It still feels strange to think that a holiday like Independence Day can be marked to the sound of air raid sirens and the blasts of guided bombs and Shahed drones. In a normal country, this day would be about fireworks, parades, and embroidered shirts. Here, it is about nerves of steel, endurance, and the cold calculation needed to survive.
Ukraine marks its thirty-fourth Independence Day very differently than imagined back in 1991. No one dreamed of celebrating it during a war with Russia, when Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa are shelled without pause, when every night in Kyiv begins with a glance at the dark sky — will something hit, or not? Yet paradoxically, this is the very essence of independence. Because independence is not a parade on Khreshchatyk, but the ability to tell the world: we will exist, no matter what.
People are exhausted. Some have lived a year without light or heat, others carry the grief of a grave at the edge of their village where a family table once stood. And yet, all these losses only deepen the value of the state’s very existence. Ukraine is not about an easy life — it is about the fact that it still stands.
And today, on this Independence Day, the largest parade is not in the capital but on the frontline. There, Ukrainian soldiers face down, day after day, an army once hailed as “the second strongest in the world,” now reduced to a weary monster mired in its own aggression.
Perhaps this is the true meaning of the holiday — to understand that independence always comes at a cost, and now at the highest one. And everyone who raised a blue-and-yellow flag today, or hung it from their window, made a simple but powerful statement: this country is still here. And it will remain here forever.