Not too long ago an astute reporter noticed a revealing book on the desk of Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence. The book was Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman. It describes how, over the years, Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies have carried out hits on Arab adversaries far from Israel’s borders. ‘Since World War II’, Bergman writes, ‘Israel has assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world.’ It’s a policy that has undoubtedly enabled Israel to vanquish some of its enemies, but has also led to sensitive moral quandaries. In Bergman’s telling, Israel’s policy of targeted killing reflects the mindset of a nation vastly outnumbered by its enemies and still haunted by memories of the Holocaust, leaving it ‘perpetually in danger of annihilation’.

Ukrainians know the feeling. The savagery of Russia’s invasion and Putin’s repeated expressions of contempt for Ukrainian statehood have reinforced a long-held sense of existential dread. Covert action, like guerrilla warfare, is the logical response of a small society besieged by a far bigger enemy. Since the start of the full-scale invasion three years ago, Kyiv has struck back against the Russians with a series of assassinations that recall Mossad at its most audacious. On 3 February, Armen Sarkisyan, the organiser of pro-Russian death squads in the Donbas, was killed in his heavily guarded apartment building in the centre of Moscow. Earlier hits have involved a booby-trapped scooter and a bomb placed inside a bust of the victim presented to him at an awards ceremony. Two years ago someone bumped off a Russian submarine commander while he was out on a morning jog; the Ukrainians are said to have hacked into his exercise app.

It is almost impossible to imagine a modern western European country resorting to an assassination campaign. But then, it has been a long time since the post-national French or Germans faced a threat as urgent as the one Ukrainians do today. If Kyiv’s posture on covert action resembles anyone’s, it’s Israel’s. This is no accident. Israel offers the best lens for understanding Ukraine’s current evolution and its future relationship with the West. In the years to come, we should expect what might be called the ‘Israelification’ of Ukraine – a state uneasily allied with the West, but always poised to pursue its own interests regardless of allied hesitations or appeasements. (A clarification: I’m not talking about the so-called ‘Israel model’ of security that some have recommended to Ukraine if it can’t gain NATO membership. What I’m describing is a collective attitude, not a suite of policy options.)

History offers an explanation. While Jews look back on the Holocaust, Ukrainians memorialise the Holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine in the 1930s that took the lives of up to five million people. Given Ukrainians’ place in a resource-rich heartland coveted for centuries by a long list of competing powers (Tatars, Ottomans, Polish-Lithuanians, Russians, Germans, Soviets), it is not hard to see why they would develop a stubborn defiance of each and every potential oppressor. At its best, this deep-seated bloody-mindedness leads to heroic acts of resistance against superior enemies; at its worst it descends into a cult of militant victimhood.

I fully realise that many Jews might find the comparison with the Ukrainians alienating, given the many dark moments in the intertwined histories of the two peoples. Ukrainians have committed their share of antisemitic sins; some Ukrainians participated in pogroms and the Holocaust. Yet today that legacy has receded, if not entirely vanished. The willingness of Ukrainians to elect a Jewish president and to see other Jews in prominent national positions is at least one tangible sign of progress.

I recently spent two months in Kyiv, observing a modern European society besieged by an enemy bent on its destruction. Surveys show that three quarters of Ukrainians have lost a friend or relative to the war – which might help to explain the intensity of Ukrainian emotions toward their supporters as well as their enemies. Over lunch in a Kyiv café a few months ago, a Ukrainian friend recited a litany of American betrayals: George Bush’s 1991 Chicken Kiev speech, which warned Ukraine not to push for independence from the USSR; the failure to enforce the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which offered (ultimately useless) security pledges to the Ukrainians in return for surrendering substantial nuclear arsenal left on their soil by the collapse of the Soviet Union; and George W. Bush’s tentative 2008 promise to offer NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia – only to stand by and watch as the Russians invaded Georgia a few months later. ‘If they don’t let us into NATO, maybe we’ll just have to turn to China,’ he concluded.

One man I met referenced the nationalist guerrillas who continued fighting Soviet forces well into the 1950s: ‘If the West stops supporting us, we’ll just have to go back to being partisans in the forest again.’ During such conversations, I often felt reminded of the moment when Ukrainian activist Daria Kaleniuk scolded former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (one of Kyiv’s most ardent supporters in the West) for his allegedly flaccid support. I also thought of the senior Ukrainian intelligence operative who wondered to the New York Times whether his partners in the CIA were about to abandon his agency: ‘It happened in Afghanistan before and now it’s going to happen in Ukraine.’

I can’t help sympathising with these sentiments. Western assistance has often been hesitant, begrudging, or cynically calculated while Ukrainians have fought to defend their families, friends and homes from a pitiless invader. At least the Biden Administration stuck to the mantra of ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’. But now the Trump administration is eager to make a deal with Putin, raising the prospect of a compromise ‘peace’ that will almost certainly be unsatisfying to the Ukrainians. If that comes to pass, the latent tensions with the West are destined to deepen and fester.

The one thing that might reconcile Kyiv with its fitful supporters in the West would be strong security guarantees, policies that would ensure that Russia cannot continue its aggression. Yet the chances that Ukraine will join NATO anytime soon are minimal. That means in turn that Kyiv’s currently ambiguous relationship to western security structures, linked to the alliance but held at arm’s length, will persist for some time. Ukraine, like Israel, will remain aligned with the West but not quite part of it. Even if Kyiv did manage to gain NATO membership – increasingly unlikely –  it would be a particularly restive member, primed to react proactively to enduring Russian threats.

Ukrainians, like Israelis, are happy to get help from their allies even as they maintain a culture of Darwinian self-reliance. Their deep historical experience of persecution has made their society extremely cohesive and determined, fostering a robust sense of national pride that will distinguish Ukraine from most European states.

Ukrainians have responded to the Russian invasion in characteristically Israeli fashion: by emphasising nimbleness, ingenuity and calculated ruthlessness. This translates into a culture of military innovation and a strong emphasis on intelligence. Ukraine’s intimate knowledge of Russian culture and institutions are a huge asset for its spy operations – similar to Israel’s leveraging of the rich cultural and linguistic knowledge of its many diasporas. (President Zelensky spent a significant portion of his career as a Russian TV star; he and his aides are fluent not only in Russian but also in Russian habits of thinking.) The ability of Ukrainian agents to immerse themselves in Russian environments has helped them to amass prime intelligence that can then be traded to western friends. But the CIA and other partner services express frustration that Kyiv’s agents are often unwilling to share details about their operations – and are willing to undertake aggressive actions that appall the paper-pushers in Washington, Brussels and Berlin. Sound familiar?

And there is another issue that will undoubtedly complicate Kyiv’s relations with the West. It is to be expected that Ukraine, again like Israel, will do everything it can to develop an indigenous nuclear deterrent. I would be shocked if Kyiv has not already started down this path; Ukraine inherited much of the old USSR’s defence industry and boasts a large civilian nuclear energy sector, both of which will enable it to ramp up nuclear weapons in relatively short order. Ukraine claimed the first successful test of its own ballistic missile design in August 2024. Some experts question the report, but the symbolism was unmistakable. Why go to the expensive effort of developing such a missile if it’s only going to be armed with conventional explosives that could be delivered by much cheaper drones?

Ukrainians often refer to the current war against Russia as their ‘war of independence’, a fight for their survival as a people. And just like Israel after 1948, the Ukraine that emerges from this war will be shaped by the generation that fought it. Ukraine is currently led by a cohort of mostly 40-somethings, and their experience of this collective crucible will affect the way the country is governed for decades to come. (Zelensky is 47; Valerii Zaluzhny, the general who ran in the military in the first stages of the war, recently turned 51; and Budanov, the military intelligence chief, is 39.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see postwar Ukraine become a sort of military democracy, shaped by the warrior ethos of its veterans. This will make Ukraine an even more complicated partner for the West – a country that is keen to anchor itself in the EU and NATO, but one that will often buck the restraints imposed upon it by countries that are inherently cautious about confronting Russia.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, speculating about the consequences of a war that is yet to end. I can’t help remembering another conversation in Kyiv, this one with my Ukrainian friend Bogdan, about accountability for Russian war crimes. Bogdan argued that all Russians, regardless of their individual participation in any acts, bear responsibility for the atrocities committed by their leaders and troops. I pointed out that western Europe had already gone through a similar debate after 1945, eventually leading to a consensus that collective guilt is based on a faulty premise; you can’t hold all members of a group liable for crimes committed by some of its members – which, of course, shouldn’t exclude a country like, say, Germany, from expressing a sense of collective responsibility for the sins of past governments, morally and politically.

Bogdan disagreed. Any Russian, he said, should be regarded as culpable unless they had actively opposed the war. The intensity of his feelings brought home a point I should have realised earlier: Ukrainians aren’t living in the 1950s. For them it’s still 1943 – the war is still going on, and its outcome is uncertain. The West’s leaders should work now to develop policies that will keep Ukraine firmly in its fold. The Israel precedent suggests that this might be easier said than done.