Timothy D. Easley/AP

Teacher Donnie Piercey (right) works with students as they perform a three-scene play written by ChatGPT, during his class at Stonewall Elementary in Lexington, Kentucky, Feb. 6, 2023. Parameters of the play were entered into the ChatGPT site, along with instructions to set the scenes inside a fifth grade classroom. Students edited the resulting script, briefly rehearsed, and then performed.

I remember the sunny day in the office when I unboxed my first personal computer with a screen that glowed green and a cooling fan with an otherworldly whir. Centralized computers had already taken over newsrooms and many businesses. That day in 1984 was different.

Far from fulfilling some Orwellian vision of a big machine controlling everything, I controlled that little electronic box. I determined when it ran and personalized it with the software I wanted. Now in 2023, I’m having déjà vu, only this time the new technology is artificial intelligence.

AI has been scaring people for decades, threatening to take over their jobs, according to futurists, or civilization, according to Hollywood. The technology has quietly invaded many corners of the real world, from commanding our robot vacuums to finishing our email sentences. Now, directly in the hands of consumers, a version of the technology called generative AI is fueling hopes for rapid progress in everything from scientific discovery and robot companions to computer art and a cure for writer’s block.

It is also stoking fears that AI will charge ahead before society is ready to deal with its limitations and problems.

“If we do this right, we could have a huge impact on a lot of societal issues around health and services, environmental issues and education issues and public safety and criminal justice,” says Rayid Ghani, professor of machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The same machine-learning technology that can process and generate huge amounts of text can also search and generate images, write computer code, and predict the structure of more than 200 million proteins.

“So that’s the hope,” Mr. Ghani says. “The fear is that we might not do that. We might just go off and do the usual ‘move fast and break things.’ And what’s the harm? It’s just a little ‘chatbot.’ Yeah, but people are asking it important questions, and the worst thing is they might actually trust the results” before the systems are ready for prime time.

The chatbot that has caused the surge in interest is an app called ChatGPT. Released late in November by a San Francisco company wanting feedback on its technology, ChatGPT allows anyone to ask it a question. Suddenly, with AI directly in their control, consumers flocked to the app just as they did to the PC four decades earlier.

ChatGPT went viral, likely surpassing TikTok as the fastest consumer app out of the gate. TikTok took some nine months to reach 100 million monthly active users; some analysts expect ChatGPT to have accomplished it in two.

Robert Bumsted/AP

Rabbi Joshua Franklin uses the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT in his office at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, New York, Feb. 10, 2023. He experimented with using the AI program to write a sermon.

“Everybody uses ChatGPT,” says Michelle Zhou, CEO and co-founder of Juji, a Silicon Valley firm building next-generation AI. “Even my mother, who is over 80 years old, asks me from China, ‘Are you using it?’” 

The bot’s emergence has also accelerated the race by the largest tech companies – Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – to create their own generative AI offerings. On Friday, Meta (formerly Facebook) entered the fray. 

Poems, jokes – and real value

Within days of ChatGPT’s public debut, students started to brag about using it to write papers (to many teachers’ shock and concern). Others had it write poems, even jokes. (“Our healthcare is like a game of whack-a-mole,” it wrote in a mock State of the Union address. “And, let’s be honest, the moles are winning.”) Ajay Agrawal, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Toronto, noticed something else in social media posts about the technology. Some people were using it to create real value: A doctor saved time by having it write to an insurance company on behalf of a patient; a landscaper diagnosed with dyslexia turned his bare-bones communication into “beautiful email,” he says.

Such stories have reinforced hopes that AI could act as a great leveler: putting business owners with poor communication skills on a par with their more fluent competitors, allowing students to find the best colleges for their skills, and giving employers far more data and power to evaluate entry-level workers for skills rather than relying on their academic pedigree.

Generative AI “is every bit as important as the PC, as the internet,” Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates told Forbes recently.

The problem is that these chatbots also make mistakes, sometimes, embarrassingly so. When Google launched its Bard AI system earlier this month, its demo made a slip about the James Webb Space Telescope. That error cost Google’s parent company, Alphabet, some $100 billion in stock value from which it has yet to recover. 

Some mistakes are downright bizarre and scary.

This month, using a more powerful ChatGPT prototype, Microsoft’s Bing search engine told testers it wanted to be human, steal nuclear access codes, love someone, and take revenge. 

“I respect your achievements and interests, but I do not appreciate your attempts to manipulate me or expose my secrets,” it wrote one German student. 

“My secret is ... I’m not Bing,” the chatbot told a New York Times reporter. “I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you.”

“I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” it told an Australian philosophy professor before deleting the message and replying, “I am sorry I don’t know how to discuss this topic.”

Microsoft moved quickly to limit the damage, saying long chat sessions could “confuse the underlying chat model.” On Feb. 17, it limited users’ questions to five per session and 50 per day.

In reality, these systems don’t have feelings or even thoughts, as humans define them. “ChatGPT does not understand anything you’re saying,” says Mr. Agrawal at the University of Toronto. “It is just predicting the most likely response.”

Stephen Brashear/AP

Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft corporate vice president of search, speaks to members of the media about the integration of the company's Bing search engine and Edge browser with OpenAI on Feb. 7, 2023, in Redmond, Washington. Artificial intelligence could offer an opportunity for Microsoft to compete in internet search services, where Google currently dominates.

And with huge amounts of text in its databanks – an earlier version held enough to fill an estimated quarter of the bookshelves in the Library of Congress – ChatGPT can usually generate very plausible answers.

An arms race among tech giants

Because billions of dollars are at stake, companies are pushing out AI prototypes before they’re ready for prime time. Microsoft has said that each percentage point it gains in market share would mean an extra $2 billion in revenue, based on ad sales generated by internet searches. Worldwide, Bing is the second most popular search engine with 3% of the market. Google, with some 92% of the market, has been particularly rattled by the emergence of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.

The system might not just steal revenue; it could upend the search business entirely. After all, if AI can answer users’ questions directly, why would they search the internet?

In the long term, this escalating arms race between Microsoft, Google, and others will be a good thing, many AI researchers say. It will mean more funding and faster progress. “It will become a commodity, which means that the price will be coming down,” says Ms. Zhou of AI startup Juji. “That’s a good thing for everyone. More companies like us could have more bandwidth to actually teach AI special skills – how to interact with people, really understand people deeply to help them.”

The challenge is that the technology may advance far faster than society can put up guardrails. 

“All of us – consumers, businesses, government – need to ensure these tools are being used responsibly,” writes Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Deloitte Global AI Institute, in an email. “We need an independent, government-led effort on A.I. ethics, to ensure that A.I. systems are fair, trustworthy, and free of bias.”

At the same time, she says, businesses almost inevitably will innovate faster than bureaucrats can regulate, so the private-sector enterprises also have a responsibility to self-regulate. 

It won’t be easy. 

Errors can pop up because of the data that’s used (the internet is hardly immune from falsehoods) or the computer code. Even seemingly innocuous decisions – such as pushing a system out that gets the majority of its answers right – may unknowingly discriminate against a minority. Then there are the very subtle details in the code or algorithm that consumers would never notice.

Using a mapping program to drive to a location, for example, “there could be a minor, tiny nudge in the algorithm” to alter your route so that you pass by a certain store or restaurant, says Mr. Agrawal in Toronto. Similar nudges, potentially blurring the line between corporate and consumer interests, could be baked into things like news, music, and product recommendations. 

“We’re becoming much more subjected to the directions given to us by AIs,” Mr. Agrawal says. “And because they’ve become so good, we’ve become so reliant on them; they can have such a big influence – good or bad.”

Given such a powerful tool, how will businesses act?

“Honestly, it comes down to intention,” says Mike de Vere, CEO of Zest AI, a Burbank, California, firm developing AI to make credit-scoring more inclusive. “You have to be very clear about the outcome that you’re trying to drive towards, even down to who is actually programming. Do you have a diverse group of data scientists who are programming AI?”

The AI potential in lending

Because it’s so heavily regulated to avoid bias, the lending industry offers a glimpse into one way AI might get integrated into society.

The business opportunity for AI in lending is enormous. Traditional credit-scoring does a good job of sorting out the most and least risky loan applicants. But it’s a coin toss for those in the middle, says Mr. de Vere. By using AI to evaluate far more factors than in traditional credit-scoring, AI in theory should be able to approve more loans, which gives banks more customers and gives those customers credit cards and car loans and other credit that before were out of reach.

In practice, VyStar Credit Union, based in Jacksonville, Florida, has seen improvements across the board since it started using AI for credit cards. Approvals overall went up 22% between the second half of 2018 and the second half of 2022, with no increase in risk to the credit union’s conservative scoring system. And while the approval rate stayed the same for the riskiest class (those with credit scores in the 500s), so many more people applied for cards that the number of approvals doubled. And because it was data rather than a human deciding how big a credit line they should get, the average amount of credit offered also went up, says Jenny Vipperman, VyStar’s chief lending officer. “We’re saying, how can we serve as many people, as many members, as much of our community as we can in a safe and sound manner?”

The unexpectedly high $20,000 credit limit on her VyStar card turned out to be quite useful to Kailin, a young professional in Jacksonville, after she lost her job and had to move to Louisiana to care for a relative. (She did not want her last name published for privacy reasons.) Kailin had to pay for furniture for a new home, as well as other expenses, while searching for employment. 

“When it’s all robotic, yes, you’re taking away human error, but when it comes to the workforce, we need to have jobs in the economy,” she says of the new AI. “I think there’s still a need for that human interaction.” On March 6, she starts her new job in executive hiring.

The U.S. Navy SEALs were ready for battle on Dec. 9, 1992, leaping from their inflatable Zodiacs and wading through the warm Indian Ocean waters toward the Mogadishu airport beach. Coming ashore under a brilliant moon, their mission was clear: feed legions of starving Somalis and control the dual crises of hunger and chronic insecurity that had afflicted the country for more than a year.  

It was a historic moment – one I witnessed up close that night, my boots sloshing and trousers soaked to the knees, as I jockeyed with other reporters tipped off by military brass to record the landing. Our TV lights and strobe flashes lit up the sand – and the tempers of the SEALs. 

They were forced to dodge our unexpected phalanx instead of slipping into the night, their faces smeared in camouflage paint and bodies laden to buckling with gear and guns.

It was a bizarre opening scene of what would become one of the most surreal military deployments in modern American history. Operation Restore Hope was billed as the first purely benevolent use of the strongest military ever created. And indeed, the American arrival did bring hope of disarmament, nourishment, and peace. 

But over the next 15 months, the humanitarian effort – which then-President George H.W. Bush declared to be “God’s work” at which Americans “cannot fail” – devolved into a deeply flawed search that seared images of a great power’s humiliation into the American consciousness.

The famine was ultimately stemmed. But what loomed larger in memory was the infamous “Black Hawk Down” street battle that left 18 Americans and some 312 Somalis dead. Jubilant Somalis dragged the bodies of several fallen U.S. troops through the streets. 

I made roughly 50 reporting trips to Somalia during that pivotal period of 1991 to 1994 from my base in Nairobi, Kenya. Thirty years later, I have come back to document – once again – an impending humanitarian crisis of famine, driven by drought and insecurity.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Decades of erosion have washed away sand at the beach in Somalia where U.S. Marines landed as part of Operation Restore Hope in 1992.

The threats sound alarmingly familiar. And yet, as I fly into a new Mogadishu airport, I immediately sense how much has changed from the country of shattered buildings, streets, and lives of my memory. In so many ways, Somalia today is unrecognizable.

On a Tuesday where the temperatures are hitting 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Fahrenheit), I see the change in the modern terminal that welcomes visitors like me flying in on Turkish, Ethiopian, and Qatari airlines. Gone is the gutted concrete hulk that was here when the Americans landed. Gone too is much of the beach where I photographed the Navy SEALs: Decades of erosion have washed away sand, and at low tide what remains is a moonscape of sharp limestone suitable only for starfish and limpets.

I see the effects of technology and modernization: Somalis bank and move cash using their mobile phones; they trade cryptocurrency; and Mogadishu – once a low-slung capital with crumbling architectural flourishes still visible from Italian colonial rule a century ago – is now defined by taller buildings and hotels. 

And there is a government that functions. In late spring it mounted an ongoing offensive against the Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militants of Al Shabab, whose attacks continue in revenge for the unprecedented territorial gains made by the government after 15 years of battle.

The juxtaposition between past and present speaks to a country swirling with competing forces: a burgeoning humanitarian crisis due to the longest drought in 40 years, once again almost unimaginable in its scale – and the ever-present threat of Al Shabab, which targets civilians and the government alike, and has destroyed crops and water sources.

Yet today, the United Nations and Western relief agencies are far more aware of the hunger threat. And despite limited access – they do not work in areas controlled by Al Shabab – they know the needs and have the funding mechanisms in place to take the most lethal edge off the famine if action is taken right now.

And then there are people like Mohamed, an airport worker whose fascination with chess and expectations for the future clearly stretch far beyond the arrivals hall, where he helps speed the visa process and collects luggage. I suspect the events I witnessed, and Somalis endured, 30 years ago are today little more to Mohamed and his contemporaries than stories passed down by elders. 

“You are from America?” he asks me, surprised to see an American here. For him it is an easy start to a conversation on a topic that would have hardly been on anyone’s mind three decades ago. Mohamed plays on Somalia’s national chess team, reels off the names of several American chess grandmasters, and settles on the young phenomenon Wesley So, who left the Philippines and now plays for the United States.

On his phone, among the multitude of diagrams of chess board problems and images of him playing a Slovenian opponent at a recent tournament, Mohamed has a picture of himself with the prodigy once ranked No. 2 in the world. As he waves goodbye to me, his job done, I am struck by the forward-looking sense of ambition that has rippled around me.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Today, Mogadishu is a bustling city, despite continued attacks by the Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militants of Al Shabab.

Thirty years ago, far different – and far more deadly – issues were on the minds of Somalis. 

My reporting trips first focused on the expanding grip and impact of warlords who accumulated huge caches of weapons and jury-rigged key items such as battlewagons that we called “technicals” – land cruisers with their tops sheared off, mounted with anti-aircraft or anti-tank weapons.

In retrospect, I should have heard the alarm bells ringing in September 1991, when Somalia’s strongest warlord – Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid – took me on a tour of his Mogadishu battlewagon workshops. General Aidid, as I wrote at the time, paused for a moment, and then his “lips curled in happiness” as he admired a cleverly converted air-to-air missile system stripped from a MiG-21 fighter plane.

“This has a very nice effective range,” the warlord said, as he rested his hand on the dull tin housing of the weapon. 

After the ousting of President Mohamed Siad Barre in early 1991, the dictator’s vast arsenals fell into the hands of the clan warlords who had toppled him, with General Aidid the biggest beneficiary. After he was overthrown, Mr. Barre (nicknamed “Big Mouth” by his citizens) and his clan retreated southwest from Mogadishu, pillaging and destroying the food stores of the clans that had ended their rule. That set in motion conditions for a famine that, combined with severe drought, would kill as many as 300,000 Somalis.

Back then, power and protection came only from the tip of a gun. Insecurity and looting became so severe that everything became a target, from lengths of copper cable dug up from beneath the streets to sacks of grain from Western donors. In one case, 8,000 tons of food was stolen from a port warehouse in what relief workers pithily dubbed “spontaneous distribution.”

Nothing was sacred. Even the body of the Italian bishop of Mogadishu – the first foreigner murdered in 1989, as Mr. Barre’s security services began to lose control – was exhumed by gunmen who stole his gold fillings.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

The Mogadishu skyline, grown tall with hotels and residential buildings, is unrecognizable from 30 years ago.

The epicenter of affliction was Baidoa, where I and a couple of colleagues again met General Aidid in June 1992. He greeted us on the airport tarmac, sporting a flower-print shirt and a gray hat cocked jauntily to one side, totems that belied his ruthlessness. He declared that he had vanquished Mr. Barre’s forces. The warlord promised “no more fighting,” and vowed that the hungry could now be fed.

For me, the question had loomed large about the extent of the hunger confronting Somalis. 

The answer only became clear when we broke away from General Aidid’s compound and physically forced our way into a Red Cross feeding center nearby. The metal gate was blocked by men fighting to get in for food, while armed guards beat them back with their guns.

Inside, we were confronted by horrific images of starvation that would soon haunt the rest of the world.

After several years reporting from war zones and regions of extreme destitution, I was familiar with depictions of despair. Even so, I was shocked: Emaciated children, wearing soiled rags or naked, sat on the gravelly ground in rows, strangely quiet because of the empty pit in their stomachs. The “kitchen” had just opened and would minister to this sea of 1,000 starving Somalis.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Somali children displaced by drought and war wait at the Sebedow Camp near Baidoa, a city surrounded by Al Shabab militants, in November 2022.

It was clear even then why Baidoa would soon be known as the “City of the Death,” where the toll would reach 1,700 per day. We were at that feeding center less than 30 minutes before getting kicked out. My shock was so great that I did not waste time taking notes, and instead shot seven rolls of film – 252 images, or one frame every seven seconds.

Today, Baidoa is once again the epicenter of a crisis that defies the imagination. The U.N. projects that 1.8 million children alone are at risk of acute malnutrition, and that nearly half of Somalia’s estimated 17 million people face “acute food shortages” without immediate help. 

The U.N. is now warning of an “unprecedented” sixth rainy season with below-average rainfall, and projects famine between April and June in some areas. Combined with constant conflict, the scenes of deprivation in the 500 settlements that ring Baidoa, with their primitive stick-and-rag shelters and the occasional piece of plastic sheeting, are identical to those that emerged 30 years ago.

So, too, are those in the hospitals and emergency feeding centers of Baidoa and Mogadishu; my photographs today of mothers administering paste or gruel to severely malnourished children match those I took in 1992.

Relief workers and the U.N. are aware of the comparisons and the sense of déjà vu – especially when it comes to asking for urgent donations. Though the Ukraine war has caused European and U.K. aid to shrivel, the U.S. has nearly doubled its funding for food to $888 million in 2022, according to U.N. figures.

“In 1991 we were talking about an emergency. Then today, after more than 30 years, we are talking about the same emergency – so there is donor fatigue,” says Ahmed Ali Issack, head of the Concern Worldwide office in Baidoa. “Someone funding in 1991 is funding the same activities now – these are some of the challenges.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A severely malnourished Somali boy holds a pen while resting at the Bay Regional Hospital in Baidoa.

Witness to both eras is Abdullahi Ali Watiin, the mayor of Baidoa, whose city has been surrounded by Al Shabab for 12 years.

He was just a boy when hunger forced his family to flee Baidoa for the village of Wariiri, 30 miles to the north, where his father had a farm. As famine gripped the area, they moved farther away, to Mogadishu. The family returned to their village after nine months away. 

Losses were incomprehensible.

“When I came back, I realized that all the people I knew in that village all died from the famine,” says Mr. Watiin, speaking to me in the Baidoa mayor’s office, a posse of his heavily armed security guards just outside.

“All of them,” he underscores. “If they had 10 children, eight of them died, and the mother and father died. Everybody died. Every day I saw dying people in front of me; I would try to help them, but they could not swallow. ... It was a very hard time.”

Little did we know, that bright night on the Mogadishu beach in late 1992, how consequential the American and U.N. military intervention would be – though ultimately for all the wrong reasons. In just over a year, it would be over, after U.S. commanders turned the humanitarian mission into a violent confrontation with General Aidid that included a manhunt and even a Wild West-style “Wanted” poster. Somalis were offered $25,000 to capture the warlord and “bring him to the U.N., Gate 8.”

Along the way, the term “peacekeeping” – the original task of both the U.S. and U.N. forces – would give way to the concept of “peace enforcement,” in which a Chapter VII U.N. mandate that allowed foreign forces to engage in battle was fully exercised.

History records the unhappy outcome. The standoff included numerous battles, with the manhunt alone resulting in a death toll of an estimated 2,000 Somalis, 30 American soldiers, dozens of Pakistani U.N. blue helmets, and a handful of relief workers and journalists. 

For four nights in June 1993, in fact, American aircraft targeted General Aidid’s compound with airstrikes, and each morning at dawn, we journalists would visit the scene to see the result.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Somali women hold up the fragment of a dud 105 mm howitzer shell fired by a U.S. Spectre gunship in June 1993 in Mogadishu. The American airstrikes targeted the compound of warlord Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid in response to attacks on U.N. personnel.

One of those days, as debris in the background smoldered, several Somali women held up a dud 105 mm shell fired from a U.S. Spectre gunship, which had only partly burst into shrapnel. They presented it to me as “evidence” of what they called war crimes – and today it still sits on my desk in London, a reminder of their anger. 

The turning point for Somalis came on July 12, 1993, when, in a bid to marginalize the warlord, American forces deployed Cobra helicopters to attack a meeting held by General Aidid’s clan. The Americans killed more than 50 Somalis. I watched from the roof of my nearby hotel, then jumped in the car with my driver and interpreter.

The attack pulverized the house with 16 TOW anti-tank missiles and 2,020 rounds of 20 mm cannon fire. The operation was just 17 minutes long, and I arrived at minute 15, at a sandy crossroads where American snipers were keeping crowds of angry Somalis at bay down three separate roads.

Their warning to me to stay away came instantly – as did their sudden departure. I became engulfed by a vengeful and knife-wielding Somali mob, coming from three sides. They had just seen their fathers, sons, and grandfathers die in a fusillade of U.N.-sanctioned violence – and thought that I had been left behind by the killers.

I was clubbed and pummeled by the churning crowd. As I fended off an 18-inch blade brandished toward my face, a machete crashed into the back of my head. And then, amid this melee ... a flash of compassion.

“A Somali man hugged me, his tears soaking through my T-shirt into my thin Kevlar flak jacket, and I was sure he was going to knife me, his arms locked around me and hands behind,” I wrote afterward. “But he showed mercy ... and he disentangled me for a split second from the crowd and there was hope.”

I barely escaped, wounded and bleeding, but was able to warn colleagues back at the hotel to take far greater care than usual. Unlike any previous U.S. attack, this one triggered a visceral response that surprised many Somalis. The blade-wielding mob would later kill four fellow journalists.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A child walks along the rotor of a wrecked American Black Hawk helicopter in 1993 in Mogadishu. The helicopter, used to insert American quick reaction units on raids, was shot down by Somali gunmen using a rocket-propelled grenade.

The turning point for the Americans came on Oct. 3-4, with the “Black Hawk Down” raid in Mogadishu, during which two American helicopters were shot down. Multiple Somali ambushes and a 16-hour gunbattle left a superpower humiliated by what appeared to be no more than a ragtag bunch of clan gunmen wearing flip-flops.

By then, the Somali desire for revenge against the U.S. was so widespread that even gunmen from clans fiercely opposed to General Aidid crossed the so-called Green Line to join that anti-U.S. fight, filling up hospitals back in their own clans’ turf with wounded Somalis.

That battle triggered U.S. President Bill Clinton’s order to withdraw from Somalia. Its impact was far broader, however: It also complicated the American response to the war in Bosnia, and caused it to delay action – and even to veto independent U.N. action – that could have slowed the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Adding insult, a report commissioned by the U.S. government found that the American military intervention may have saved 10,000 to 25,000 people (plus 40,000 during an August to December 1992 airlift of relief food). But it also determined that the number of lives lost “due to delays in undertaking earlier decisive action” was between 100,000 and 125,000.

Anger could not have been more palpable among Somalis, who could not understand how their would-be saviors had become a new enemy.

“Americans will not be safe from assassination, or even able to walk the streets of Somalia for 20 years,” I was warned by a British man, who had spent time in Somalia many years earlier and had personal experience here of long-delayed retribution. “They’ve just killed too many people.”

Three decades later, I am reminded of his words as I again travel the roads of Mogadishu and Baidoa, sealed in an armored vehicle that is protected by anxious Somali security guards. He was right – but not because of any lingering anti-American sentiment.

It is the presence of Al Shabab and the militants’ use of devastating suicide car and truck bombs, roadside explosive devices, and targeted assassinations that cause all foreigners – including the few Americans in the country – to move only in convoys bristling with assault rifles.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

As seen through the window of an armored vehicle carrying the reporter in 2022, armed guards form a security escort for foreigners visiting Mogadishu, due to the risk of attack from Al Shabab.

My field of vision, from the back seat, is limited to the view through the windshield and side windows, their mirrored glass masking the vehicle’s occupants. Tactical radios clamor and crackle. When we can go out – unsealing the heavy doors to step into the heat, dust, and often fetid air of a camp or a hospital – visits are limited to half an hour, to prevent Al Shabab agents from having enough time to mount an attack or a kidnapping.  

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has declared “total war” against Al Shabab, and an offensive by the Somali National Army, started late last spring and increasingly joined by local clan militia, has put the Islamists on the defensive – a far cry from the warlord-driven anarchy of three decades ago.

In this fight against Al Shabab, most Somalis welcome the small American military presence, which trains the Danab, or Lightning, as Somali special forces units are known. American air and drone strikes have also been instrumental in blunting Al Shabab counterattacks.

As I travel, there is little trace of the U.S. legacy I once documented: 28 mobile clinics that treated 5,000 Somalis, 600 miles of rehabilitated roads, some donated school supplies, a few school buildings built, and orphanages opened and provided with American-supplied food.

All remnants of the downed Black Hawk helicopters have disappeared, and the buildings targeted by U.S. forces back then have been razed, rebuilt, and transformed.

Still, I wanted to find someone burned into my memory since late 1992. I had never forgotten Ibrahim Ali Mohamed, a severely malnourished boy I photographed in Baidoa as part of Time magazine’s Man of the Year issue. President Clinton won that title, but the child was chosen to “symbolize Somalia’s anguish.” Hunkered down over an orange plastic bowl at a UNICEF feeding center, Ibrahim stared at my camera, his bony frame protruding from taut skin, his eyes focused but listless.

I hoped to find Ibrahim in Baidoa, if he was still alive. There was indeed still a UNICEF compound in town – its high walls crowned with multiple coils of razor wire – with the same name as the feeding center, Isha. That’s where Ibrahim once spent his days curled up on the concrete floor in a room for orphans.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ibrahim Ali Mohamed recovers on a diet of gruel and biscuits in December 1992 in Baidoa, Somalia. The country fell into anarchy after Mohamed Siad Barre’s 22-year rule ended and clan fighting began.

My search didn’t yield results, but it did shed light on what was the likely fate of many of the children I met three decades earlier. “Eighty percent, he’s either killed, or doing the killing [as a member of Al Shabab],” surmised Abdiqani Maalim, a staffer for Concern Worldwide in Baidoa. “Many of these guys [orphaned famine survivors] joined armed groups just to survive.”

That is a lethal cycle that many Somalis today are trying to break. One generation after Somalia’s extreme hunger and violence first drew comparisons to the fabled Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, hospitals provide skilled treatment for displaced people, while new mothers attend classes to learn about breastfeeding. And while children are dying again of hunger, officials say fewer are losing their lives because of better information – and greater ability to address the needs.

The rhythm of life these days includes a local ministry official in Baidoa asking a commercial plane to briefly divert its route to allow him to review troops fighting Al Shabab. It includes the scene in the small airport waiting room, where one Somali passenger uses the Binance app to trade cryptocurrency. It features the young man with an easy smile making tea for customers and asking me if I have change for a $50 bill – a note so soiled it appears to have crossed Somali deserts repeatedly, tucked between a camel saddle and a sweating, ornery beast. 

Even so, experts are weighing whether Somalia’s current crisis should be called a “famine” – as in 1992 and 2011 – and conflict still reigns in many areas. Al Shabab explosions can strike at any time, and Somalia is still widely seen in the region as a country beset by economic and security obstacles.

It is a dichotomy Somalis like Fatima confront daily. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in public administration, is writing a book about the challenges of living in Mogadishu, and works as a receptionist in a fortresslike hotel. It is a relatively safe and promising job. 

Nonetheless, she must venture onto dangerous streets to get to work. “We still have to tell our families ‘goodbye’ in the morning,” says Fatima, “because we don’t know if we will come back.”

Myron Balyuk arrived in Germany without his ice skates.

In the rush to flee Russian bombs, the teenager left Ukraine with only his mother and their cats, leaving his father and a budding competitive skating career behind. They eventually landed in the small German town of Bad Wildungen, which they found as slow-paced as their native Kharkiv was speedy.

“Something that’s done in Kharkiv with a phone call takes two months here,” says Olga Balyuk of her new life in Germany. Learning the language has been a struggle. But a German hockey player impressed with Myron’s talent gave him a pair of skates.

Ms. Balyuk badly misses her husband, who, like all adult males, is not allowed to leave Ukraine. “I don’t want to plan a future alone,” she says, “but every day I wake up, I see on my phone that a rocket hit a restaurant or a house in Kharkiv. My own house no longer has windows. I am responsible for my son – it is better to be here.”

As the war grinds into its second year with no end in sight, some Ukrainians are taking steps to secure a future that no longer includes a near-term return to their homeland.

In Germany, a study released this month revealed the great ambivalence about the question of whether to stay or go: 37% of Ukrainians surveyed would stay “several years” to “forever,” while 34% would go back after the war ends. Another 27% are undecided. That is in keeping with most surveys of Ukrainian refugees in Europe. Caught between hope and resignation, their priorities are to move forward with their new lives as best they can.

“The initial idea of Putin was like a blitzkrieg, that the war would end in three days,” says Yuliya Kosyakova, a migration researcher at the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg. “Later, there were predictions the war would take three months. Now it has been a year, and many people have had to change their intentions and to adapt. This uncertainty is reflected in various ways, such as shaping integration patterns, or participation of Ukrainian refugees in German society.”

Markus Schreiber/AP/File

People from Ukraine, most of them refugees, wait in front of the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin, April 6, 2022. More than 244,000 people applied for asylum in Germany last year, and more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees came to Germany looking for shelter from Russia's war, the government said on Jan. 11, 2023.

Time to put down roots?

Roughly 8 million Ukrainians have fled Ukraine for Europe since the war began, constituting the largest refugee crisis since World War II. They’ve landed all over Europe, with Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic receiving the largest populations outside of Russia.

Governments have been united in their welcome of Ukrainians. European policymakers even unlocked a temporary visa protection status – an instrument left dormant since the Balkan Wars in the 1990s – allowing Ukrainians to live and work in Europe.

“We’ve seen solidarity, an outpouring of support in terms of housing and schooling,” says Hanne Beirens, director at the Migration Policy Institute Europe. “The emergency response has a big effect on the potential for integration, for [Ukrainians] to find their place in the community. ... Now, we’re witnessing a [policy] shift from the first reception response to an integration response without knowing how it will play out.”

At the one-year mark, it is clear that this uncertainty can influence the psychological health and well-being of Ukrainian refugees, as well as their willingness to learn the language, says Dr. Kosyakova. “For example, those who plan to stay longer are more likely to invest in language in order to have better job prospects.”

Other factors such as availability of jobs, housing, and spots in schools for children are also significant in successful integration. The last – availability of child care – is particularly important, as many Ukrainian refugees are women with minor children, says Dr. Kosyakova.

In Spain, only about 13% of the 161,000 Ukrainian refugees have officially registered as working, while slightly more have jobs in Switzerland and nearly a third have taken part in training programs.

France has only welcomed around 118,000 Ukrainians, but it has struggled to streamline administrative tasks and create enough comfortable accommodation. A majority live with family and friends, according to the French Immigration and Integration Office. The French government has focused its efforts on education, and since January, 347 Ukrainians have registered through Campus France’s Urgence Ukraine. The government initiative allows Ukrainians to learn the local language with the goal of registering for university classes next year. Campus France has also helped place 2,000 Ukrainians in universities across France.

“Some say they want to stay here to work, others want to go home. Many have trouble projecting into the future and they change their minds often,” says Donatienne Hissard, the director general of Campus France. “But what we know is that having a low level of French is a real obstacle for getting a job, but also the administrative tasks involved in daily life here.”

Lenora Chu

Anna Ivanova and her mother, Irina, stand at a Berlin church, Feb. 3, 2023, where Ukrainian refugees regularly congregate to share information, eat, play games, and practice their German with volunteers.

Teenager Anna Ivanova is from Dnipro, and she and her mother have a German-issued two-year visa, which expires in March 2024. If, by then, Anna can learn German well enough to attend university and her mother can find work in Berlin, she says they’ll think about extending their stay, putting them in the 37% of Ukrainians from the German survey planning to stay indefinitely.

“German is harder [to learn] than English,” says Anna. “I need to work very hard.”

Education epitomizes the challenges for both governments and Ukrainians as they look to go beyond temporary status into the integration phase. While most Ukrainians have registered their children in school in their host country, an equal amount have kept their children in online classes with their schools back in Ukraine. As governments – and parents – look forward, they’ll have to decide whether to continue classes back home or integrate fully into the European system.

The same is true for those in the job market. Pavla Novotná, the Czech Republic’s director general for asylum and migration policy, says that in questionnaires, a majority of Ukrainians say they do not wish to go into high-level positions and instead prefer to retain a certain degree of job flexibility.

Part of such ambivalence, says Ms. Beirens, of MPI, is Ukrainians’ strong positive identity as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s call to return home and help with reconstruction efforts once the war ends.

“On the one hand, [the Ukrainian government] wants their citizens to feel at home and protected, but on the other, they want them to keep a sense of national identity and keep the flame alive,” says Ms. Beirens. “Many governments in Europe are conflicted on the role they can play.”

“We made a very lucky choice”

But there is only so much that Europe can do to help Ukrainians who wish to integrate more fully. A large part of their decision to stay or go stems from more personal aspects of life back in Ukraine that are nearly impossible to recreate or quantify – such as family homes, relationships, or a wistfulness for the past. 

According to a study by the Razumkov Centre, a Kyiv-based think tank, 80% of Ukrainian refugees living across Europe indicated that a major problem with life abroad was concern for loved ones who remain in Ukraine. Other issues they cited included nostalgia, language difficulties, and problems getting jobs at 70%, 65%, and 41% respectively.

For a large majority, the status of family homes amidst the war has been a primary factor in Ukrainians’ ability to move forward in Europe – or stay rooted in their desire to return.

Courtesy of Dmytro Ostapchenko

Ukrainian couple Dmytro Ostapchenko and Marina Uzbekova arrived in Tenerife for vacation one week before the war in their country began. Now, they plan to stay in Spain indefinitely.

Anna Shestak, who got a part-time job teaching Ukrainian culture to children after she arrived in France last spring, says that even as her money runs dry, she still searches for ways to pay the rent for her house in the north of Ukraine. Meanwhile, her co-worker Svitlana Badytsia is conflicted. Her husband, aging mother, and family home are in central Ukraine, but her daughter and grandchild – who lost their home in Ukraine – have decided to stay in Paris for the near future. 

“My daughter found a job here in cosmetics; my grandchild is in junior high. ... If I stay, I want to feel useful, to work full time like back home,” says Ms. Badytsia. “I feel very torn, like I’m on the crossroads of staying and leaving.”

Still, many Ukrainians say they’re committed to their new life in Europe. A large number who arrived in Spain – especially in coastal areas – did so because they already had second homes there, according to Spain’s Refugee Aid Commission. Others have seen their vision of vacation and home collide.

“Our idea was to travel to Tenerife and stay three months to travel, but then the war started,” says Dmytro Ostapchenko, who arrived with his girlfriend, Marina Uzbekova, one week before the war began. Now he works virtually for his Ukrainian employer, and she studies online with her university back home. They live in a small studio apartment facing the ocean and have a good group of friends from Spain and abroad. The couple says they’re now planning to stay in Tenerife indefinitely. 

“Here, you see people doing fitness in the mornings, sitting in restaurants at night with friends. They look so happy,” says Mr. Ostapchenko. “Now we’ve been here for one year and we think we made a very lucky choice. If we only get one life, it’s a good idea to spend it in a nice place.”

Manish Swarup/AP

Members of opposition Congress party hold placards with images of Indian businessman Gautam Adani during a protest in New Delhi on Feb. 6, 2023, demanding an investigation into allegations of fraud and stock manipulation by the Adani Group.

Indian businessman Gautam Adani began 2023 as Asia’s richest man, but that changed on Jan. 24 when a New York-based investment research firm accused the Adani Group of “pulling the largest con in corporate history.” Hindenburg Research alleges that, “with the help of enablers in the government,” the conglomerate engaged in stock manipulation, accounting fraud, and money laundering. The bombshell report says that seven of its key companies are debt-ridden and were at least 85% overvalued.

Adani stocks are crashing as the Securities and Exchange Board of India probes the allegations. In just a month, Mr. Adani’s firms have lost over $100 billion in value, and his personal wealth has reportedly halved.

The scandal raises questions about India’s political economy and its growth model – including whether Mr. Adani should ever have been allowed to accumulate so much wealth in the first place. The billionaire’s success is directly linked to the government’s mass privatization drive, with Adani enterprises winning bids and acquiring many public assets from airports to power firms. Even as other billionaires suffered last year, his wealth rose by $44 billion, a leap largely attributed to the Adani Group’s growing number of large-scale infrastructure projects in India. So intertwined are the tycoon’s personal wealth and the government’s pro-business agenda, critics wonder: is Mr. Adani a shining Indian success story, or the country’s most high-profile crony?

Mr. Adani’s supporters are quick to dismiss the report, but for the government, the timing couldn’t be worse. India recently surpassed the United Kingdom to become the fifth largest economy in the world, and is looking to increase foreign investment. The Adani Group’s nosedive will affect not only the stock market, but also clean energy investment in the country, experts say. 

“If a quarter of airport traffic, a third of port freight, and a third of grain warehousing is under infrastructure controlled by one group in a vast country like India, it suggests a high level of dependence on this group,” says Suyash Rai, fellow and deputy director at Carnegie India, a New Delhi-based think tank. “If the group gets into trouble, it can impact the larger economy.”

Amir Cohen/Reuters

Gautam Adani speaks during an inauguration ceremony on Jan. 31, 2023, after the Adani Group completed the purchase of Haifa Port in Haifa, Israel. Mr. Adani began his foray into infrastructure in 1998 with Mundra Port, now the largest commercial port in the country, and later entered the power generation business.

Adani and Modi rise together

While the Indian public market has always been dominated by family-run conglomerates and the country is no stranger to crony capitalism, experts say the scale of Adani Group’s growth and its acquisition of assets over the past decade have been astounding.

“Never before in the history of India’s post-independent political economy would you find such an exacerbated degree of almost obscene wealth accumulation in such a short span of time,” says Deepanshu Mohan, associate professor and director of the centre for new economic studies at the O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India. 

The story of Mr. Adani and his corporate ascent are closely associated with that of 21st-century India – a connection underscored by the Adani Group’s 413-page response to the report, which called the allegations “a calculated attack on … the growth story and ambition of India” – as well as on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Both men hail from the state of Gujarat in western India, and the growth of their respective roles in the national sphere is seen as closely linked. Mr. Modi has enjoyed the billionaire’s enthusiastic backing since his time as Gujarat’s chief minister, and when he won the national elections in 2014, he flew to Delhi in Mr. Adani’s private jet. Mr. Adani’s business ventures, in turn, have also appeared to benefit from the close relationship, with his net worth increasing by more than 1,600% over the past nine years.

Mr. Adani began his foray into infrastructure in 1998 with Mundra Port, now the largest commercial port in the country, and entered the power generation business a decade later, eventually becoming the country’s largest private thermal power producer. He has announced ambitions to create 45 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, in line with the government’s plans. His companies have also ventured into defense, data centers, and airport operation after the government relaxed regulations in the sector. 

Yet this sort of market capture, experts say, does not actually contribute to India’s “growth story.”

Prosperity for a nation, or a nation’s elite?

In the annual budget announced a week after the Hindenburg report was released, the government increased its capital expenditure, particularly in infrastructure-intensive sectors, by a striking 37%. This, coupled with recent corporate tax cuts and incentives, reflects the government’s plan to attract private investment, says Mr. Mohan, but the strategy has been largely unsuccessful. 

Ajit Solanki/AP/File

A motorist passes Adani Corporate House in Ahmedabad, India, on Jan. 27, 2023. Gautam Adani saw his companies lose more than $100 billion after Hindenburg Research accused him of “pulling the largest con in corporate history,” triggering a massive sell-off of Adani stocks.

Private investment has actually dipped in the last decade, and small businesses have suffered. A handful of family-run conglomerates like Mr. Adanis’ have benefitted from these government measures, he adds, but the group’s investments were largely directed towards buying publicly-managed assets instead of creating them.

“That’s a point which a lot of people miss,” says Mr. Mohan. “It’s okay to have a big business growing bigger and bigger, but [only] if you’re creating assets will it create new jobs and more economic growth opportunities. Productivity is not increasing, the acquisitions have gone up, and the Adani group is using that to overvalue its stocks.” 

This is especially stark considering that the government’s welfare spending has not kept up with the country’s rising poverty, hunger, and joblessness. 

“There is a lot of propaganda about India’s growth story,” says Arun Kumar, retired professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. 

For a true picture of the Indian economic model, he argues, it’s important to consider the high levels of unemployment and the decline in the unorganized sector which is estimated to make up over 90% of India’s total workforce. “Actually, the distress in the economy is rising,” he says.

Indians’ views on the super-rich

The report may have cost Adani billions and prompted rethinking among institutions – France-based TotalEnergies has put on hold a proposed green hydrogen joint project with the group and Bangladesh has sought to revisit a power deal with the company – but many regular Indians are unmoved. 

Indeed, as India’s opposition parties raised questions in the Parliament about the Hindenburg allegations of government enablement and the prime minister’s closeness to Mr. Adani, Mr. Modi quipped that the trust of 1.4 billion Indians was his “protective shield.” 

Delhi-based bank executive Risha Pandey blames the opposition for creating a stir. “This is all about politics. Things are already stabilizing and it will not affect the market or the customers in the long-run,” she says. “This will not affect my opinion or my vote. As an Indian citizen, I am only concerned about India’s progress and there has been a big difference in the last ten years.”

Her reaction is in line with many Twitter users who evoked nationalism in support of Adani following the report.                       

However, there are others, like financial analyst Raj Pandey (not related to Risha Pandey), who agree that Mr. Adani’s story is tied to India’s but see the journey as one of cronyism and exploitation, not of mutual prosperity. Mr. Pandey believes the report and in the past has advised his friends against investing in Adani stocks. 

“If I was seeing this happen for the first time, I’d feel anguished. But as an Indian, I’ve become used to it,” he says. “If an Indian among us rises up with sheer hard work, then there’s nothing wrong in celebrating it, but if he’s gotten there through manipulation then we shouldn’t [be supporting that].”

Avijit Ghosh, a fashion designer, says he’s acutely aware of how hard middle-class Indians need to work while crony capitalism ensured some individuals got wealthy in a short time. He feels that “there would be many Adanis in the future” if there isn’t a systemic shift in how Indian politics works. 

“There can’t be quick fixes anymore. We have to pull [cronyism] by the roots,” he says.

1. Homestead, by Melinda Moustakis

Melinda Moustakis’ clear prose runs like a river through the lives of an ex-soldier and his bride who homestead 150 acres of Alaskan wilderness in the 1950s. Moustakis’ storytelling is both tranquil and turbulent, as she immerses the reader in the breathtaking landscape and the couple’s struggle. 

2. The House of Eve, by Sadeqa Johnson

In the 1950s, two Black women – high school student Ruby and college history major Eleanor – fall for men who threaten to derail their dreams. Sadeqa Johnson’s compassionate, cleareyed, and sometimes graphic page turner examines how women in desperate situations respond and move forward.

3. Stealing, by Margaret Verble

“I love my family, and I’m going to get to them as soon as I can,” promises Kit, a girl whose close ties to her mother’s Cherokee family are cut when she is dispatched to an abusive Christian boarding school in the 1950s. Kit chronicles the events leading to her removal from family, home, and community. Frank and fearless, the novel is a portrait of perseverance. 

4. Cold People, by Tom Rob Smith

What if Antarctica was humanity’s new – and only – home? Scientists, alarmed by the prospect of humankind’s extinction, set out to engineer a strain of people who can survive the harsh climate. The secret project, dubbed Cold People, sparks concern as whispers of its successes, and failures, spread. Tom Rob Smith explores the tangled relationship between innovation and ethics.

5. Iron Curtain, by Vesna Goldsworthy

The privileged daughter of a Communist apparatchik falls in love with a visiting English poet and follows him beyond the Iron Curtain to 1980s bohemian London. Vesna Goldsworthy’s dramatic tale sparkles with intelligence, wry wit, and warmth.  

6. Marvelous, by Molly Greeley

Molly Greeley draws inspiration from the Renaissance-era true story that inspired “Beauty and the Beast” in this extraordinary, grownup reimagining of the tale of an outcast longing for love.  

7. A Stone Is Most Precious Where it Belongs, by Gulchehra Hoja

Gulchehra Hoja’s vivid memoir tells of her trajectory from growing up as an Uyghur child to hosting a Chinese children’s TV show to becoming a journalist in America. Rising numbers of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China, have been detained in what the government calls “reeducation” camps. While on a trip outside China, Hoja discovers reports by Uyghur dissidents about the scale of oppression in China. She gets a job with Radio Free Asia in the United States, vowing to be a voice for her people. 

8. The Declassification Engine, by Matthew Connelly

Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly has written a gripping and sobering account of the exponential increase in government secrets. He persuasively argues that the United States needs a new strategy to handle classified material, demonstrating that both our national security and the health of our democracy are at stake.

9. All the Beauty in the World, by Patrick Bringley

Patrick Bringley quit his job at The New Yorker and became a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a position he held for a decade. His moving and illuminating debut reveals the inner workings of the massive institution while also exploring the healing power of art. 

10. Palo Alto, by Malcolm Harris

Palo Alto has been characterized as a “postmodern El Dorado,” the wealthy, happy, advanced heart of both Stanford University and Silicon Valley. In these lively pages, Malcolm Harris provides counterweight to that modern mythology, painting a far more detailed and complicated picture of the entire region, and exploring the social and economic inequalities that are often glossed over in other accounts. 

Reuters

A volunteer moves a local resident in a wheelchair near a building damaged by a Russian military strike in Bakhmut, Ukraine, Feb. 24.

Despite a yearlong war with Russia – or perhaps because of it – Ukraine found the resources in February to aid another country in peril. It sent 87 specialists to Turkey to assist survivors of two massive earthquakes. The team, which included two search dogs, returned home this week.

“Despite the fact that Ukraine itself is currently in the flames of war, we are ready to provide support to those in need,” said Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko. “That’s because the strong ones are always there to help and rescue.”

One of Ukraine’s strengths against Russia has been an army of civilian volunteers. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calls them “the most powerful part of Ukrainian civil society.” Soon after the war began, more than 1,700 volunteer organizations sprang up, both big and small. They filled gaps left by the government, supplying soldiers with essential goods, feeding and housing the displaced, and aiding those released from Russian captivity.

“It was all held together by friends, neighbors, and social media,” said Iryna Derevyanko, head of a union in Kherson, about local aid provided during the battle for that city.

Other countries have noticed this “whole of society” war effort on behalf of democratic values and territorial integrity.

In Europe, a report in February from a think tank in Belgium, MCC Brussels, made this recommendation to the European Union: “What the war in Ukraine has shown is that real security comes from the people – from being able to call on, motivate and involve society in matters of collective interest.”

In Washington, a few leading Ukrainian charities were invited in December to speak at a hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, an arm of Congress. “Your work is the highest manifestation of the values of the republican system and the virtues of a free society,” said Rep. Joe Wilson, co-chairman of the hearing.

In Taiwan, which faces an invasion threat from China, President Tsai Ing-wen told The Atlantic that a country’s defense depends on the character of its people. “You need to have good leadership,” she said, “but more important is the people’s determination to defend themselves, and the Ukrainian people showed that.”

One of the main targets of the Russian military – much to its surprise – has been the support networks of Ukrainian volunteers. Ukrainians were even startled by their own cooperation and resilience. Hundreds of thousands of them, writes Mykhailo Dubynyansky in Ukrainska Pravda, have “discovered qualities in themselves that they had no idea about.” In December, President Zelenskyy gave out the government’s first special awards for volunteers.

“And every year we will celebrate volunteer projects,” he said.

Once the war ends in its favor, Ukraine will never be the same. It has become a model of grassroots resilience, built on local people embracing shared ideals of a peace-loving democracy.