Wars deserve to be viewed in ways other than geopolitical issues or shifting alliances, and more as moments of personal agony or horror. A year after the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, I have never forgotten the fate of Ekaterina and Valentin. This summer, the police saved them from bombardments around their small apartment in Lysychansk, before it fell into the hands of Russian forces.
Their house consisted of a tiny room, a shared kitchen and a bathroom, the smell of which was all Ekaterina could talk about when we met her. Valentin seemed stricken with dementia, both seemed stunned by the ambient cacophony. When the police slowly ushered them into a car, he clutched a small, tidy briefcase containing their documents. It was an act of loss, Valentine acknowledging the fact that he might never come back. But it was also a leap of blind faith that the state structure would persist, and that there would be a place in the future where his papers would come in handy again.
These tiny moments of panic represent the true cost of Putin’s invasion, but are also small symbols of hope for the future.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of this new era we have entered is that the West has had to remember its values and its ambitions. Russia’s unprovoked invasion served as an unwitting antidote to six years of clumsy populism, the economic and psychological shock wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the disturbing sense that moral values were becoming obsolete on a planet in crisis. permed.
We should not have needed the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainians or nuclear blackmail to remind us of this message. But perhaps it was disgust at the brutal and inept war wrought by Putin that helped Europe and the rest of the West regain its weakened spine that Donald Trump had weakened.
Fear of Moscow has waned
So many other moments remain etched in my memory. I haven’t forgotten, in the early days of the war, the eyes of three old men poked into our van in Posad Pokrovske, desperately fleeing the bombardments that had shattered their world: even the Nazis didn’t beat them like that, said they sobbing. They never thought they would live long enough to see worse than the 1940s.
Wars can lead to relativism when one scrutinizes the behavior of the two opposing camps. So it’s important to point out how grotesque and ugly modern Russia is in times of war.
First, she doesn’t even admit she’s at war – an indicator of the fictional setting in which she operates. Second, Moscow has exhausted its professional army so quickly that it now sends students to the front in groups and resorts to human waves of Russian prisoners in Ukrainian trenches. The coffins come back empty, the wounded are sent back to fight. Third, the lack of sophistication – or even basic self-awareness – is staggering. The Russians don’t even seem to want to realize how bad they are: they’re not the army worthy of modern warfare and the jujitsu shots dear to Putin. In the background, the threat of nuclear force has been wielded so ineffectively – proving all the weaknesses of a Kremlin losing conventional warfare – that it seems to have had almost the opposite effect, galvanizing the West in concerted action. Honestly, who wants to live in a world of nuclear blackmail?
Ukraine’s response only fueled Western unity. His ingenuity bolstered his dogged defense. A territorial defense fighter known as “Graf” could, in Kramatorsk, talk to us for hours about the complexities of synchronizing drone surveillance with artillery, then discuss the role of Western private contractors in the war effort, before concluding with a scathing critique of the damage alcoholism and corruption would cause to the Russian nuclear program. Ukraine sends its best elements into combat, and therefore adapts to it more quickly than one would imagine, while Russia forces convicts to run in front of machine guns.
Fear of Moscow has waned over the past year. The Cold War enemy who once had the ability to obliterate our world – and whose nuclear warheads were the threat in so many films of our childhoods in the 1980s – continues internally to display the same blindness and same neglect that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s just as bad as before, if not more desperate. Its elite has been humiliated twice, in the early 1990s and today. The Russian dead I witnessed, sprawled on the side of the road as the Ukraine advanced into Kherson this summer, were horribly destitute, with sleeping mats and sports gloves for only comfort, and wearing only a rusty armor on their backs.
A Russian population will stir at the gates of Europe
There is something deeply tragic about how quickly Russia has fallen. It must be remembered that the early years of Putin’s rule contained, despite the massacres in Chechnya and the slow strangulation of all dissent, a kernel of economic reform and progress for Russian citizens. At that time, Putin was creating a middle class. Today, all that is gone, and a dwindling population will suffocate and bustle at Europe’s doorstep for years to come. The impact of the disappearance of Russia will be another problem that Europe will have to face closely.
The choice imposed by Moscow on the West – to seek Russia’s strategic defeat in Ukraine rather than appeasement – is all the more surprising given that Europe was heading in the opposite direction a year ago: the budgets of the defenses were certainly increasing with the realization of Russian malevolence, but the general hope was that Putin would remain a grumpy, benign neighbor we could argue with over a border fence, rather than a savage marauder bent on restoring the old Russian Empire.
The West is now engaged in unconditional support for Ukraine that most of its leaders would have deemed far too provocative a year ago. Sending in tanks, consider F16s, training troops, it’s all so brazen it’s hard to pretend NATO isn’t already at war, even by proxy.
Is this a bad thing? For Ukraine, whose sacrifice should never have taken place, the answer is clearly yes. So many human losses remain unknown: I remember feeling shivers outside the administrative building in Mykolaiv. Today I can only think of the number of people who must have been inside when a missile tore it in two this summer.
But the NATO strategists could never have envisaged such a defeat for Russia. The great power was not meant to waver so explicitly, nor so ineptly inspire unity in enemies it had worked so hard to divide.
These miscalculations and repeated missteps by Moscow are not entirely comforting; the use of its nuclear arsenal remains as a kind of joker in the hands of Russian power. We know the consequences that the use of nuclear power would have for Ukrainian victims as well as for ordinary Russian citizens. But such concerns have never deterred Putin in the past.
The possibility that Russia’s most vicious and destructive toys will also fail is perhaps what is holding Putin back from pressing the nuclear button. Or maybe it’s his survival instinct, which has always guided his every move. But the year ahead is likely to see the unconventional threat of a desperate Russia grow, alongside the slow weariness of Western support as elections roll over and budgets come under strain. But a great victory has already been won in this costly, difficult and painful first year of war: Western unity and the strength of its support for Ukraine have thwarted Moscow’s aim of sowing selfishness and division. This moment of lucidity cannot be erased, no matter how long it lasts.