“Victory for the Ukrainians is coming very fast,” says
Bernard-Henri Lévy.
“And I was the first to predict it.” Mr. Lévy is on his fifth visit to the country since
launched his invasion in late February; his first was in mid-March.
“I am in the east,” he tells me Wednesday by WhatsApp, the least unreliable way to communicate from the front lines. He’s in Kupyansk, a town “just liberated,” then to Izium, where “Ukrainian families are just beginning to return.” Two days earlier, the Russians had bombed the heart of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, including a children’s playground. But he still feels “a strong wind of victory. A sad victory, of course. A victory in the midst of graves, but victory nonetheless.”
Mr. Lévy, 73, is conventionally billed as a “French philosopher.” That’s wholly inadequate to describe a man who’s also a journalist and filmmaker, a passionate crusader for democratic rights, and a freelance envoy of the Western world to war zones on almost every continent. We met last month, after his return from his fourth Ukraine visit, in Mr. Lévy’s exquisitely furnished and commodious apartment in the heart of Paris.
He leads a magnificent life and has no need to risk his neck in Ukraine or elsewhere. Yet he does. He is a wealthy man—heir to his father’s timber fortune and the author of several best-selling books—and he often pays his own way to these combat zones, setting himself the task of highlighting the plight and the needs of the people at war. “I have the means,” he says, “and the time.” He also feels “a duty, as an intellectual whose voice is heard, to ring the bell and warn the world.” He confesses to a kinship with the Ukrainian people. Ever since he visited Kyiv during Ukraine’s democratic Maidan Revolution in 2014, he’s regarded them as “the sentinels of the West,” on the front line with Russia.
We meet days after the Ukrainian armed forces liberated Lyman, a town in the east that the Russians had captured and ravaged. We sit at Mr. Lévy’s dining table, a large map of Ukraine spread out between us. He’s “not at all surprised” by the victory in Lyman. “I was there with the Ukrainians, a few kilometers from the city, a few days before the offensive,” he says. “One could feel the encirclement of the Russian forces,…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at RSSOpinion…