 2027.