It’s been a year and a day since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February. Putin’s and Russia’s genocidal escalation of the war they started in 2014.
I was wrong about many things.
I did not think Russia would launch a full-scale invasion. The idea just seemed so obviously stupid and monstrous—Delphi’s oracle to Croesus came to mind, “If you attack Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”
I did not believe American reports that Russia was preparing an invasion. After the 2003 Iraq invasion, the 20-year disaster of Afghanistan, and the 24/7 fabulation of Trump I was primed to disbelieve.
I did not believe Ukraine would withstand the assault. When the air raids and the artillery and the missiles started, I believed the wise heads on the squawk screens who predicted Kyiv’s fall in 3 days no wait 3 weeks well let’s say 50 days. Well, to be honest, by the third time they revised their estimated date of fall, I started to suspect they might have misapprehended something.
I did not believe the Russian army was this bad. Bad in the way they behave like the worst B-movie baddies: looting, torturing, raping, castrating, sledgehammer murdering, child-stealing, city-razing baddies. And bad in their banal incompetence and corruption, a true Potemkin army.
I did not believe the Russian citizenry would acquiesce so readily to their descent into depravity and to their own brutal mass slaughter by their corrupt and callous overlords. Look at them, at the generational shame they accept rather than resist with dignity.
I did not think the long 1990s would end with such brutal, massive, bloody, and pointless war waged in Europe by a revanchist Russia animated by absolutely batshit insane slogans and conspiracy theories in the year 2022. This was definitely not how I saw the 21st century going. After all, we’d joined the EU and history had ended, hadn’t it?
I exaggerate, but it did feel that way between 1989 and 2008. Then came the crisis and the long slow winding down of the 90s. Pop, Georgia, fizz, Crimea, bang, Ukraine. Feels like most of Westurope, and us Slovensi along with them, was caught out by a waking dream of sweet delusion that the Alleuropean trade superchuffer was just going to keep going its merry way.
And I have to say, I did not think the democracies of the collective Ouest would pull together so effectively after the poly-shambles many of them made of their initial response to covid.
Finally, I did not think a war this simple could exist. Most of the wars I’d seen in my life had been more-or-less muddy affairs. A fractal chaos of great powers and regional powers and local factions fighting over money and mud dressed up with propaganda and spin. Then along comes Putin’s Russia, embraces the role of genocidal cannibal giant and tries to eat its smaller neighbor in a straight-up imperial war. Blatant and evil as can be.
It’s been a year.
Now here we are, with Ukraine fighting for life, freedom, democracy and also … us. I don’t know how it will play out. But one thing I’ve learned: slava Ukrajini.
There are many ways to help Ukraine defend itself. Here’s UNITED24, an official fundraising platform to help Ukraine right now. Herojem slava.