Julia Nikhinson/Reuters

The Supreme Court, shown Jan. 8, 2024, is suddenly facing a term of historic proportions and tight deadlines.

A lot can change in two weeks.

Entering its Christmas break, the U.S. Supreme Court was in a familiar place. One opinion had been issued in the now-typical slow start to the term. The highest-profile cases – touching issues like gun rights, taxation, and government regulation – had been argued. A routine term seemed in the cards, a boon for a high court coming off historic rulings in consecutive terms and now entering a divisive election year. 

A fortnight later, the Supreme Court is in a much less comfortable position. Over the next four months, the justices will hear cases with mammoth implications for both the 2024 election and one of the central issues of that election: abortion access.

The term “has taken on tremendous weight that was not evident at the start,” says Carolyn Shapiro, co-director of the Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States.

“On the other hand, it’s not entirely unpredictable we find ourselves in this situation,” she adds.

Indeed, legal questions involving former President Donald Trump have been looming since the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Similarly, the landmark rulings of recent years – such as overturning Roe v. Wade – were always likely to prompt follow-up cases.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s legal team asked three judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to declare that a president who had not first been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate was immune from criminal prosecution. In an exchange that raised legal eyebrows from coast to coast, Mr. Trump’s attorney asserted that this would hold true even if a president ordered the assassination of a political rival. The justices declined to hear the case before the appeals court weighs in, but it seems all but certain the Supreme Court will be asked to decide the issue.

And even if the justices saw it coming, they are now facing six months of political scrutiny, compressed timelines, and unprecedented legal questions. However they rule, they’re certain to anger a segment of the country and sow further distrust in their judicial integrity. And when voters head to the polls in November, the rulings are likely to be fresh in their minds.

Susan Walsh/AP

Former President Donald Trump, with his attorneys, speaks to reporters at a Washington hotel after his hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024.

November’s ballot, on the docket

Public confidence in the Supreme Court stayed near record lows last year following consecutive terms in which the six-justice conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade, struck down affirmative action, and ruled that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a firearm in public. 

Republicans, unsurprisingly, have a more favorable view of the court than other Americans. But that confidence could be tested by the end of this term.

In February, the justices will hear a challenge to a ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that the 14th Amendment disqualifies Mr. Trump from running for public office because he “engaged in insurrection” on Jan. 6. Then there is the question of whether the Constitution gives a president immunity from criminal prosecution after they leave office.

The court has indirectly affected elections over the years, including through decisions reshaping the Voting Rights Act and campaign finance laws. But not since Bush v. Gore in 2000 will the Supreme Court have such a significant influence on a presidential election.

“The legal questions are different [from Bush v. Gore], and the impacts of the outcomes would be much less direct,” says Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

But the 14th Amendment and immunity cases, he adds, “could have a significant indirect impact on the election, and that’s going to be on people’s minds.”

Abortion rights, redux

Meanwhile, abortion rights has been a defining issue in political campaigns since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022. Over the next six months, the court will be dealing with the fallout from that decision.

Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters/File

Abortion-rights activists and counterprotesters face off outside the U.S. Supreme Court on the first anniversary of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, in Washington, June 24, 2023.

In mid-December, the court agreed to hear a case challenging the federal authorization of the widely used medical abortion pill mifepristone. And last week, the justices took up a case asking if Idaho’s near-total abortion ban conflicts with a federal law requiring health care providers to perform abortions for certain emergency room patients.

The Idaho case will be argued in April. The court hasn’t yet scheduled arguments in the mifepristone case. That the justices are again wrestling with this hot-button political issue “is not surprising either,” says Professor Shapiro.

“When the court [overturned Roe], it was setting itself up to be adjudicating extremely divisive and important issues regarding health care access for years to come,” she adds.

The regularly scheduled program

All these cases only add to what was already a substantial, albeit lower-profile, Supreme Court docket.

In a follow-up to a landmark gun-rights ruling in 2022, the justices will decide if laws barring domestic abusers from possessing firearms are unconstitutional. The high court will also decide if the federal government can no longer tax certain “unrealized” income. That decision could have consequences for other sections of the U.S. tax code, as well as for the $340 billion that the specific tax at issue is projected to raise over the next decade.

Finally, the justices could also overturn the Chevron doctrine. The 40-year-old precedent, which holds that federal courts must defer to an agency’s interpretation of ambiguous laws, plays a major role in the regulatory process. But conservatives have long argued that Chevron gives federal agencies too much unchecked authority, and several justices have openly criticized the doctrine.

Guns, taxes, and Chevron made for a significant but low-key start to this Supreme Court term. After the past two weeks, however, the term has taken on the weight of historic significance – on a par with those that outlawed segregation and effectively ended Richard Nixon’s presidency after Watergate.

“I’m struggling to think of any term in which the court will have decided a larger number of massively important cases,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas School of Law professor, on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“It’s a court that is spending most of its time right in the middle of our political wars.”

Monday’s Iowa caucuses will be the Republicans’ first election of the 2024 presidential primary contest. It will also be former President Donald Trump’s first appearance on a ballot since he lost the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 and inflamed many of his supporters with unfounded claims of widespread election fraud. 

And caucuses – a longtime tradition in Iowa as well as a handful of other states – could present a challenge for an already-skeptical electorate and a front-runner with a history of crying foul if he doesn’t win. 

The arcane process, which emphasizes grassroots politicking, has launched numerous underdog campaigns in the Hawkeye State. But it also has a well-documented history of delays and inaccuracies.

“Should Trump lose, or should he do much worse than anticipated, then I think the complexity of the [caucus] rules will give rise to ammunition to complain,” says Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

Caucuses are run by parties, not government officials. In 2020, Iowa Democrats bungled their caucuses so badly – with vote count discrepancies and a multiday delay in tallying results – that this year the Democratic National Committee bumped Iowa out of its kickoff spot in the primary schedule. Republicans, too, have had caucus mishaps: In 2012, the Iowa GOP declared that Mitt Romney had won by just eight votes – only to announce two weeks later that Rick Santorum was actually the winner. 

State officials insist nothing like that will happen this year.

Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

Supporters listen to Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley at Mickey's Irish Pub during a campaign stop in Waukee, Iowa, Jan. 9, 2024.

“We’re very, very confident that we’ve done everything humanly possible to make sure that this caucus comes off without a hitch,” Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, told a roomful of Republican legislators in Des Moines earlier this week.

Still, any kind of delay or miscalculation could further erode trust. Even without any irregularities, an upset on Monday would almost certainly strike Trump supporters as suspicious, given that polls here have shown the former president holding a commanding lead for months. In 2016, after he lost in Iowa to Ted Cruz, Mr. Trump claimed the Texas senator only beat him because he “stole it.” 

The biggest criticism of caucuses in general – among both Republicans and Democrats – is that the format limits participation. Unlike in a typical primary, when voters can show up anytime, cast their ballot, and leave, caucus participants must arrive at a specific time and often stay for hours. 

This means they typically attract only the party’s most dedicated voters. That’s particularly true in Iowa, whose caucuses take place in the middle of winter on a weeknight. In 2016, only about 30% of the state’s registered Republicans participated. And this year’s election is forecast to be the coldest caucuses on record, potentially below zero degrees, which is raising concerns about turnout.

At his rally in Clinton last weekend, Mr. Trump speculated that the extreme temperatures would benefit his campaign.

“I hear the weather’s going to be very cold,” he told a packed gymnasium of supporters. “Why is that good? Because the other side won’t have a vote. They don’t have any enthusiasm.”

The Republican caucuses here don’t involve the complicated in-person shuffling between candidates’ designated room corners as did the Democratic caucuses notoriously. But the process is still different from a typical primary election. 

Voters must arrive at one of the state’s roughly 700 caucus sites – in schools, libraries, fire stations, or occasionally living rooms – by 7 p.m. Local party officials or volunteers check people in using registration lists provided by the secretary of state, and after voters show a valid ID, they are given a paper ballot.

“It’s a 2-by-4 little sheet of paper,” says Gloria Mazza, chair of the Polk County GOP. “Don’t lose it, because you don’t get another.”  

One person speaks for three minutes on behalf of each candidate (this year, the Trump campaign has organized a slate of “caucus captains” with custom hats to give these speeches).

Scott Morgan/Reuters

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a campaign visit to the Cedar Falls Woman's Club in Cedar Falls, Iowa, Jan. 5, 2024.

Ballots are then filled out and “picked up in a basket like in a church offering dish,” says Ms. Mazza, who manages the caucuses in the state’s most populous county. Each campaign is allowed one observer as local organizers stack and count the ballots before announcing their precinct’s winner and uploading the results to an online database. 

“We count our votes in the same room where the votes are cast. We report the votes in the same room where the votes are cast. A representative can observe the counting. Everything we report has a paper trail,” Mr. Kaufmann tells the Monitor. “You will not find a more open and transparent process in the United States.”

In some ways, the more intimate aspect of the caucus process could potentially prove helpful in combating worries about election fraud, says MIT’s Professor Stewart.

“Republican election skeptics, they’re going to go into somebody’s living room or they’re going to go into a church basement, and they’re going to see the precinct chair of the Republican Party, who’s a neighbor, another Republican who lives down the street from them, running the meeting. That might reassure them that things will be fair,” he says.

But that same Republican from “down the street” also may not have much experience – and could have a harder time controlling the crowd if things were to go sideways.

“Even if they’ve run these caucuses before,” notes Professor Stewart, “they haven’t run them since the 2020 election.”

Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Supporters of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party rally in Taiwan ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections.

There’s a good reason the world is paying such rapt attention to this weekend’s election in Taiwan: The result could influence whether and when Chinese leader Xi Jinping acts on his vow to “reunite” the island democracy with the Communist mainland.

But in what has been dubbed “the year of the election” – not just Americans but 2 billion people worldwide are due to go to the polls in 2024 – something else distinguishes Taiwan’s vote from many of the roughly 70 others being held in coming months.

It will be free and fair, with a level field for the competing parties.

Elections in some other democracies – including two of the world’s largest, Indonesia and India – will fall short of that standard. In an autocracy like Russia, the result is a foregone conclusion. In Iran, the country’s religious rulers will decide who may run in legislative elections and who may not.

Still, two powerful messages are likely to emerge from this worldwide election year by the time the United States goes to the polls in November in the most closely watched race of all.

The first is that even established democracies are under serious strain from eroding public trust in government institutions and an increasingly angry, polarized political climate.

But the second is that the core principle of democracy – that political legitimacy ultimately rests on the consent of the governed – is proving extraordinarily resilient. Even autocratic regimes feel the need for election victory, if not as a demonstration of support, then at least as a show of loyalty.

Some elections this year will demonstrate the power of that core democratic principle in action.

South Korea’s in April, like Taiwan’s, could have international implications. The country’s delicate relationship with North Korea and recent rapprochement with Japan are in play. In Britain, with an election expected by the end of the year, the center-left Labour Party seems poised to end 14 years of Conservative rule.

Ahn Young-joon/AP/File

South Korean election officials sort through votes cast in local elections in 2022. Legislative elections are due in March 2024.

Voters in the 27 member states of the European Union will elect new members of the bloc’s Parliament, amid signs of possible gains by far-right candidates calling for tougher policies on immigration.

Mexico will get its first female president this year: Both leading candidates are women.

In a number of other democracies, however, the potential fragility of their core institutions and political fabric will be on show.

That includes the U.S., the world’s wealthiest, most powerful, and most influential democracy.

As the primary season begins in Iowa next week, the political mood is fractious. The November election will be held under the shadow of efforts by the last president, Donald Trump, to prevent certification of his defeat in the 2020 election, which he and millions of supporters still insist was fraudulent.

Yet in a pair of autocracies voting in March, the second part of the election year message – the staying power of democracy as a governing principle – is also in evidence.

The most powerful sign is that President Vladimir Putin in Russia and the ruling ayatollahs in Iran feel the need to hold elections at all.

Their aim is twofold: to give their governments a sheen of democratic respectability in the eyes of the world, and to demonstrate to their own people the extent of their control.

Especially this year, both countries’ leaders are aware that even a carefully stage-managed election is not without political risk.

For Mr. Putin, this will be the first election since a constitutional change allowed him to run for a further two terms. It’s also the first since his disastrously miscalculated February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and last year’s march toward Moscow by mutinous Wagner Group mercenaries.

AP

Nikolai Kharitonov (right) registers as the Russian Communist Party candidate in presidential elections next March, expected to be won by Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin will win, comfortably. But he’s taking no chances.

Even a little-known candidate calling for an end to the Ukraine war has been prevented from running. The best-known opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, has been jailed – first in central Russia and, since last month, in a labor camp above the Arctic Circle.

Iran’s supreme Islamic leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will be equally confident of the election outcome: A council of guardians, and ultimately Mr. Khamenei himself, can bar candidates deemed unsuitable from running.

But the election, for Iran’s parliament, follows the most serious unrest since the Islamic revolution in the late 1970s. For months last year, demonstrators risked, and sometimes lost, their lives to protest the regime’s punishment of women for disobeying strict headscarf rules.

The goal in both Russia and Iran will be to ensure a high turnout, to avoid any impression that support for the authorities is on the wane. But leaders in both countries will know that democracies are inherently unpredictable, however carefully they are managed.

They need only look back to an election last year, in the former Soviet bloc state of Poland.

It had been ruled for nearly a decade by the right-wing Law and Justice Party, tightening its hold on power by reining in both the judiciary and the news media.

But a coalition of opposition parties, united in pledging to reverse these curbs on democracy, startled not only the incumbent government but also itself.

With record turnout, buoyed by support from women and younger voters, it won a majority.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Sophie Neiman

Patients relax while waiting for checkups at Dr. Gladys Atto's eye clinic, Oct. 27, 2023, in a remote part of Karamoja, in northeastern Uganda.

Gladys Atto settles into a chair in her sparsely furnished office and rests her feet for a moment. It is only a few hours past midday; she is tired, but there is little time to relax. Already today, the young ophthalmologist has removed cataracts from five patients’ eyes so they can see again. 

Another six surgeries are scheduled before evening. 

Dr. Atto is the first and only ophthalmologist in Karamoja, a remote region the size of Belgium in the northeastern corner of Uganda. For the nearly 1.2 million people who live here, life is ruled by extremes. The climate is harsh; the sun hot. Rain rarely falls, making it hard to grow enough crops. 

During the long dry periods, nomadic Karamojong pastoralists migrate over the scorched earth with their cows, searching for grass and water. In 2019, the region was hit hard by a surge of cattle rustling. Armed raiders roamed among thorny livestock pens and stole animals from their neighbors, hoping thefts would bring in the money they needed to survive. 

In these rugged areas, access to Western-style health care is rare. The hospital where Dr. Atto works is one of just five in the extensive region, and the only one capable of providing specialized services. Travel is difficult, but especially so for those who are unwell: Long distances are traveled on foot along rough dirt roads, or in crowded public cars. The care Dr. Atto provides is free of charge, but the cost of transport is out of reach for many in Karamoja, which is Uganda’s poorest region. 

“They are resilient,” Dr. Atto says of the community she serves. “That is all I can say.” 

Sight restored, lives reclaimed

Dr. Atto learned her own tenacity at a young age, growing up during the government’s conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Over the course of some three decades, Joseph Kony recruited thousands of child soldiers to serve in his fearsome guerrilla group. 

“That time was a scary moment, but I believe that it built me up,” she recalls. “We’d be sleeping ... and Mom would say, ‘Come down; go under the bed.’ You did not know how close or far the bullets were.” 

Sophie Neiman

Dr. Gladys Atto is the first and only eye doctor in Karamoja, a remote subregion in Uganda, which is home to 1.2 million people, Oct. 26, 2023.

As a child, Dr. Atto knew that she wanted to be a doctor. She loved science, and hoped to do some good in the world. 

Interning as a doctor in her home city of Gulu, she saw how few eye specialists there were in Uganda. Without a permanent ophthalmologist in the public hospital, patients seeking care were sent away until a specialist from Kampala, the country’s capital, could visit and offer eye care. 

Dr. Atto wanted to help other places and people facing similar challenges. A telephone conversation during her studies with the director of a hospital in Karamoja revealed that there had never been an eye doctor permanently posted there. 

She offered her services full time. The director accepted. 

It worried her mother, and her friends, who wanted her to stay closer to home. 

“When you mention Karamoja, everyone thinks you are cut off,” she says. “People see this place as very remote. Some were thinking I’d made a terrible decision.”  

Undeterred, Dr. Atto loaded everything she owned into a truck and made the 12-hour journey to her new posting. 

“The only thing that worried me about working here was if I didn’t get good accommodation,” she jokes, with characteristic good humor. “Put me in the deepest village. Give me good housing, and everything else can wait.” 

When she arrived five years ago, the eye care unit was just two rooms. There was nowhere for patients to recover, so they often took to sleeping in the grassy courtyard. Specialty equipment was gathering dust; staff had not yet been trained on how to use it. 

An international nongovernmental organization, Sight Savers, stepped in to sponsor Dr. Atto’s work in Karamoja. It also helped in the construction of a new eye clinic, which was completed in 2020, and trained half a dozen staff members.    

Now, the walls are painted the color of sunshine, adorned with vision tests and notices about eye health. Nurses in clean white uniforms bustle from patient to patient, gently removing bandages to check recently restored vision.

Ensuring these patients can see again is Susan Niyigena’s favorite part of her job. “The eyes are the window to the beautiful things which are in the world. The environment, the people,” says Ms. Niyigena, who is a nurse specializing in eye care. 

Sophie Neiman

Moroto, the regional capital of Karamoja, nestles in the shadow of mountains in a remote district of northeastern Uganda.

It is hard to keep track, but Dr. Atto estimates that she has treated at least 7,000 people. 

Sight is vital to the livelihoods of farmers and pastoralists in Karamoja, so Dr. Atto and her team run mobile eye clinics, traveling to rural villages. Hot wind whirls red dust into the air as they meet patients who cannot make it to the hospital in Moroto. 

“I have seen people’s lives being given back to them,” says Juliet Sentongo Busobozi, who manages programs for Sight Savers. 

Whenever she can on these trips, Dr. Atto focuses on women, who bear the brunt of feeding and caring for their families. “If you want an improvement in any area of life, economically, socially, everything, a woman needs to be able to see,” Dr. Atto says. 

In her limited spare time, the doctor visits schools to encourage girls to take jobs in medicine themselves. 

A bright future

But with progress comes pressure, and Dr. Atto often wonders if she is doing enough. She frets about leaving the hospital, knowing patients in emergency situations might not receive the care they need as she is the only eye surgeon there is.

Funds for eye care are limited in Uganda’s already-meager health care budget, says Dr. Denis Erima, president of the Ophthalmology Society of Uganda. And of the 40 practicing eye doctors in Uganda, the majority are clustered in the capital city, Kampala.

Still, Dr. Atto is slowly gaining recognition for her efforts. Last year, she was nominated for a Doctor of the Year award in Uganda. In November, she won.

She celebrated with her staff, going out for a meal and sharing a cake. But she appears most comfortable at the hospital, free from pomp and hard at work. On her rounds she wears red lipstick and colorful beads, giving patients something exciting to see as soon as she restores their sight. 

She hopes the future of eye care in her country will be equally bright.

“I still dream that one day we will achieve universal eye health, the state where everyone, anywhere, anytime, can get the quality eye care services that they need,”  she says.

This article has been amended to correct the spelling of Ms. Sentongo Buzobosi's name

You’re 8 years old, and your day is about to be made. As soon as your eyes pop open, you can tell the light is different. And then you see the fat flakes falling at the window, and the little radio in the kitchen is already tuned to the school closures, and the world is transformed. Yes!

Nothing is going to pull the reins back on this much joy, and no one will even try. Your mom will stuff you into your snowsuit, and you’ll be outside until your socks slush up. You’ll come back in for hot cocoa and press your feet against the heat register until they itch.

It’s still a beautiful thing every time, the snow, as though every fret and flaw has been forgiven, and replaced by an exuberance of bird tracks. You go outside for the sheer crunch of it and for the memory of the snow day. How you feel about it depends on your circumstance. It depends on whether you have a wooden toboggan and a ready supply of gravity, or whether the outhouse is all the way out in the windbreak. It depends on whether you work from home, or you’re past your due date.

We don’t get a lot of snow here in Oregon. We get a lot of rain, and sometimes the temperature toggles around either side of freezing, and then we get confused rain. We get a layered casserole with every possible state of water, including something like sherbet in the middle, and if your circumstance is such that you have to drive, your beautiful snow day has an anxious edge to it.

My circumstance for several decades was that I had to deliver mail no matter what. Which would have been thrilling in the snow, if I could just walk out of the station, but I had to drive. On steep, narrow lanes. Occasionally sliding sideways. The kids would be out of school and sledding in the street, and they’d see me perched at the top of the block and begrudgingly step back until I had a mitten’s worth of space on either side of my vehicle, and I would stand on my brake, lean out the window, and bellow at them in a voice that would drop an exorcist.

“Get over! MOVE! On the sidewalk! ALL THE WAY!! I’m not moving till you do! I’m TELLING YOUR MOM!” The kids saw me only on snow days, and their opinion about me was very different from their parents’. The parents thought I was as sweet as pie, but it’s the kids who have grown up and are running the show now, and this is why everyone pays bills online and the post office is in trouble.

There was once a prominent citizen in town whose videoed trip down an icy block in his Mercedes became an internet sensation. It was a steep one-way street, and he slowly mashed into every single parked car on the left until there was a gap, and then he pinballed into every single parked car on the right, and then he caught the lucky flipper at the bottom of the street and spun into all the remaining bumpers, and the phones of insurance agents all over town began lighting up and ringing simultaneously, ding-ding-ding, and that street, ladies and gentlemen, was on my mail route.

Sixty years ago, snow days were a surprise. We’re too advanced for that rare delight now, for the most part. But awhile back, we got our predicted 3 inches of snow, right on time, and then we got 6 more inches after that, and every knob and twig was soft and plump and perfect. And I did not have to deliver mail, anywhere. I did not even have to go anywhere. This beautiful snowfall was all the more beautiful for me not being a mail carrier in it.

And so I went for a walk, with my inner 8-year-old tagging along. A little voluntary walk in the snow, while not delivering mail. A walk in which I observed people delivering mail, although I, myself, was not so doing. And I filled up the bird feeders and rigged up a heater for the birdbath while continuing to not deliver mail, and I had myself a cocoa while at the very same time not delivering mail, and, my friends, it was a beautiful thing. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing.

REUTERS

Military chaplains pray with soldiers during a Christmas Day service near the front line in Ukraine's Donetsk region, Dec. 25, 2023.

During the nearly two years since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has frequently used one notable word in public comments: despair. He cites it not to consent to it but to, as he says, “not allow” it. With the war currently at a stalemate, he has been battling despair among Ukrainians more than ever.

Yet not in ways easily seen.

The most obvious way is by winning more aid from Western capitals to match Russia’s military might. He has fought official corruption and kept the economy going. Lately, he has boosted troop morale by handing out more medals for combat heroism.

During a visit to the front line in December to hand out medals, he said he found “no despair and no weakness” among the soldiers. A few weeks earlier, he visited a memorial wall to fallen soldiers, saying it was a “wall that fear, despondency, despair, discord, or the thought of giving up won’t break through.”

“We are strong. We are the wall. We stand,” he said.

A year ago, during a visit to Britain in which he was presented with a special-edition Book of Psalms translated into Ukrainian, Mr. Zelenskyy quoted from Chapter 3: “But You, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory and He Who raises up my head. With my voice, I call to the Lord, and He answered me from His holy mount to eternity. I will not fear ten thousands of people, who have set themselves against me all around.”

The Jewish president says the Psalms tell of people praying often for help from God. “We never know whether our prayer has come close to perfection, and whether the Lord heard it,” he said. “That’s why in harsh times – when we lose loved-ones; when people lose children, ... when a criminal war is conducted against your people; – faith may stagger. It happens that people think that God doesn’t hear and will not hear prayer. And it is important for us, as leaders of nations, to resist despair.”

In the first 15 months after the invasion, demand for Bibles rose fivefold in Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian Bible Society. Online engagement with the Bible also rose dramatically, according to YouVersion, creators of the popular Bible app and Bible.com.

In the year after the war began, the most popular search terms in Ukrainian were “war,” “fear,” and “anxiety,” according to YouVersion. As the war went on, those words were replaced by searches for “love.”

Perhaps that shift can be explained by YouVersion’s finding that the most popular Bible verse among Ukrainians in 2022 was Isaiah 41:10: “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

Among the top 10 favorite Bible verses among Ukrainians, “curiously absent are verses on evil, anger, and grief,” Valentin Siniy, president of Tavriski Christian Institute in Kherson, told Christianity Today.

Along with President Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s clergy have also been on the front lines, battling despair. One is Mykola Berezyk, a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

“The war showed us that it is not enough to feed, equip, and arm soldiers,” he told Agence France Presse. “They also need spiritual support.”

Mr. Zelenskyy went further in that idea during his Christmas message last month: “In troubled times, as we defend our land and our souls, we are making our way to freedom. The way to gaining comprehensive independence, including spiritual one.”

His words were one more way Ukraine plans a triumph over despair as much as a victory against an invasion.