About two months before a mortar killed him, 19-year-old Ukrainian soldier Daniel shared a cigarette with me in a trench in eastern Ukraine. On that hot June afternoon, with small arms fire rattling in the background, he told me why he’d volunteered to go to war. “We are fighting for our homes and for our land,” he said. “Ukraine is a free country, and when Russia invaded I had no other choice. I had to fight.”
Four months later, 77-year-old Jampa Choejor offered me a cup of masala chai at his home in the Jampaling Tibetan refugee settlement outside of Pokhara, Nepal. I was still slightly amped from the motorcycle ride it took to get there, an hour-long slalom course dodging cows and overloaded buses amid the free-for-all chaos of Nepal’s rural roads. As we sat with legs folded on yak skin blankets and sipped our tea, Choejor, a former Buddhist monk, explained his decision decades earlier to join Tibet’s guerrilla war against the Chinese invaders.
“When the Chinese came, they bullied, they killed,” Choejor said of China’s invasion of Tibet in the 1950s. “There was no freedom, no religion. After so many brutal acts, there was no way to stay silent. We couldn’t stay living like that. We suffered. But there was no other choice. We had to fight back.”
When it comes to their culture, history, and geography, Tibet and Ukraine appear to have few things in common. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find many surprising similarities, including the fact that when neighboring empires invaded their homelands, the Tibetan and Ukrainian nations summoned a devotion to their freedom and an unbreakable will to fight for it.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, Tibetan irregulars fought a decades-long insurgency against China’s occupation. It wasn’t until 1974, and at the Dalai Lama’s request, that they finally laid down their arms. The legacy of this armed resistance continues to inspire generations of Tibetans, both inside Tibet and in exile, to resist Chinese oppression in other, non-violent ways.
Likewise, Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 spurred a nationwide resistance movement to take root, paving the way for Ukraine’s remarkable stand in February 2022. After more than three and a half years of full-scale war, Ukraine’s will to resist remains unbroken.
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I’ve spent the past thirteen years embedded in the Tibetan and Ukrainian freedom struggles, wanting to understand how these two nations summoned the will to defy the empires that meant to destroy them. This quest has taken me to the ends of the earth and to the extremes of the human experience. I dodged Russian snipers on Ukraine’s battlefields and crossed remote Himalayan passes that soar as high as jetliners fly.
Along the way, I met Ukrainian university students who adapted small commercial drones to kill their Russian enemies, and shared tea with Tibetan monks and nomads who had fought on horseback, armed with swords and World War I-era rifles, against China’s mechanized invasion. Throughout it all, I’ve been consistently surprised by all the similarities these two stories share.
Whether I was talking to a 20-year-old Ukrainian soldier or an 80-year-old Tibetan veteran, I kept hearing the same humble explanations for their actions, such as the shared sentiment that they had “no other choice.” For many of those I have met, going to war for their homeland’s freedom wasn’t really a decision at all. It was automatic and instinctual, like an immune system response. Their country was invaded and innocent people were dying, so they had to fight. Simple as that.
Ukrainian soldier Denys put it to me like this: “Wars aren’t won by surrendering. You have to fight. If you don’t fight, you won’t be supported by anyone. Because it’s your own freedom and you have to fight for it.”
Kelsang Tsering, a former Buddhist monk who served in the Tibetan resistance from 1955 to 1974, had a similarly matter-of-fact explanation for his decision to resist China’s occupation. “I saw what China was doing in Tibet and it made me so angry, I had to fight,” he said.
Tsering and I spoke over tea one evening at his home in a Nepalese refugee settlement. A flickering fluorescent lamp lit the room. A picture of the Dalai Lama hung on the wall. Tsering’s wife sat on the floor, legs folded, spinning a prayer wheel while she chanted a Buddhist mantra. I asked Tsering if it was difficult for him to take a life in combat, given that he was once a Buddhist monk who eschewed all violence, even the killing of an insect.
“In the beginning, I was thinking we were monks, and so we shouldn’t kill,” he answered. “But when I recalled all the abuses, all the terrible things the Chinese did, I forgot my hesitation. After seeing so many bad things, I forgot that killing was a sin.”
Such moral certitude echoes what I’ve heard from many Ukrainians. “The Russians came to our country and killed our people. It’s our country, our land, our families. For us, it’s very clear. We kill them, or they kill us,” a Ukrainian special operations soldier named Serhii told me.
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China and Russia are on the march against the US-led world order. Yet, the way I see it, America’s military might isn’t the only obstacle holding these aggressive, wannabe empires at bay.
By refusing to surrender their identities and submit to imperial rule, the Tibetan and Ukrainian nations defy the fantasies of civilizational greatness, detached from historical reality, that the Chinese and Russian regimes depend on for their domestic legitimacy. The authoritarians in Beijing and Moscow see such expressions of independence and self-determination as existential threats to their grip on power. Their retaliation has been brutal.
Russia launched its disastrous full-scale invasion in 2022 to destroy the Ukrainian state and extinguish Ukraine’s national identity entirely. China, for its part, has spent decades trying to erase Tibet’s culture and ethnicity. Today, after seventy-five years of occupation, Tibet is a nightmarish Gestapo state for the Tibetans living there, a chilling portent of what Ukrainians are fighting to prevent from happening in their homeland.
The irony, of course, is that the Ukrainian and Tibetan nations are more unified today than they ever were prior to being invaded. Rather than break Ukraine’s spirit, each new Russian atrocity reinforces the resolve of the Ukrainian population to resist. As for Tibetans, a people once divided by regional dialects and cultures, they’ve now coalesced around a single version of their language and national identity, at the heart of which is their universal devotion to the Dalai Lama.
The price of freedom is set by those who wish to destroy it. And yet, as the Dalai Lama said in a speech not long after the Soviet Union collapsed, “Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom.” In today’s troubled world, that’s a message worth remembering.
Nolan Peterson is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US Air Force Special Operations pilot.
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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.
The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values, and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia, and Central Asia in the East.
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Image: A service member of a mobile air defence unit of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade stands next to a M2 Browning machine gun during a combat shift on the front line, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. September 15, 2025. (REUTERS/Stringer)
