Three years ago, I was a school student preparing for my 10th board exams. We were pretty sure that we would be given harder question papers as the previous batch hadn't written board exams due to Covid-19 pandemic. Amidst all the speculation and pressure of studying, there was always the chatter of world news in our school. My friends and I were ardently following the troop buildup on Ukrainian borders since December 2021. It seemed amusing to us that a country would be invaded in the 21st century. India had been colonized before but we Indians, born in an independent country can never fathom our colonizers coming back. Invasions seemed a thing of the past. Though we were aware of the U.S invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the context was different. Given this mindset, we were stumped and taken aback on 24th February, 2022.
Russia had launched its invasion in Ukraine. Our chatter at school became about anticipating the future of the world and we had nearly forgotten about our boards.
Easter Europe always fascinated me as it adds to a layer of mystery due to its complicated history. Since middle school, after watching numerous videos of Nas Daily and Drew Binsky, I formulated an Eastern European bucket list which I would fulfill in the future. We had very brief excerpts of Eastern European history as a part of our syllabus but this facilitation prompted me to search up things. The early days following the start of the war, I was shocked and it added to my dismay. I couldn't gather myself together to think that a sovereign country with such beautiful culture and history was being destroyed. Days went by and the exams flew past. I continued following on the live news coverage whenever I could get time. One such anecdote I remember was reading President Zelenskyy's interview to Time magazine on 28th April, 2022. The description of the genocide at Bucha kept me awake all through the night though I had my English boards the next day.
The exams were over by the second week of May and during the summer break, my family decided to take a vacation in our hometown in Sikkim. While flying from Coimbatore, my brain raced to the visuals of the mangled metal which were the remnants of the iconic An-225.
Being an aviation enthusiast, the world's largest aircraft, the Antonov An-225, always fascinated me. 27th March, 2022 was a day which I can never forget. I was heartbroken to learn that the invading forces had destroyed this masterpiece of science and engineering when they had barbarically entered Hostomel. The visuals were released after the town was liberated by Ukrainian forces. I still haven't been able to come to terms so as to why a marvel of engineering would ever be destroyed since science is universal. Perhaps, aircrafts and Serhii Korolev, the person who made spaceflight possible are the two reasons why I plunged into learning Ukrainian on 18th June, 2022.
I started having an infatuation with the sweetness of the language and was baffled to find similarities with my first language, Bengali. I practiced for quite sometime and then joined one of the live classes where I came to know Mrs.Oksana Riabets. Her sessions enabled me to learn more about their culture and since then, I have been fixated on visiting the land of Cossacks.
Since then, I have completed my course on Duolingo and have joined quite a few Ukrainian communities on Reddit. As 2022 passed by, on the day of Christmas, I decided to paint the Mariupol Drama Theatre with a contrast between Christmas of 2021 and that of 2022.
I found it heinous that children would be bombed while the city was being occupied. As 2022 rolled into 2023, I began working on a project as part of my curriculum on the environmental effects of war. While the human toll of a war is counted and revealed, the silent victim, the environment is thrown to the shadows of doom. It was during then that I was put in touch with Ms.Alona Varukha who supplied me with ample resources. I realized that there was an ecocide in play.
I delved on this topic for quite a long time and the facts kept me on all night as I couldn't bear to think of the environmental consequences post-war. A question always popped up in my mind, in this ever globalized world with climate change dawning on us each day, could we afford to have such ecocides? Throughout 2023 and until mid-2024, I was jampacked with exams but I still decided to keep in touch with the news. It was during this time that I painted two scenaries of the Carpathians in Ukraine, one in the helm of summer while the other in early spring. It was during this period that I found quite a few Ukrainian physicists, chemists and biologists names in the references of our textbooks. I googled them up and learned about their vital contributions such as Winogradsky, Kapustinskii, Ostrogradkii and Dobzhansky yet people hadn't heard an iota about them.
As my exams came to a close, I got hold of Serhii Plokhy's book, "Gates of Europe" which was about Ukrainian history and found it quite fascinating that Kyiv had been modeled after Constantinople, erstwhile Istanbul. These trains of thought however, always brought me to one specific place, why do we have war. I remember learning in Biology, a subject much to my chagrin that 99% of human DNA is the same. We were all same fundamentally. All of us are made of atoms and its the same four laws of physics which govern us. There is just one race, the human race and our diversity and differences is something which should be cherished. It seemed unfathomable as to why should a nation be destroyed for being different. It still seems the same.
On this third anniversary of this dastardly invasion of a peaceful country, I ruminate on all the countries with flexible borders. Choosing a nation's future is the right of the citizens of that nation. Nobody should ever utilize force to dictate it for anybody. A nation is formed by people's collective history and memory and they alone have the right to decide their future. The path which Ukraine decided to walk after Euromaidan is theirs and invasion in the name of a special military operation to punish a nation for choosing its own future is dastardly. The resistance put up by the Ukrainians must serve as a reminder to all of us in free nations that it us who decide our nation's future. It's a right which people pay for with blood and our ancestors had done the same during our struggle for independence. This war must set a precedence for all the countries with flexible borders that the human diversity must be harnessed and not bulldozed to the ground. I write these lines as visuals from the documentary "20 Days in Mariupol" by Mstyslav Chernov flicker in my eyes. It was a lively waterfront city which bears no semblance to its past today. I hope and wish for peace to return yet, let this be a precedent that such invasions would never happen again.
Indian tradition believes in the principle of acceptance and tolerance with our scriptures stating "Vasudhaiva Kutumbakkam" meaning the entire world is one family.
Peace be to the world and to humanity.
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