History of the Present (week ending 14 October)
Death
Returning to Lviv, I was determined to revisit the military cemetery, known as the Field of Mars - see my newsletter ‘In Ukraine’ from last December – and to lay flowers on the grave of Yevhen Hulevych – see ‘In Memoriam Yevhen: A Soldier of Ukraine’. I was shocked to find that the number of graves of fallen soldiers had pretty much doubled since I was there ten months ago.
The graveyard itself tells an extraordinary story of 100 years of European wars. Watch my spontaneous, improvised video (above) to learn more.
Courage
I visited wounded veterans in the ‘Unbroken’ rehabilitation clinic. Most of them had lost legs or arms or feet or hands to the terrible Russian minefields. They gave me a very sober assessment of just how difficult it is for Ukraine to re-capture territory, faced with those minefields and two or three lines of well-prepared Russian defence. Yet they all expressed a fierce desire to get back to fight again, beside their comrades at the front. They exemplify the quality summed up in the Ukrainian word volia, which means both freedom and the will to fight for it.
Not everyone is prepared to do that. Many Ukrainian men are finding ways to avoid military service, and many mothers pray that their sons (and daughters) will not have to go to fight. The scale of the casualties is horrendous: according to US estimates, Ukraine, a country of less than 40 million people, has had more war fatalities in one and a half years than the US did in all the 20 years of its military engagement in Vietnam.
Maksym, a professional soldier who lost a foot to a hidden Russian bomb on the Zaporizhia front, told me simply: ‘the Russians have more men’.
As US political support for continuing to fund Ukraine’s struggle dwindles – a development that a new focus on the Israel-Hamas war will almost certainly accelerate – Europe needs to do more, or Ukraine will not be able to get to the victory and just peace that it deserves and our continent needs. I will write about this in a forthcoming commentary.
Life
Yet on the surface, life goes on pretty much as normal in this beautiful central European city. Cafés, restaurants, well-dressed young people, eyes on i-phones, all the markers of modern European life. You could be in Prague, or Budapest, or Vienna – until the air raid warning sounds.
Cultural life goes on too. I was in Lviv to participate in the splendid Lviv Book Forum. Friends there told me that people are reading more than ever before. I was moved to see a fresh Ukrainian edition of the Bosnian writer Ozren Kebo’s account of the siege of Sarajevo.
Reading and discussing books, carrying on with as normal an intellectual life as possible, is also a form of quiet resistance. As Paul Celan once said of his native Czernowitz, Lviv is a place where people and books live.
‘Europe whole and free’
For the 60th anniversary issue of the New York Review of Books (which for many years could reasonably claim also to be a - perhaps even the - pan-European intellectual review) I wrote this essay, asking how far we have come towards the 1989 vision of a Europe whole, free and at peace; whether it is coming closer or receding; and what we should do about it.
I’m actually finishing this newsletter in Warsaw, on the day of the most important Polish election since 1989, having in the meantime been briefly in Istanbul. More of that next time.
Thank you for your courageous reporting. I hope Civic Coalition (KO) prevails.
The Polish results are coming in as I write this.....