Pacifism Is Not Passivity
A week driving a van to Ukraine, and what it leaves you with.
Last week I drove a Toyota van from Oxford to Ukraine with my friend Romain. It was loaded with body armour, drone jammers, bandages, masks, an incubator for a maternity ward, and an old golf practice net we’d been told would be repurposed as anti-drone netting.
We were one of thirty vehicles in a convoy organised by Driving Ukraine, an outfit that’s now delivered 380+ vehicles since the war began. Two of ours were proper ambulances. One was even a fire truck.
This morning we handed the keys to Igor.
Igor is Russian. He used to live in Odessa with his Ukrainian wife and their daughter. When Russia attacked again, his aunt’s flat was levelled by a strike. She moved in with them. Four days later, another salvo flattened their building.
He has since joined Odessa’s anti-missile brigade - the team flying small, cheap, very fast “hornet” drones that intercept incoming Russian drones and missiles before they reach the city. They stop up to 90% of what’s launched at civilians, hospitals, schools. Maternity wards, in the case of the incubator we were carrying.
The 10% that get through are why our van is now an evacuation vehicle.
I want to say something I’ve been turning over since we crossed back into Poland.
The Ukrainians don’t need more courage. They don’t need more innovation - they’re already the most inventive people on a battlefield I’ve ever seen, repurposing quad bikes into casualty-evacuation robots because their paramedics get targeted. They don’t need pity. What they need is the certainty that their allies are not going to lose their nerve.
This is where I have to be direct.
The political voices in Europe - and increasingly in the US - calling for limits on Ukraine’s capabilities, or invoking “acceptable boundaries” on what we can send, are not pacifists.
They are repeating the cowardice of 1933-1939, dressed up in the vocabulary of restraint. Pacifism and passivity are not the same thing. The Russian army will not stop until Ukraine, backed by the world’s democracies, has stripped it of any hope of victory. As long as we refuse to accept this, thousands of Ukrainians will keep dying - and our own deterrence keeps eroding.
There’s a strategic point here too, separate from the moral one. This war is exposing a systemic weakness in Western militaries against a new kind of attack. The asymmetry is glaring: we’re still using million-euro interceptors to shoot down hundred-euro drones, with limited success.
Ukraine is solving that problem in real time, under fire. Every defence we develop with them is a defence we won’t have to invent for ourselves later.
I don’t want to pretend Romain and I made a meaningful difference to the war. We delivered one van and a load of equipment. The people doing the work are Igor and his brigade, the medics, the volunteers running the convoys month after month, the families in Lviv we met at the Champ de Mars cemetery - which had a single grave in 2022 and now stretches across a field. They were mourning sons, daughters, husbands. The photos pinned to the graves showed civilian lives. They could have been any of ours.
What I can do is tell you what I saw, and ask you to share it.
If you take one thing from this: be careful about the people in your feeds and your parliaments who confuse silence with peace. Driving Ukraine runs convoys every month. They always need help.
In the hope of not having to do this again,
Etienne