what have you got there, brothers — they ask at the borders —
silence dressed up in cyrillic letters
the sacred fire of the candlelight letter “ï”
our and your freedom to rest in a land of love
like the broken trees of distant memory
--- Ia Kiva, Ukrainian poet
In 2022, Outlook ended the year with an issue on the war in Ukraine. But the war is far from being over, although it has been one year since the invasion. It has been a year of loss, death, dispossession and battle for Ukrainians who continue to wage a war to protect their homeland from Vladimir Putin’s invasion that started 12 months ago on February 24, 2022. A war that Russia could end in a minute, should it so choose, but instead appears determined to prolong it.
While photos and art pouring in from Ukraine reflect the continuing nightmare to which Ukrainians wake up each day, the perception of the war has moved on from being a shocker to a novelty to an everyday occurrence. In his columns for Outlook, Polish medical practitioner and social worker Marek Kubrick who has been involved with helping Ukrainian refugees with rehabilitation in Poland has recounted with detailed despair this shift from the atrocious to the mundane.
But the war has continued in Ukraine, even if it fails to make space for itself in the global news cycle. As Outlook Editor Chinki Sinha writes, “The war as news is only good in the beginning when destruction is new, when the sight of dead bodies is not yet routinized, when displacement makes for good visuals”.
However, the poets and the writers have continued to document the loss, the identity question, the resilience, the hurt, and the sadness that is inherent in the war. They have become the “spokespersons for their people” and some are even fighting on the frontline.
Even after a year, the nation continues to resist the invasion, though at great cost. As a report in the Associated Press put it, “so far, Putin’s gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbour seems to have backfired spectacularly and created the biggest threat to his more than the two-decade-long rule”. His invasion of Ukraine has suffered several stalemates and setbacks.
In 2021, Putin laid the foundation for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in which he questioned Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation.
That was only the latest chapter in a long obsession with the country and a determination to correct what he believes was a historical mistake of letting it slip from Moscow’s orbit. He reached three centuries back, to Peter the Great, to support his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.
The war began as a “special military operation” in the name of Ukraine’s demilitarization and so-called “denazification” wherein Russia claimed to be seeking to protect ethnic Russians and prevent Kyiv’s NATO membership so as to keep its neighbour within the Russian “sphere of influence.”
Nevertheless, Putin seems to have overestimated Russian military prowess and, more importantly, underestimated Ukrainian resistance which has enjoyed copious amounts of support from there West.
While the war has caused over tens of thousands of deaths on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides, the latter under the leadership of the intrepid Volodymyr Zelensky has managed to liberate a sizable portion of the territory that had been forcefully annexed by Russia. Moreover, Russia’s plan to thwart Ukraine’s plan to join NATO and remain the single political hegemony in the region has also met a roadblock with other non-NATO nation-states like Sweden and Finland now seeking NATO membership.
The war nevertheless seems far from over as Putin seems determined to make Ukraine crumble. How long will the Ukrainian sunflower seeds hold up?
In his ground report from Ukraine, A City Under Siege, published by Outlook, Jeffrey Witsoe wrote about how Ukrainians had initially described Russian soldiers as the ‘orcs’, the monstrous soldiers of Mordor, from JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. He also wrote that “Russia’s full-scale invasion obliterated any populist appeal of Russian culture in Ukraine overnight, replaced by a far more united and militant Ukrainian national identity”.
As the war in Ukraine reaches its first anniversary, Outlook looks back at its December 2022 issue on the “unexpectedly fierce, determined and creative resistance put up by Ukraine in the face of a full scale invasion” and how the combined efforts of a mobilised civil society, the government and the country’s armed forces have helped Ukrainians hold off the Russian onslaught.
(With inputs from Associated Press)
