Ukraine: Reality Bites

“Now, we face a second reminder of reality. First plague, now war has come to Europe, the biggest since 1945.”

In 2020, as the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was encircling the world in a suffocating grip that mirrored its physical effects on individual sufferers, I wrote that we, in the West, were waking up from our post-Cold War dream state to the reality of life that had always been there and which could no longer be denied. I was too apocalyptic in tone regarding COVID-19 itself: Back then it looked like it really would be a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic, scaled up for a bigger, more intertwined global population.

But the fact remains that it was a rude awakening, only deadened by the fall back into digitally-enabled partisan conflict as a soporific. Now, we face a second reminder of reality. First plague, now war has come to Europe, the biggest since 1945. Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday, February 24, 2022. What we thought was impossible was all too possible.

The situation in Ukraine is too fast moving to write usefully about here. Russia, having prepared since autumn 2021 and declared military operations abroad in the week of the invasion, invaded along multiple axes of attack on Thursday and is facing stiff opposition as of writing on Sunday, February 27th, with its advance stymied as of now. But the fact is it took the United States two weeks to reach Baghdad in 2003 and another week to take the city, and this was considered a lightning campaign in military terms. If it takes Russia a few weeks to take Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, that will still be one of the fastest campaigns in military history.