poignant reflections that stretch the canvas of war

Thousands of images pass before our eyes as we face endless television coverage of Russia’s attack on Ukraine. In one such photo, a BBC reporter asks a Ukrainian girl how old she is and what she is thinking as she boards a train from Kyiv to the Polish border. She is 19 years old, she says, and she wants revenge for what the Russian president is doing to her country. Then she adds: ‘How can someone be so bad in 2022?’ Although presented as a question, it conveys a sense of moral outrage. It also expresses surprise about a young man who is about to become a refugee.

layers of meaning

His question reveals a globally shared spirit amongst young people born at the turn of the century. They have every reason to believe that the world is an interconnected place, governed by rules and consensus. They have seen evidence of the world’s efficiency and interconnectedness in dealing with the recent COVID-19 crisis. The deadly virus failed to stop the two Olympics from being held. In the first one, Ukraine won 19 medals, and in the second, held a few weeks earlier, it won one. Then, bombs began to fall and the streets of the city turned to rubble. No wonder a 19-year-old girl feels lost. So are we seeing the devastation in action.

The question of the girl will remain for some time. It has already turned into a metaphor, with layers of meaning that are difficult to understand.

How can this happen in 2022? The scale of brutality and violence is shocking; The attacker’s resolve not to give peace any chance is deeply disappointing. We have seen the helplessness of the common people of Myanmar for the last whole year. This time it is Europe’s turn to stare. The phrase, strongly promoted by United Nations agencies for decades, now sounds like stone dried bean pods. Two of them come to mind with particularly hollow implications: these are: ‘global citizenship’ and ‘sustainable development’. Pictures of Ukraine under attack catch fire as symbols of prosperity, with millions leaving their homes, their faces numb with disbelief. They don’t look like refugees from poorer parts of the world waiting at the Mexican or Greek borders.

The news that Russia has put its nuclear system in a state of high alert is jarring with the wisdom gained. The global information system had for decades preserved its strict terminology for Iran, Palestine and Kashmir. Terms such as ‘flashpoint’ and ‘nuclear neighbour’ were used for regions away from Europe. Memories of the Bay of Pigs had faded and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was cleared. When I visited it in the new century, all its horror-inducing imagination was gone. A member of the museum staff reported that the old style of display had proved discouraging for tourism.

what young people face

For us in India, the poignant absurdity of Russia’s war in Ukraine is expressed by our trapped students. The uncertain nature of their plight, and the mark it will leave on their future, is unimaginable. Some people, who should know better, have been asking: ‘How did so many Indian youth study in Ukraine?’ This is not the right time to consider such a question, one might say. At the same time, we know how little public memory lasts – and that some public concerns have longevity in our ethos. This situation reminds us what the folly of worrying about the headdresses worn in classes. The news that a senior medical student, who has been killed by a Russian bullet, hails from Karnataka, makes a lot of sense, which no one can investigate, but not now.

The sudden turn his life has taken in a war-torn land is no less sharp than when he tries to deal with a 19-year-old Ukrainian girl. His question evokes a sentiment that millions of youth will sympathize with. She is asking, ‘How can someone be so bad in 2022. In many countries like theirs, middle-class youth had convinced themselves that they were living in a world their parents had to cope with. And he was sure it was getting better. The digital convenience of negotiating the complex demands of life had an impressive impact. There was nothing that would create a problem that technology and science were not able to solve.

That a European location could be the site of a nuclear warning might surprise even a generation that had no reason to remember how dangerous a nuclear weapon is. What has helped to dispel this awareness is the rhetoric about nuclear energy being clean and eco-friendly. The debate on separating nuclear energy from nuclear weapons and war never ended. Under new, broader discourses of climate change, nuclear power is starting to appear safer, and those who talk of nuclear deterrence seem to benefit from the idea.

If a Russian minister comfortably talks about the Third World War based on nuclear weapons, his worldwide youth audience cannot be expected to tremble. He is told that the Cold War had ended in the previous century, leaving the new century to proceed with a relaxed mind. It has been described as a post-truth generation because it is used to the idea that politicians can say anything and get away. Russia’s claim about Indian students being used as hostages is one example. At least in this case India has denied Russia’s lies.

a wide moat in Russia

No matter what country they are from, people born after 1995 have a particular problem with making sense of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are many clear signs of the generation gap in Russian society. For young Russians, the Bolshevik Revolution is as far away as a map of the Soviet Union. Unlike many societies that have gone through sharp turns and historical turns, Russia has faced the challenge of upgrading its sense of the past. Reforms in curriculum and teacher training have been largely imaginative since the early 1990s. Ironically, these reforms have widened the gap between generations. This is perhaps a reflection of the difference that a massive effort is being made to reach out to the youth to explain the reasons for the ‘special military action’ in Ukraine.

Vacuum

The burden of history sitting so awkwardly on their shoulders cannot be lightened by a good education alone. The problems of understanding the problems they faced in some parts of Germany after the removal of the remarkable Berlin Wall are quite similar. It was a strange symbol of war-torn history. A 2003 German film, Goodbye Lenin!, a senior citizen of Berlin, mastered the difficulties of maintaining composure when the division of the city between the eastern and western sides of a wall began to face open resistance from young citizens. The story revolves around an imaginative, desperate attempt to drag the past into the present. Something similar is happening in Ukraine today, but it’s not fiction: the country is facing a naked, violent invasion. Its struggle to survive echoes a terrifying vacuum in the modern world. This is a moral void, it is quite obvious, but it is also a void in intelligence. In war and PeaceTolstoy said that ‘there is a need to look for causes in the soul of man’. Any reason Russia could possibly cite today could justify its violent behavior on display.

Krishna Kumar is a teacher and bilingual writer. His upcoming book is ‘Thank You Gandhi’.