By John Leicester, KYIV
Ukraine
In the final hours before the Russian onslaught, a last grasp at peace. Russian troops would soon pour across Ukraine’s borders and Russian missiles would fill Ukrainian skies, taking Ukrainian lives in the biggest air, sea and ground assault in Europe since World War II. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy still appealed, on war’s brink, for reason to prevail.
Staring intently into the
camera in a last-ditch, dead-of-night, video-recorded
plea against the invasion, Zelenskyy warned Russia that the
consequences would be “an abundance of pain, filth, blood and death.”
“War is a huge calamity,”
Zelenskyy said, in what proved to be one of his last outings in a suit before
his switch to military-style casual wear. “This calamity carries a huge cost —
in every meaning of this word.”
The date was Feb.
24, 2022 — cataclysmic for Ukraine, course-changing for Russia,
history-shaping for the wider world. Every hour of every day since has proven
those words to be right.
As milestones go, the invasion’s first anniversary Friday is both grim and vexing. It marks a full year of killing, destruction, loss and pain felt even beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine — with war-related price shocks being just one example. But it also raises a question that is unsatisfying because it can’t be answered at this partway point: How much longer until this stops?
“Not soon enough” might be one
response, though any peace deal looks far off as Russia’s invasion force
meat-grinds into Year Two, with neither side close to reaching hoped-for
objectives.
The misery of 365
days of bloodshed and the full scale of the
global repercussions are difficult to sum up with mere words. Russia
is more isolated than at any time since the Cold War. Western nations are
banding together for Russian President Vladimir
Putin ’s defeat while also gambling that the
ex-KGB spy won’t go nuclear. China is filing
away lessons that could be used against Taiwan.
And how to measure all the tears? How to adequately describe all the suffering and atrocities? Or even the broken heart of just one of the children who have lost loved ones and futures?
The numbers are dizzying:
hundreds of thousands of Russian
men escaping abroad to avoid being thrown into battle, millions
of Ukrainians uprooted from their homes, tens of billions of dollars
poured into weaponry that is making war ever-more
lethal, trillions more dollars estimated lost
for the global economy. And even those figures don’t do justice to the
human and economic costs.
Of the body count — surely the
most important tally, but kept under wraps by both sides — all that can be said
with certainty is that it is horrific. Western officials estimate it to be in
the many tens of thousands and growing inexorably.
But Ukraine is still here. That in itself is a stinging defeat for the Kremlin. Putin seemingly believed his forces and secret services would have turned Ukraine into a puppet state by now. The invasion plan called for resistant Ukrainian officials to be liquidated, weeded out or flipped into collaborating, according to a British think tank’s study based in part on captured Russian documents.
Instead, the threat of
extinction as a free nation is pushing Ukraine into an ever-closer orbit with
the European Union, the United States and the wider West — the very outcome
Putin wanted to avoid. Each additional delivery of NATO-standard
weapons, the billions of dollars in other Western aid, and pledges to stand
with Ukraine for “as long as it takes” are hard-wiring bonds that, in
peacetime, might have taken many more years to build.
Ukraine, independent from the
ex-Soviet Union only since 1991, has also grown in war as a nation. Fighting to
remain Ukrainian has forced clarity about what exactly that means, sharpening
the contours of national identity.
Says Olena Sotnyk, a lawyer
and former legislator: “Putin did for us something which nobody did. He helped
us to become a free nation.”
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