ARCHIVE 24/02/2025: Three Years
It has been three years today that, directly or indirectly, whether they realize it or not, the lives of billions of people have changed forever. There was a before, and there is a during. Unfortunately, we will only see later what comes after. It’s our responsibility weather it will be bright or not.
These three years have cost the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainian, Russian, and North Korean fighters, but also foreign fighters who, whether out of conviction, money, or under pressure, fought on the side of the aggressor or the victim. They have cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, almost only Ukrainians. They have witnessed the destruction of thousands of libraries, museums, schools, hospitals, and theaters in Ukraine ; the illegal occupation of thousands of km2 of Ukrainian territories; the forced displacement of its population. These three years have seen the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children, sent to camps and families to be russified.
These three years have also seen the reappearance of the term “genocide.” First to describe Russia’s campaign of destruction of everything Ukrainian, and later, after the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians and soldiers, to characterize the national policy of ethnic cleansing Israel strengthened massively against the Palestinians, killing and burning everything Palestinian.
These three years have revealed the fragility of countries and thinkers who still claim to be democratic. The accelerating gap in inequalities and the passive corruption of political actors, driven by big businesses and their lobbyists, has created a resentment never seen before in a population that suffers the virtual and daily humiliation of the insatiable desire that capitalism has set up to create categories of people competing against one another. This competitive violence, which we are made to believe we are condemned to, weakens empathy and pushes discourse to the right of the political spectrum.
It is also during these three years that the world has stood in awe of Ukrainian resistance. It woke up to realize that it was possible to resist the “stronger” side, that the fight for freedom, when waged, seems stronger than the lying, violent, and mafioso conservatism. Ukraine is still resisting not only the Russian imperialist suicide, but also the deadly ideology of a capitalism that downgrades, reclassifies, decodes, recodes, impoverishes life, and simplifies in a second cultures and ways of life that are of infinite complexity and millennia-old. The war seems to have diverted it from this path for a time, but its horror has revealed more essential things that should be everywhere, all the time, without needing the pretext of external violence: culture, love, poetry, and the risk of their disappearance.
It is also during these three years that I began to sincerely call Ukraine “my home.” From now on, when I am in France, I am abroad, from which I return “home” to Kyiv.
Nothing is perfect, no one is perfect, no place is perfect. And that’s just fine; it’s not the result that matters, but the hope of seeing something fairer come to be. This hope is today in Ukraine, but not only Ukrainians have to fight, everybody that care about liberty needs to stand up.
