Today the war between Russia and Ukraine begins.
The Muscovite invasion began just a year ago, but according to the most recognized academic authority on the subject – the Correlates of War project, started in 1963 and led by the University of Pennsylvania – a violent conflict is defined as war when it lasts at least a year and there are at least a thousand dead in battles.
The war, academically, begins today. But if we start from the unity of the thousand dead, this war is already beginning with tens and tens of thousands of wars, with dizzying massacres of civilians and –above all– soldiers. And if we remember that behind each number there is a body, and behind each body, a soul, the academy ends up bursting.
Have you looked a Russian soldier in the eye? I ask Oleg (he prefers not to give his last name), a Ukrainian soldier on the Donetsk front in Donbass.
“If I have looked into his eyes and I am here it is because he is now dead. I still don't know how to process this feeling, ”she replies. Although my question is about a look and not about a bullet, his answer is an accurate shot. Or many.
"I used to be one of those who believe that each person is the whole world," he adds. Now I understand that the Russians are here to kill innocent people."
For millions and millions of people, Ukrainians and Russians, it's not just the anniversary of an invasion. It is the anniversary of a discovery. Like Oleg: “I have discovered another person inside of me. I don't soldier for money."
Are you afraid that a Russian will look you in the eye and that you are the one who is no longer there?
“Death is not the end of the journey. But I am going to do everything possible not to die, ”she says.
In another life, Oleg was a bartender, learning at bartending conferences in Berlin, and when the Russians broke in he had his own music studio, “music has always been my life”, but now he has found another life. Other music.
War is noise, is war music?
“Yes, and sometimes I imagine how I would create that theme in my studio. It would be without melody. Something synthetic, electronic, without melody, ”she replies.
Perhaps one day he will compose the Azov Symphony (he has just been admitted to this controversial elite regiment). A symphony without melody.
The noise of the artillery fixes the horizon in the city of Kostiantinivka, ten kilometers from the front, at a leisurely pace, in a slow tempo, and the snow covers this industrial, gray, Soviet territory with a soft mantle.
“The noise is getting closer and closer,” warns Dasha (she does not want to give her last name either), blonde, buxom, born in Moscow to Ukrainian parents and who came to Kostiantinivka as a child. If Bakhmut falls, these streets fall.
“I don't want to live under the Russian flag,” he says. When I ask her about these 12 months, she sheds a couple of tears that end up being confused with the transparent sequins glued to the base of her eyes.
Wars have this: it blurs the line between natural and artificial flashes.
Kostiantinivka is the textile market of this front, the wardrobe of the Ukrainian trenches. And it is the FM station of the Russian soldiers. The local radio, at 102.4, broadcasts commercial music with spots intended for Putin's troops: "You see how your commanders abandon you, you see how nobody receives you here with flowers, turn yourself in and you will eat three times a day", and they give a number phone number to call.
A couple of young soldiers have a hot lunch at the Lashka restaurant, eating slowly, as if each spoonful were the last, while they stare at the Russian-language film Captain Hook on television.
A funeral home invades the sidewalk and presents a model of their graves: so that you can see how the photo of your dead will look, they have engraved in the black marble a large face of Charlie Chaplin making a face.
On the horizon, both continue to play the hammer concerto at a slow tempo. A music marked by the Soviet metal of both sides, despite the sophisticated weapons that the Westerners pass on to the Ukrainians.
Oleg, the bartender, the musician, the soldier, remembers his first screwed-up moment at the front.
"We had to withdraw, they had to cover me and the situation paralyzed me, I didn't feel any emotion, the brain works differently, a colleague hit me with the rifle to make me react...". When a rifle blow is love.
Pokrovsk is another town on the Donetsk front where the Ukrainian soldiery hangs out. In the Corleone pizzeria, two types of rifles are mixed, the small wooden ones that hold the menu and the large ones, those that kill, that the military leave next to the four stations.
At closing time, with no one in the premises and with the waitresses cleaning up, a young man comes in with an unexpected pizza.
"I'm going to forge papers so they think I'm dead, I don't want to go back to the front," he blurts out to the waitresses (the Ukrainian journalist who accompanies me translates it for me).
“Better in jail than dead. I don't want to be meat in this war, and I'm not the only one."
The outgoing train from Donbass carries wounded soldiers, from Kramatorsk to Kyiv. It is modern, and next to the wounded they offer free wifi, sale of sandwiches in the armchair and cartoons of the Paw Patrol on the television screens.
What is a war?
There are indecipherable definitions even for the University of Pennsylvania.
At the beginning of the trip, on the train from Kyiv to the front of the Donbass, a young soldier was traveling with a bandaged hand. Shrapnel had crushed his tendons on the Avdíyivka line and he spent his first recovery in Odessa. He was going to Pokrovsk so that his bosses would tell him what to do until he could pick up the rifle again. He was talking to his mother on the phone. "You don't know how I miss your fries," she would tell him.
War is many things.
Also the absence of fries.
