These are not the anniversaries you want to be acknowledging. I am sure a lot of other people will have a lot to say. I am just going to take a moment and quote from an upcoming book of mine:
Vladimir Putin created the modern state of Ukraine. This is a state that clearly is now going to be around for decades, if not centuries. The year 2022 is their 1776. It is the year they unified their country and finally and firmly broke with their past as a member of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It is the year it clearly asserted itself as Ukraine.
…it still has a long, extended fight on its hands, where a country over three times its population and almost ten times its economy has seized and looks like it intends to hold onto major parts of its Eastern regions. Not sure for how long that will play out, and whether this is a war that reaches a negotiated settlement in six months, of a war that continues on for years, or achieves an armistice for now only to return back to war later. But what is clear, is that Ukraine as a nation is going to continue to stand, and the primary reason for that is they were willing to fight for their independence multiple times, in the protests of 2004, in the protests of 2013-2014, in the fighting of 2014-2015 and in the war of 2022. Sadly, sometimes freedom and self-determination have to be earned by blood.
Note that this last paragraph is drawn from my old blog post: At this point, it looks like Ukraine has been saved | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org)
