Tomorrow marks four years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yesterday Russia launched hundreds of drones and almost 50 missiles. The whistling rockets, the sound of alarms and the explosions continue. Four years is a long time. And many dead. More than 100,000 Ukrainians. And many displaced (about six million within the country). Plus exile (four million refugees), most of them women and children. Four years later, the children are not so children anymore.
How could they imagine when they were fleeing on those trains going west that the war would last so long. Taras Viazovchenko took his wife and two children out of Irpin on March 3, 22. They now live in Switzerland. He stayed in Ukraine, but has visited them once. He says that the children speak French among themselves, and he no longer understands them. Before the invasion, Viazovchenko was a yoga teacher. At first, he helped people escape. He then set about identifying hundreds of bodies in Irpin and Bucha in mass graves. Massa Gessen tells it in The New York Times.
But Ukraine has been disappearing from the news. Alberto Rojas, from Kharkiv, reports that the front continues to be a meat grinder. That we are at a time when more soldiers and civilians are dying there. With hundreds of dead and maimed every 24 hours. And he talks about Vita, an 82-year-old Ukrainian who goes to clean her son’s photo in the Kharkiv cemetery every day, even if it is 20 degrees below zero.
We remember stories better than numbers. And the meetings. The next round of sanctions against Moscow depends on one that exists today in Brussels. And there are already 20. The Kremlin has not met any goal of February 24, 2022. Trump also failed to end it within 24 hours, as promised. Since he has been president of the United States, Russian attacks on Ukraine have increased. Putin’s “special military operation,” which was to last three days, this week enters its fifth year of war.
Moral?
Ukraine continues to resist,
That this horror continues is tremendous
