Short War - Long Peace
Mar 16th 2022
Three weeks, or eight years, into the war in Ukraine.
The war has only lasted for three weeks, but it seems like an eternity. Three short weeks, three million refugees, and untold numbers of internally displaced. Thousands dead and thousands more injured. Cities reduced to rubble; homes, schools, hospitals, day care centres destroyed.
The world has changed, for Ukraine, for Europe, for the World, and for Russia. Just three weeks.
Then again this conflict already started eight years ago, when Russia annexed Crimea. It has just been slowly simmering in the background since then, and now Russia decided it is time to finish the job.
As the shelling continues, negotiations are ongoing, and may result in a ceasefire in the near future. In the meantime, there will be more casualties and more destruction, on both sides. For how long, no-one knows.
European countries are rethinking their military and energy strategy, and Europe has not been this united in a very long time. Russia, on the other hand, is already isolated, its economy is heading for deep recession, and more and more sanctions are piling up.
Even if this war ends today, the sanctions are not going to be lifted for some time, and Russia will remain isolated and sanctioned for the foreseeable future.
But, regardless of how this war ends, one thing is already clear, Russia has already lost Ukraine and Ukrainians. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it well in an address yesterday; “Because every shot at Ukraine, every blow at Ukraine are steps towards Russia's self-destruction. Steps to self-isolation, poverty and degradation.”
The war will end one day, but the Ukrainians will not forget their fallen; fathers, brothers, wives, children, grandparents, friends. They will be remembered, and for a very long time, in Zelenskyy’s words: “Eternal memory to everyone who died for Ukraine! Eternal curse to the enemy who took thousands of lives.”
There will be peace, but as Yitzhak Rabin said: “You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.” Russia has become that ‘very unsavory enemy’ for Ukraine, and the question is, what will peace be like, with a neighbour like that.
There will be visible scars in Ukraine for a long time, to remind people of what happened. Destroyed cities will take a long time to rebuild, and some skeletons of structures will probably not be rebuilt, but left as they are, and will become war memorials. They will become part of the fabric of the cities, just like the war will become part of the collective memory of the country.
There will be peace, but underlying that peace there will be the stories of the fallen, the absence of the missing, and the lost lives of the unborn. In a few years, a child will ask ‘where is my father’, thirty years from now, another child will ask what happened to my grandfather, and seventy years from now, grandchildren will hear stories of the war, from grandparents who experienced it as children.
In the year 2122, when anyone reading this will be long gone, you can be sure, there will still be candles lit for the fallen in the churches and war memorials of Ukraine.
That will be part of the long legacy of a hopefully short war.
