“But we’ve been at war for eight years already.”
An important message that is conveyed by this comment in Lindsey Hilsum’s letters is that the Russia-Ukraine war didn’t start with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it resurfaced in public media then. The Russia-Ukraine war has been ongoing since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. I guess this was a detail that surprised me more than it should’ve because every war is preceded by history, tension, and preparation (which sometimes hides in plain sight). As Alan Little says in his BBC article “The evidence has been building for years.” The alleged murder of exiled Russians, the invasion of Eastern Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea. He then creatively reveals his version of how Putin thinks about Ukraine, how Putin was mistaken in his estimates (causing the invasion to prolong from days, as Putin was expecting, to over a year now) by drawing an analogy between the relations of Russia and Ukraine to those of Serbia and Bosnia in 1994. Little’s article gives a concrete example of how sometimes history repeats a showing of the same play on the stage of the world, just starring different actors this time around. How little we learn every time, how predictably we act every time, but this isn’t a zero-sum game. There is a net effect of increasing harm that comes from the technological progress we make in defense. Before we stood at the brink of World Wars, now we stand at the brink of Human Extinction.
In her letters Hilsum talks about the destruction of Mariupol and the war crimes in Bucha. She was able to talk to many people fleeing Mariupol while she was in Zaporizhzhia, how desperate they were to talk about their stories of escape and to narrate their suffering to another human. A mother with her daughter who was so needlessly shot by the same Ukrainian soldiers that then tried to help her get medical attention for her wound. But I suspect that there was suffering in Bucha and Mariupol which Hilsum doesn’t have much testimony of in her letters, not for lack of trying, but perhaps because this kind of suffering had the opposite effect on people – it silences them. As Professor Amos reports, the crime of rape is perhaps the most difficult to prosecute because people hide their stories out of shame. It is a unique suffering in that in addition to the trauma of deeply physical and personal violation, it can be a shameful one even in today’s society.
As Hilsum reports in her letters most people fleeing were women and children while “most [men] would rather stay and fight (from what I can tell).” And men from all walks and stages of life appeared to be just as willing. Someone as amateur as Slawa, Lyndsey’s local producer from a previous visit to Ukraine was on the frontlines, and on the other hand (from the diaries of Yevgenia Belorusets featured in This American Life) someone as old as the 66 year old veteran Yevgenia encounters (who was in that moment taking care of his ailing wife) was willing to relive the horrors of fighting on the frontlines. I think seeing how the war changes people’s priorities in a way that is so drastic, poses them with hard choices, and leaves them with difficult losses through the human stories in This American Life was eye opening to the realities of war. When war is punctuated and remembered by the big defeats and conquers, it is easy to forget there are days in-between where dogs are walked, jokes are cracked, drinks are had, all experiences of the everyday felt now with a melancholy and grief left in the wake of the big days.
