Ardennes, France- On Feb. 24, we will witness the two-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine pass into history. After two years, while the conflict has flickered into the back channels of most Western media dockets, the bloody and brutal conflict continues to rage. Over the course of the war, between Feb. 24, 2022 and September 2023, per Statista, over 9,000 civilians (including over 500 children) have lost their lives to Russian brutality. The numbers of injured reported at the time stretched well over 17,000. Since these numbers are out of date (September 2023), we may only speculate the degree to which they have grown during the winter offensives.
I am writing this dispatch at a desk on the fringes of the Ardennes Forest, south of Belgium in France, where 80 years ago this month, another winter offensive that threatened the very fabric of the world took place. Bastogne, Belgium is three hours away by car and was a central focal point in the allied defense of Western Europe from Hitler’s winter offensive in 1944/45, known afterwards as the Battle of The Bulge. Similarly to the modern frontlines of Ukraine, that historical battle saw young men dug into frozen, rotting trenches, pummeled by glacial winds and buried under snow. Supplies were limited, death was a constant companion, and hope, as it would seem, had itself frozen over.
In America, we celebrate and honor this struggle for the total survival of the world against the rising tide of German fascism. We hold close in our hearts the sacrifices of those men in the trenches, the women in aid stations, and the countless horrors they endured to preserve a world on the razor’s edge of total annihilation. The same, however unfortunately, cannot be said for the generalized approach of the United States, both publicly and federally, in our support of the Ukrainian struggle for survival.
In our lives here in Carbondale and across the United States, we are prone to forgetting that we do not live in a world disconnected from geopolitical events. While perhaps in the late Victorian period of steam ships we might have been able to survive alone on our continent across the waves, today, in a world interconnected on every front by instant global commerce and communication, we no longer have the luxury of entertaining the delusion that such things are beyond the scope of what we should care about.
The Ukrainians struggling now in their trenches across their nation are fighting the same battles that shelled out across the Ardennes in 1944, albeit in new ways. The onslaught of Russian aggression, coupled with a demonstrable brutality in the performance of hundreds of war crimes against Ukrainian men, women, children, culture and history, is only a few shades removed from the marching tide of the Third Reich nearly a century ago. The struggle of Ukrainians is a struggle for the preservation of freedom, culture, language and the allegedly inalienable right to life.
In Europe, there is a collective understanding that the fight in Ukraine is not a fight for Ukraine itself, but for the security and safety of the entirety of the continent. It is a grand battle between a despotic former KGB officer turned dictator and the idea of prosperity that was so hard fought and won from the beaches of Normandy to the Reichstag.
In speaking with locals here, there is a pervasive knowing that the fight for Ukraine is the fight for Europe, many having been touched by the atrocities of the second world war either directly or indirectly through family. One person told me that they fear for the future of Europe and for their grandchildren’s future and that they do not want to see them having to fight and die to protect all that they love. “We have been there before,” she told me. “We have cried those tears.”
What we must consider now and into the next year is that this war, although it is far from our homes, and despite the propaganda and political posturing about how it is not important to us, is a paramount struggle for the survival of our world. Ukrainians — fighting and dying in their trenches, surviving war atrocities, and braving a continually shaky and unpredictable Western support network — are not just fighting for the rubble that was once their hometown. They are fighting to keep at bay an onslaught on the very fabric of European life and freedom.
I cannot say what we might do in our safe and serene Valley, nor can I claim to know what must be done. All that I can offer is a reminder that we must not allow this existential fight for the future of the world as we know it to pass by us into the waste bin of American public thought. Support Ukraine how you can: donate, read, spread awareness, write our representatives in Congress.
What must be known, above all else, is that we cannot allow ourselves in our apathy or polity to forget or ignore that right now, at this very moment, all that we may hold dear hangs in the ever-precarious balance somewhere on the eastern edge of Ukraine.
Tucker Farris is a longtime local of the Roaring Fork and Crystal valleys, he teaches sociology at Colorado State University and, among other things, specializes in Soviet history, identity and ideology. He splits his time between Carbondale and the Wild Unknowns.