Since the start of the war with Russia, the Ukrainian military has fired an average of 9,000 cannon shells a day – nearly half a million so far, enough to have depleted the stockpiles of the United States and many other NATO members. Where? All focused on four regions, the ones it claims and wants to reconquer.
We see on TV and read in the newspapers the destruction inflicted by Russian weapons – rockets, bombs and cannon fire – on buildings throughout the rest of Ukraine, even if mostly concentrated on the front area. However, we do not see the destruction that Ukrainian cannon fire has inflicted and is inflicting on what Ukrainians consider part of their country, their homeland. Will they all hit? Will they not also sow death and destruction among the civilian population – the one that remained – and their homes? When they don’t hit military targets or buildings, those bombs end up in the fields: they pollute them, sprinkle them with metal fragments, and make them difficult if not impossible to cultivate for years.
Now we are also starting with the cluster bombs supplied by the United States – because, Biden said, conventional bombs are over – which spread unexploded fragments that will make those lands unworkable for years. They are weapons prohibited by an international convention which, however, the USA, Russia and Ukraine – among others – have not signed. If they keep them, they produce them; and they didn’t sign because they intended to use them and sooner or later they would. According to the US government, the Russian military has already done so (it is entirely probable) on the rest of the Ukrainian territory it has not appropriated, and according to the Russian government, the Ukrainian army has already done so on the territory it would like to recapture. But the same goes for nuclear weapons: if you don’t sign the UN treaty that bans them, it’s because sooner or later you intend to use them. And they will be used.
Then there are the mines. According to the Ukrainian government, the Russian army has already positioned at least a million of them, of different types and sizes. And all, of course, close to the front, within the borders of that disputed territory. It is not known where. Maybe the Russian army that placed them doesn’t even know it well. Surely the Ukrainian army does not know it, [and it] will have to discover and neutralize them at its own expense (in human lives) if and when it reconquers those territories: another deadly obstacle to their liveability, whoever governs them. But many of those mines have been dislodged and swept who knows where, along with thousands of tons of pollutants, debris, and drowned animals, by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam (by whom? Both sides would have had reasons to do so).
On the other hand, for a year they tried to make us believe that Russia had destroyed the North Stream gas pipeline… And another dam, to stop the invasion, had already been blown up a year earlier by the Ukrainians, who had proudly claimed it. Who will ever be able to inhabit and cultivate those lands, among the most fertile and with one of the richest subsoils on the planet?
Hundreds of thousands of men on both sides have been, and are being sent, to take possession of or re-appropriate a territory that the war is making uninhabitable. Some – it is said – agree, but certainly not all. The others are almost all forced. There are not only the dead; thousands are permanently disabled and [there are] even more combatants that the war has troubled so much that they are no longer recoverable for civilian life. Then there are the other millions of Ukrainians who fled to Europe (mostly welcomed, so well welcomed that many will try to stay there, as more than a million of them had already done even before the war broke out). The country will emerge from this war, if it ever emerges, devastated, deprived of a vital and essential part of its population, with hundreds of thousands of physically and mentally disabled people to care for, without them being able to care for themselves or their families. But as always, after being hailed as heroes, they will be forgotten, neglected and treated more and more like an unnecessary burden.
Then it is necessary to take into account – perhaps Greta Thunberg, going to see Zelensky, did not do it – the damage that this war also inflicts on the fight for the climate and the environment in the rest of the planet. Climate-changing emissions [due to this war] approach those [due to] Italy in one year. Then, to make up for the blockade on the Russian extractions and processing of hydrocarbons, the green light for these operations [has been given] wherever possible, in defiance of the commitments made; [one must also take into account the] drive to manufacture more and more weapons just waiting to be used; the deployed militarism, and above all the diffusion everywhere of a belligerent spirit according to which problems can only be solved with war…
Was it worth it? Was it really certain that Russia – Putin – would have tried to take over Ukraine if his government had not pledged itself to NATO after the Maidan uprising? If that uprising had not given rise to a vicious war against the autonomist aspirations of the Russian-speaking regions in the east of the country, imposed even on Zelensky who had won the elections with an entirely different agenda? Had the sham Minsk truce not been signed, as Angela Merkel herself acknowledged, only to stall for time, to arm Ukraine, its army and its Nazi militias to the teeth, to prepare them for a war that nothing was done to foil?
I reread Svetlana Aleksievic’s books on war, in which she gives voice to those who have waged and endured wars, and I wonder if the proponents of arming Ukraine to the bitter end are aware of the irreparable horror, pain, and heartbreak that such a war inflicts on millions of human beings (human beings who live in Europe as we do; for of those on distant continents we are all surely and serenely unaware).
What has turned so many of us into strategists who can no longer find, or even seek, a solution to this heartbreak, except in a “victory” that appears increasingly unrealistic on the military level, but above all insubstantial on the civilian one? Because to those destroyed territories and to those extinguished existences, no one will give life back.
And in the face of this non-perspective, what prevents us from considering that war [as] a conflict unleashed and waged at the expense of populations unaware of the “great game” being played over their heads, but promoted by an idolatry of “borders” (largely drawn “at the table”) that is recalled today to justify the worst atrocities, but which is also the premise of every war?
