For the most part, I write to level out my thinking, to put some order on a tangled thicket. (It’s an exercise remarkably similar to sorting the rubbish for bin day). But this is perhaps my eighth attempt at writing something on Ukraine and it’s becoming apparent that little order can be put on infinite pity, remorse and naïve disbelief.
The weather here has been beautiful these past few day. The long evenings are coming, and with them the good intentions of our summer selves. And I’m sure I’ve reams to write on all the above, but the writing side of me is all at sea since late February and until I put some order on it, there’ll be little room in me for tracts on blue skies and cliffs bathed in sun.
We are all familiar with the shattering trauma endured this thirty-three days now by the people of Ukraine. Our social media feeds and weekend supplements are filled with devastating pictures of desolate children, bewildered adults, ruined homes and flattened communities. Yet, there is something wrong about focusing a lens on the tears of a child as a train departs just to beam his trauma into our comfortable homes.
Such pictures clamour for our attention, like courtiers before a monarch. It reminds me – and worries me – that it’s likely we’ll be done talking about Ukraine in another month or two, that the crisis will sink further from the front pages. That yellow and blue will be a thing we used to do. That our attention will wander and Zelenskiy’s videos won’t catch our attention any more.
I had thought there were certain ‘certainties’ with regards to decency, civility, diplomacy and tolerance. They weren’t of course certainties at all – not for millions less privileged than I – but I got away with thinking of them as certainties and even took for granted all they stood for. Maybe it was COVID, or living on the island, or simple laziness, but I had even stopped engaging with news from around the world.
The jolt out of indifference has been sharp and swift. I read history for years without absorbing the devastation wrought on those I read of. Now every day I see how families, lives, homes, businesses and buildings can be erased in seconds. How lives can be obliterated, and all that was ever true and known and familiar erased in minutes. Just thirty-three days ago, Ukrainian people were going about their business; going to work, giving out about their neighbours, walking dogs, pushing children on bikes. But annihilation doesn’t take thirty-two days; missiles only need seconds. And what is destroyed in seconds is lost and gone forever.
History shows us that the good vs. bad narrative employed in warfare is nearly always a gross simplification; manipulated and manufactured to garner support and woo recruits. And that the grievances go back years of complicated history and war is terrible, but historians can usually explain it, and there’s some faint solace in the explanation for it carries with it the hope that horrors will be learned from, and vague aspirations of ‘never again’.
But there’s no narrating our way out this, no way of explaining this depravity, no ‘both sides’ to agonise over. One person trampled all over the arrangements, the procedures, the spoken and unspoken rules and what was there to do when he did so? Yes, there were the sanctions and strong words, but what use have they been to the people of Mariupol?
I am overwhelmed by the crisis in Ukraine. That doesn’t matter, the overwhelm of one living in comfort, as far from Ukraine as one can be in Europe. But I am overwhelmed. Feelings swim inside of me; I feel them in the pit of my stomach, a pounding in my chest, a sadness in myself. Not always, of course, but regularly. Daily at least.
There’s dread. Dread at how far Putin may go. Dread that the eyes of the world will turn, that decency and democracy will be sacrificed on the altars of cheaper oil and gas. That the shock and horror will have meant nothing after all, if western resolve is eroded by weariness and inflation. That the invasion of Ukraine will become the Balkans conflicts of the early 1990s; background noise, propelled to the top of news every so often by a horrific episode[1].
Foreboding too, for Zelenskiy and all those in government who will, presumably, have to compromise with the very one whose boot is to their throat. Foreboding too at the fall-out and the criticism that will follow the damned unglamorous, mundane and divisive reality of compromise and reconstruction.
And I feel a whole load of disillusion too. Disillusion at seeing how much we were capable of, but just didn’t do. Disillusion at the unimaginable suffering borne of blind eyes turned to Putin’s annexation of Crimea, his role in Syria, the destruction in Georgia. Disillusion too that millions others were displaced by war but their suffering wasn’t deemed worthy of the full force of western resolve. At the thousands and thousands of refugees, equally as traumatised and victimised, who got no such warm welcome when they fled to safer shores. At how much was possible the whole time.
I ran 50km for the Irish Red Cross – you can still donate here – and I’m very grateful to all who donated so generously. When I ran, I thought long and hard of all I’d taken for granted. At the end, there was no epiphany; just more sadness, more confusion, more uncertainty.
And no idea what to do. Yet.
The jolt out of indifference has been sharp and swift.
[1] Jonathan Freedland, A key reason Putin’s bloody invasion is faltering? He’s no match for Zelenskiy’s iPhone The Guardian, 25 March 2022.
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