 My name is Marie Ivanovich, and I'm a senior advisor at USIP. I'm also affiliated with Georgetown and Carnegie. Previously, I was a Foreign Service Officer at the State Department for 33 years, and most recently I was U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, as well as previous postings as Ambassador to the Kirgis Republic and to the Armenian Republic. I think the unequivocal answer is yes. It is quite clear that with Russia's renewed all-out war on Ukraine, increasingly large numbers of Ukrainians want to join the EU and want to join NATO. This has been a trend since independence in 1991, but I think this latest Russian aggression has really pushed what the Ukrainian people want forward. And so what we're seeing is that the EU is welcoming Ukraine with open arms and making declarative statements about how Ukraine is a part of Europe and helping them move forward with not only the Association Agreement, but an actual application for EU membership. I think we need to be all in. This is not just a war about a faraway country that is plucky and determined. This is a war that is David and Goliath. It's a democracy fighting against the aggression of a much, much larger neighbor that invaded yet again with no provocation and so brutally as we've seen from the images coming from Ukraine. But it's also, as President Zelensky said, this is not just a charity from the United States or others in the West. This is an investment in our values and in our security because if Russia is successful in Ukraine, we can expect that Putin will keep on going. He has written as much and he has said as much that he is looking to expand the Russian Empire to Ukraine, of course, and beyond to historically Russian lands. And I think we need to take him at his word. This would undermine the international order, as it's called, the legal order that was established after World War II in terms of norms, in terms of law, in terms of institutions. And the chief one of these was that you don't change borders willy-nilly by aggression because you are bigger and you can do it that you need to work through things peaceably. Vladimir Putin, Russia, is not doing this and that undermines international security. It undermines our values and it makes all of us less secure, less prosperous and less free. Ukrainian civil society was always robust starting from about, you know, the 1999 on and, you know, every year it's gotten stronger and this is something we don't often think about in the United States because civil society is us and, you know, if we see that there needs to be a traffic light put in near our child's school, you know, we will get the other parents together and the school officials and the town to make that happen. That's an example of civil society at work. In Soviet, former Soviet states, that was not the case because the Communist Party stamped out any kind of individual initiatives because that would have been dangerous if the Communist Party didn't control it. And so it took a while for people in Ukraine to kind of get the hang of this but as we've seen over the last 20-something years the Ukrainians have really gotten the hang of it. You know, when the Russians invaded Ukraine for the first time in 2014 civil society was ready and it was ready again in 2022 when the all-out invasion, the total war that Russia has instituted against Ukraine, not only the military but the society and the culture. Civil society was ready and, you know, what you see in Ukraine today is that everybody is mobilized. You know, some people have joined the military some people are doing territorial defense forces others are working in soup kitchens or driving ambulances people are doing whatever they see needs to be done for Ukrainian society as a whole not because somebody has told them to do it but because they see there is a need and they feel it and that is a really mature civil society and it's something I think the Ukrainian people should be really proud of.