Does Putin know why Ukraine fights on? Because we prize freedom above stability and wealth | Andrey Kurkov

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Last November, my wife Elizabeth planted a great many tulip and daffodil bulbs in the cold autumn soil, so that in the spring, even more flowers than usual would bloom around our village house, located an hour’s drive from Kyiv. Our neighbours have sown garlic and onions for the winter, planted flowers and scattered fertiliser over the ploughed land, thoughtful of another year’s harvest.

But between now and the spring, there is winter and there is war.

During war, a person’s need for beauty increases a hundredfold. On the news, we are shown ruins, bodies being pulled from the rubble of Ukrainian cities and villages. From 10pm until 10am, sirens sound, calling Ukrainians to go down to bomb shelters. Many people bearing this unimaginable hardship are sustained by the hope of liberation of captured territories and a return to their peaceful lives – a return to freedom.

We do not know what will come first: peace or spring. But we know that the spring will definitely come. It will come even in places where everything has been burned to the ground. Grass will grow through the decayed military uniforms in the trenches, through the bones of soldiers, through the carcasses of burnt armoured vehicles. War is not able to stop the calendar or time. It only stops life, destroying it, making a person hide from everything that falls from the sky, that shoots, that explodes.

In early December, a Russian missile fell into a lake in the village of Vysoke, 10km from our village. Half of the water and silt from the lake rose into the sky and fell on nearby houses, painting the walls and roofs a swampy green colour. In our village, the explosion was felt like an earthquake. Our neighbours ran out into the yard, afraid that their houses would fall apart. They waited until the echo of the explosion had faded away and the earth calmed down and froze under their feet. Then they returned to their houses, which had stood firm this time.

This missile explosion filled their hearts with dread, but within an hour, the fear had passed and was replaced by fury and a rock-hard faith that Ukraine will defeat the Russian aggressor. We live with the reality of war, but it is not fear that drives us as we go about out daily business. Fear does not overshadow our thoughts or guide our desires. We remain, for the most part, free people, free from fear and free in general.

For Ukrainians, freedom has always been more important than stability, more important than wealth, more important, unfortunately, than laws. This would seem to be one of the main differences between Russians and Ukrainians. For Ukrainians, freedom is more important than stability; for Russians, stability is more important than freedom. The war is all about this difference. It is a war against the Ukrainian love of freedom, against the Ukrainians’ desire to determine the fate of their country and their own destinies.

The young Ukrainian poet and author of children’s books Volodymyr Vakulenko refused to leave his home near Kharkiv when the Russian army approached his village. He understood what the price of such a decision could be and, the day before people in Russian military uniforms came to take him away from his home, he took his handwritten diary – a record of his time under occupation – and buried it in the garden. He left his home for the last time on 24 March 2022. Only eight months later, in the forest of Izium, his body was found in the grave marked “319”. Two bullets from a Makarov pistol were removed. Those bullets were the price the writer paid for his freedom of choice, for choosing to stay himself and remain the master of his own home.

Throughout the eight months that Vakulenko’s fate was unknown, the writer and poet Victoria Amelina was trying to find out what had happened to him. It was she who dug up Volodymyr’s diary and prepared the manuscript for publication. A talented, determined and freedom-loving person, Amelina put aside her prose at the very start of the war and began to document the Russian army’s war crimes in Ukraine. She also accompanied foreign writers and journalists to regions close to the frontline. On one of those journeys east, she was accompanying Colombian journalists to the city of Kramatorsk, in Donbas. There, she was mortally wounded by shrapnel from a Russian missile. She paid with her life for helping others to understand Ukraine and to understand freedom.

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The internal freedom that shines out from people such as Vakulenko and Amelina is an inspiration and a guide for their fellow Ukrainians and people all over the world. They prove that freedom is not only about knowing your rights and having the ability to protect them; it is a daily struggle.

If a society forgets about the need to respect the freedom of each member – and this state of sleepy forgetfulness is so easy to fall into – the consequences can be dramatic and even tragic. Before our eyes, the prime minister of Hungary is trying to introduce laws that are typical of totalitarian states. Before our eyes, the prime minister of Slovakia bows before Vladimir Putin.

The war that Russia has been waging in Ukraine for 11 years has taught Ukrainians to love and value their freedom and the freedom of their country even more. But freedom is not only the right to life. Freedom is, first of all, the right to be yourself and remain yourself in any circumstances without the risk of paying for it with your life or your physical freedom.

Despite the war, Ukrainian society continues to value freedom and democratic values. Probably for the first time in history, a country at war has not introduced censorship of the press or mass media. Political freedoms remain and Ukrainian culture is experiencing an active period of development as cultural figures realise that culture is a vital front in this war.

I am free. These words mean a lot to me. I am free, and I am alive, but more than 100 writers, poets, publishers and translators have died since February 2022. Remember this and do not allow yourselves to fall into a cosy stupor – not now or even after the end of the war – because freedom does not tolerate being forgotten. When people assume that it will not go anywhere – that freedom is a given – that is the most dangerous moment.

Freedom requires attention, like the bulbs and seeds planted in carefully selected and prepared ground, protected from the ravages of winter. If we do not want freedom to disappear, we must look after it. If we want to be able to exercise our freedom of choice, we must understand that we have it. If we want our children to value that freedom in the future, we must make a conscious decision to use our freedom of choice today.