Watching the Olympics in Ukraine
One world enables another
The Olympics look different from different places, depending, for example, on whether your viewing might be interrupted by an air raid siren or your electricity cut by a missile attack.
It is a rough Olympics, seen from Ukraine. War is an everyday reality, touching everything. Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine right after the last Winter Olympics, so four years ago, and has killed hundreds of Ukrainian athletes.
Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Ukrainian skeleton racer, was disqualified from these Olympics for wearing a helmet on which photographs of some of these athletes could be seen. Heraskevych, along with the freestyle skier Kateryna Kotsar, was one of the best hopes for a medal. Ukrainians have won no medals at these games and are unlikely to do so.
I am working all day here in Uzhhorod, and try to catch a few minutes of the sports at night. The Ukrainian network Suspilne has an appealing wrap-up show, with gentle production values. Placed in front of one the commentators, for example, is a laptop with a visible sticker — something hard to imagine on other national networks.
The quirkiness is calming. In the Ukrainian wartime setting, I associate traditional production values with the propaganda of criminal invasions, with the Russian television I have to watch. The Russians distinguish themselves on their state-controlled channels with sparkling backdrops and horrifying lies, whereas the Ukrainians sometimes scramble on the set but provide actual reporting.
The tone of the Ukrainian Olympic coverage is humane. Like other national commentators, the Ukrainians pay attention to their own athletes. But they do a better job than some of explaining the sports, of dwelling on the funny moments, of keeping things in perspective. Hockey fights and little scandals get abundant and amused attention. Commentators and correspondents seem unscripted, and they laugh spontaneously. A sign language interpreter brings the the banter to a broader audience.
And so, ironically, when I watch the Ukrainians covering sports, I can think about the sports. I get to have that distraction, that pleasure, that moment.
And this, of course, is what Ukrainians are doing for many of the rest of us, on a vast scale, the scale of life itself: buying us time, buying us moments, with their pain, with their lives.
I am watching right now, but many Ukrainians are not, because they have no electricity. During the Olympics, indeed all winter long, and indeed for the fifth winter in a row, Russia sends missiles and drones to destroy what we euphemistically call “civilian infrastructure”: the facilities that allow tens of millions of people to have power and water. People in Ukraine are killed in these attacks, and millions are left cold during the winter nights — or left to their own resources, to tents, to generators, to the apartments of friends and family.
On the front, in the east, Russians attack. And every day, they are held back — from the rest of Ukraine, from other countries, from a victory that would alter the world. And for this defense Ukrainians pay a price.
Uzhhorod is in the southwest, at the foot of the Carpathians, the safest part of Ukraine (and the warmest, so long as you stay off the mountains). But from here men and women go east and fight. In Uzhhorod, as in every Ukrainian town I have visited, a site memorializes the men and women killed while resisting the full-scale invasion.
The Ukrainians fight well, doing what no one expected that they could do: hold back Russia. And the tragic result is that we can take them for granted, treat their astounding historical achievement as simply the status quo.
Had Russia broken through in 2022, it seems unlikely that the Winter Olympics would have pride of place in the European news just now. Had Russia won its war in Ukraine, those skillful Scandinavian skiers and biathletes would probably be deploying their abilities in a different setting.
Ukrainians even adorned these Winter Olympics with a love story. After one of those skillful Norwegian skiers managed to confound his nation’s vibe with a televised confession of relationship complication, the Ukrainians came through with romance. On Valentine’s Day, Kateryna Kotsar, the freestyle skier, qualified for the finals in big air — and got engaged to be married. Her boyfriend approached her after one of her qualifying runs, kneeled, and proposed.
There is much to be said against this sort of male stunt. A woman achieves something in public in a role she has chosen herself — and then the wedding proposal changes the focus to another role which she wasn’t choosing at that moment. But this case is perhaps different.
The boyfriend, Bohdan Fashtryha, had been encouraging the girlfriend to stay in the sport, to be the star. And he has been serving in the Ukrainian armed forces. Before the war he worked here in the southwest of the country as a guide in the Carpathians; he volunteered in summer 2024 and was assigned to a tank battalion where, according to media reports, he serves as a medic. To be with his girlfriend in Italy, he had to get leave. And of course this was a discussion; Italy is a gentler place than Ukraine, and a commanding officer who lets a soldier go there is taking a risk. By putting himself on television, the soldier made himself a public figure, and ensured that his actions would be closely followed. When his leave is over he will go back to war.
And this changes the romantic story — not so much boy meets girl as country resists genocide. Affirming a future as a couple is a different matter when a an invading army, complete with torturers and executioners, is trying to obliterate your country.
Kateryna Kotsar had a message of her own, which she wrote on her glove: “Freedom for memory.” She had in mind the skeleton racer Heraskevych, and his disqualification, and the people he wanted to remember, the Ukrainian athletes killed, the friends killed.
That moment has passed: Heraskevych could not compete in skeleton; Kotsar finished tenth in big air; her medic fiancé Bohdan will soon be trying to keep other soldiers alive. We have him on video kneeling to propose; can we imagine him kneeling to tend to a wounded comrade?
The Ukrainian network doesn’t have much footage on some nights, so I turn to the internet for the American summaries. We differ from others in how we do this. During these Olympics I have watched the Norwegians and the Austrians and the Slovaks and the Canadians as well as the Americans. While everyone is more or less nationalist and no one is perfect, we do stand out in a specific way: our obsession with winning and flashing bling.
I don’t want to be unfair. The American athletes have various perspectives. And some of our commentators do inject notes of expertise or empathy. But a good deal is just the repetition of something that everyone already knows: if the athlete wins they get a medal. Before the event starts we are told to imagine the podium at the end. The performance itself is compressed into a prelude to winning or losing.
The emphasis on getting gold doesn’t seem innocent: not in a moment when the American president paints his face gold, demands golden prizes, and tells whole countries that he wants their minerals.
One night, while watching, I found myself meditating upon the sticker on that laptop: an image of the Ukrainian poet and dramatist Lesya Ukraïnka.
Although she is not yet well known beyond Ukraine, she was an extraordinary figure, not least because of her struggle with pain. She suffered from tuberculosis from childhood, had fingers amputated, and spent much of her short life in sanatoria, in bed and in pain. And yet she journeyed to care for others who were dying, she worked hard, and was able to laugh. She used pain as motivation and translated her pain into empathy. Though she died more than a century ago, she is today one of the most popular people in Ukraine.
One of her ideas was that tyrants fall for the same reason that they rise: their indifference to others. Another was that a free society is built not as a community of grievance but as a community of pain. I am not sure that I have a right to that idea; but I feel that I have a duty to remember it.
We cannot be free without the memory of others who suffer, without recalling the people who are suffering now; in this night, in this place, during this air raid alert, I think of Ukraine, where I am: but it could be Sudan, or Gaza, or Iran, or concentration camps in Russia, or China, or America, and all of the history that we choose to forget, and how that forgetfulness helped bring us our present predicament. Do Americans remember, for example, how much hatred greeted Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they wore black gloves and raised their fists on the podium after winning sprinting medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City?
“Freedom of memory,” wrote the skiier Kateryna Kotsar on her own glove. It also works the other way around: we need memory for freedom.
When we forget others, our oblivion invites indifferent kings to rule us, to envelop us in their bottomless grievance. If nothing matters but the golden prize, then why not admire the people who cheat, who grift, who blame others? When we accept that outcome is everything, we forget the human motives that lead people to strive, and to hurt.
Kotsar’s freestyle skiing is beautiful -- as I could appreciate because Suspilne showed her runs over and over again --, but it cost her something to get that good. She can try to recall, as indeed she did, the difference between the pain of training and the pain of other Ukrainians at home. And she can give us a chance, by doing so, to make that leap of empathy ourselves.
Empathy is not a moral luxury; it is a precondition of freedom. My best night in Uzhhorod was a public conversation about freedom with the human rights activist and journalist and philosopher Maksym Butkevych, who despite his own pacifism, joined the Ukrainian armed forces after the full-scale invasion. Maksym was captured by the Russians and held as a prisoner of war for over two years, and was made to suffer.
He talks about his captivity when asked, but the other night his attention was really on others, on Americans: he had just come back from the U.S, and asked why we seemed “flabbergasted” (his word) by predictable forms of oppression which, as he was kind enough not to say, have been experienced by others.
When we remember others, they remember us. And when we remember others, and they remember us, we have a chance to remember ourselves.
TS, Uzhhorod, 15-18 February 2026, set to publish 21 February 2026.
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Can an essay win the Nobel Peace Prize? Because I would like to nominate this one.
Snyder captures something neuroscience confirms but we systematically ignore: empathy isn’t moral decoration, it’s the cognitive architecture that makes cooperation, and therefore freedom, possible.
When Americans obsess over gold medals rather than performance, we’re not just being shallow, we’re rewiring our reward systems to value only outcomes we can claim as ours.
Repeatedly choosing not to engage with others’ pain doesn’t just make you callous, it literally atrophies the neural pathways that allow you to model other minds, to imagine what freedom costs when you’re defending it under artillery fire instead of watching from a couch.
The Ukrainians covering Olympics with visible laptop stickers and spontaneous laughter aren’t just charming…they’re demonstrating what societies optimized for trust rather than dominance actually look like. They remember their dead not because it’s performative but because connection to others’ sacrifice is what binds communities when everything else is being destroyed.
Meanwhile Americans can’t remember Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising fists in 1968 because we’ve been conditioned to forget any suffering that complicates the narrative of meritocracy and winning. That forgetting isn’t accidental. It’s the product of incentive structures rewarding erasure of context, valorizing individual achievement disconnected from collective struggle.
Free societies are built as communities of shared pain, not grievance—-is the inversion of everything American culture currently optimizes for. We’ve built a society that insists suffering is either deserved or irrelevant, that acknowledges only victories worth claiming. The behavioral consequence is predictable: a population “flabbergasted” by predictable oppression because we systematically trained ourselves not to notice anyone else’s.
When you spend decades optimizing neural architecture for “winning” rather than solidarity, you end up with a society that can’t recognize authoritarianism until the camps are already built.
Ukrainians holding back genocide are buying us time we’re wasting on gold paint and willful amnesia.
—Johan