‘The bad guys are winning’, Anne Applebaum wrote in an essay in The Atlantic in 2021. If the twentieth century was about the rise of liberal democracy, the twentieth-first sofar has been about the opposite. The fight for democracy is nowhere as pressing as in Ukraine. During this conversation organised by de Balie, Anne Applebaum and Ukrainian philosopher and writer Volodymyr Yermolenko discuss Ukraine’s ongoing struggle for freedom, and the stakes for the future – not just for Ukraine, but also for democracy in Europe.