As much as it is intended to present the war in Ukraine as a technological conflict, with its drones, its precision devices to destroy enemy targets, algorithms generated by artificial intelligence to guide projectiles launched from tanks, mobile phones loaded with information... The truth is that the human tragedy of those who suffer remains hidden.
We continue the war through social networks without having reliable information and subjected to the propaganda of governments and major states. We have seen how the Russians destroyed entire buildings in cities in Donbass and the reports speak of one or two deaths and several injuries. The human factor is absent and we only know the magnitude of the disaster from the testimonies of the injured, relatives, deserters or photographs of improvised cemeteries on land strewn with graves.
There are no modern wars, they are all very old, due to the fact that they use destructive weapons that apparently do not cause harm to those who use them. Nor are the plans of the staffs fulfilled because every conflict involves improvisations and unexpected setbacks.
The war in the Ukraine has stabilized in destruction and death, human exhaustion, the struggle to conquer a city or to stop the advance of the enemy as happened in Verdun and the Somme in the Great War of 1914. Bakhmut, that image of devastation of razed and burned neighborhoods, is the sinister image of war of all time. No matter how modern weapons are, they are always used to kill others. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer film shows the moral dilemma between the advancement of science and the manufacture of weapons that will one day take the lives of other people.
The Russian and Ukrainian dead number in the thousands, according to the most conservative estimates. The Wall Street Journal ventured to estimate more than twenty thousand Ukrainians mutilated by war actions since the beginning of the invasion. No one dares to give the fateful report of the number of Russian victims. Putin designed a quick operation invading Ukraine to impose a government subservient to the Kremlin and met with unexpected resistance from a people who send their children to their deaths to defend their sovereignty and their freedom.
Zelensky has shown unexpected courage and leadership in standing up militarily to an invader who has shown no respect for the lives of Russians, let alone Ukrainians.
The historian Margaret MacMillan, the most recognized specialist in the Great War, depicts the state of mind of the German and French general staffs that sent thousands of soldiers to die in Verdun because they did not dare to propose an armistice or a ceasefire. That war of attrition is reproduced more than a century later with the stagnation of two armies that advance or retreat a few kilometers on the Ukrainian front with great difficulties and with many casualties.
Putin sends hostile signals to NATO with military fighter flights penetrating Danish or British airspace, a provocation that could escalate the conflict to a destructive global scale. The United States and Europe continue to supply Ukraine with weapons to resist an unjustified invasion that amounts to annexation.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive is being slow and is running into unexpected difficulties. All wars are won or lost in hand-to-hand combat and the occupation of disputed territory. Zelensky has just dismissed all those responsible for the Ukrainian recruitment centers, accusing them of corruption. Fear is sometimes more powerful than patriotism.
The moment is more dramatic than it may seem. Not only because the war makes basic food more expensive for hundreds of millions of people who received grain from Ukraine and energy from Russia, but because the positions are as rigid as they are intransigent. It is Putin who has invaded the Ukraine and who has caused the misfortunes that we only know about in part. Ukraine defends itself and the West supports it. If Putin gets his way, the future of Europe will be in jeopardy. The longer the conflict lasts, the greater the risk of a war that alters or destroys the relative stability of Western democracies.
