As a start
One of the greatest and most famous Christian and Jewish prophets, David, in one of his books, Ecclesiastes, wrote that: ,,What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’’ (Ecclesiastes 1:1-9). The history of Europe, bound with its future, seems like some magical circle where the past, is always in the present time, and the future is already covered by this shadow of past dark ages. It seems like we can still hear the ancient whispering from the past ,,Carthago delenda est’’ (Carthage must be destroyed), but the only difference this time is that Carthage is some other country.
Bloody battlefield
Eastern Europe is especially interesting and it is a place of the continent where major events have happened. For example, it is said that one of the oldest human neolith settlements where found there (in Ukraine), the Huns and the Mongols began their invasions of Europe from the east, and the bloodiest revolution (the October Revolution) began there. Eastern Europe is the tomb of many great armies such as Napoleon’s 600.000 La Grande Armee, or of Hitler’s armies when he launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, and his first defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad. Even the most powerful nuclear bomb was tested in the east (or the northeast), the Tsar Bomb.
The beginning of the end
In the middle of all these major historical events, geopolitically located is Ukraine. A beautiful country with the most fertile land, amazing women, tasty food, and rich Orthodox Christian history and traditions, but also a history full of suffering, wars, Holodomor, Chornobyl, etc. Unfortunately, this beautiful land is again, as many times in its history, in the focus of the world’s attention, and again, because of a war. Everything started when Ukraine declared their free will to decide their future, and the wish to join NATO, which was recognized as a national security issue and threat to Russia. Russia considered this membership as an option for the U.S hypersonic and nuclear arsenal to be closer to the Russian border, while the time to hit the major cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Rostov on Don, Volgograd, or Voronezh significantly decreased.
The actual conflict probably didn’t start on the battlefields of Donbas, but at Maidan in Kyiv, when the Ukrainians began the ”The Revolution of Dignity”, with a goal to overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych and to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union and the West, rather than with Russia.
The conflict
But not all citizens of this big European country were happy with the events in Kyiv. Ukraine’s east had other plans. To summarize in a few short sentences, the eastern part of Ukraine is the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, which together form one big region of Donbas. These regions, populated with mostly ethnic Russians, declared they would rather be with Russia than in Ukraine which is pro-western oriented, and this mentality dates back to the past, from the Cold War era when the West was ”the evil capitalist” and the East was a homeland of ”the human triumphal” Communism. The conflict in Donbas started between the pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army and resulted in the withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from the major cities but not from the regions.
In the meantime, the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, also mostly populated with ethnic Russians, has organized a referendum to leave Ukraine and join Russia. According to the Western countries, this was annexation by Russia because, in the meantime, the Russian army entered Crimea while there was still an official Ukrainian army, and according to the Russians, this was a legitimate and legal referendum that expressed the will of the Crimean population.
Those who know a little bit more about Russian history, know that Crimea has great historical and cultural significance to Russia. Just as a reminder, many bloody battles were fought there, starting from the Russo – Turkish war, Crimea was a last stand of the anti-communist White Army, and it was a stronghold of the Red Army when the Nazis were pushing through the Soviet Union, especially bloody was the Siege of Sevastopol. All these events were enough for Russia’s first decision to take Crimea first.
Another reason why Crimea was the first option, and the beginning in the military sequence of events, is that Crimea is an ‘’unsinkable aircraft carrier’’ that controls the whole Black Sea.
It is not a coincidence that since the imperial Russia era, there has been a Russian naval base in Sevastopol, with an entire fleet of the most advanced ships.
But back to the conflict, Russia said that they have been long waiting for Ukraine to give up and to sit at a table for peace talks, to stop the conflict in Donbas. Starting from 2014, Russia thought that with the Minsk agreements, all the hostilities between Ukraine and the pro-Russian separatists in the east could come to an end, while on the other hand, Ukraine hoped that Russia wouldn’t launch an invasion and it would stick to the agreement of the Budapest Memorandum, where according to article 1, the countries agree to respect each other’s mutual borders and severity. But Russia concludes that the future of the glorious Motherland is more important and that Ukraine has violated this agreement by expressing the will to join NATO, which is a threat to Russia’s territorial integrity.
Since then, the Russo-Ukrainian war has taken thousands of lives on both sides, both civilian and military, caused massive destruction of the infrastructure, millions of people lost their homes or were forced to flee, and it becomes a conflict that is every day deadlier than the previous one.
For now, it is certain that Russia won’t stop until it forces Ukraine to sit on a negotiable table and sign neutrality and give up from Donbas, which means some buffer zone for Russia, and so far, Ukraine shows no signs of doing so.
Maybe the quote that ”The battle is won not by the weapon but the heart” was true, probably when Alexander the Great with his 40,000 Macedonian soldiers defeated the 250,000 Persian soldiers, but that was in the past, in some ancient times. Nowadays, battles and wars are decided by recourses, not just by courage.
Maybe the quote that ”The battle is won not by the weapon but the heart” was true, probably when Alexander the Great with his 40,000 Macedonian soldiers defeated the 250,000 Persian soldiers, but that was in the past, in some ancient times. Nowadays, battles and wars are decided by recourses, not just by courage.
For how long will Ukraine hold on against Russia, which has almost unlimited resources of everything, it probably depends on the Western military depots.
