A brutal, bloody two-year anniversary
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s been two years. The world’s attention has begun to fade, but the war continues to rage. Some history.
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“Into the Valley of Death Rode the six hundred … Theirs not to make reply Theirs not to reason why Theirs but to do or die … Cannon to the right of them Cannon to the left of them Cannon in front of them. Volley’d and thunder’d; Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.” Selected verses from “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, one of the literary remnants of the Crimean War, 1853 to 1856, which Russia lost to the coalition of France, the United Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire. Russia also lost control of the Crimean Peninsula, which juts into the Black Sea south of current-day Ukraine. Prior to that war, Crimea was a geographical pawn for centuries, claimed and relinquished by neighboring nations. It changed hands most recently in 2014 when Russia
“annexed” Crimea from Ukraine.
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Mauling of the Light Brigade aside, the Russian loss in the Crimean War revealed the nation to be far less advanced than its European counterparts, with a poorly equipped army made up of conscripted serfs (that would be like drafting slaves to serve in the Southern armies in the Civil War), who were not exactly
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enthusiastic to die for the Tsar.
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After losing the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II decided to sell Alaska to the US in 1867 for a little more than $7 million. The deal was called “Seward’s Folly,” after
Secretary of State William Seward, who made the deal. The US got the last laugh, thanks to the discovery of massive, rich deposits of oil.
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The Crimean War in some ways was the first modern technological conflict, according to The Institution of Engineering and Technology. For the first time, soldiers used rifles that were mass-produced in factories, and landed on coastlines in armored assault vessels. British and French forces communicated between the Crimea and headquarters in Paris via telegraph lines and built railroad lines to transport supplies and ammunition.
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Florence Nightingale rose to fame in the Crimean War for leading a team of nurses treating wounded and sick British soldiers. Afterward, she wrote a nursing manual and operated a nursing training school. She was also a distinguished statistician who popularized the use of several types of pie charts and other “graphical representations” of data.
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After being absorbed into the Soviet Union after World War II, Ukraine endured the Holodomor, a man-made famine from 1932 to 1933 that killed 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. Holodomor in Ukrainian means “killing by hunger, killing by starvation.” Bad harvests were the initial cause of the famine, but once it started starvation was selectively weaponized by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the famine was “instrumentalized” and amplified against Ukrainians to punish them for their rejection collectivization of farmland and to break their nationalism. Since the Holodomor was officially denied by the Kremlin for more than half a century, it has played a large role in Ukrainian public memory, particularly since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
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Since the start of the Ukraine/Russian War, the European Union and its regional allies have spent more than $100 billion funding Ukraine’s defense effort, according to the Kiel Institute. Earlier this month, the EU agreed to a $54 billion package for Ukraine. The United Kingdom has also pledged more than $15 billion to Ukraine since 2022. According to the Kiel Institute the United States has spent $66 billion, with another $60 billion in the pipeline.
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About 40,000 civilians have been killed so far during the Ukraine/Russia war, according to the latest estimates, while about 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war.
(Jon Klusmire of Bishop gives Earnest Hemingway the last word: “An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn aggressive at the earliest moment is the great counter crime... We never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead.”