The Will to See: Dispatches From a World of Misery and Hope by Bernard-Henri Levy

Author:Bernard-Henri Levy [Levy, Bernard-Henri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: political science, human rights, history, Modern, 21st Century, Commentary & Opinion
ISBN: 9780300262636
Google: -yJCEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-10-26T00:24:25.414523+00:00

8

DONBASS

Trench Warfare Lives on in Europe

Ukraine, January 2020

The huge troop-transport helicopter dates from the Soviet era. It’s flying low, just above the tree line, nose down, to avoid Russian radar. After two hours of flying over a landscape of smooth ground, frozen lakes, and villages in ruins, all of which emerges bit by bit through the night, we arrive in Mariupol. That’s where the Ukrainian general staff has organized our first meeting, in the headquarters of the Navy Guard, with the officers who, for the last five years, have been leading the fight against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region. But I didn’t wait for the briefing. And I hardly needed to see the satellite images of the three Russian cruisers blocking the passage between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea (in defiance of international law) to gauge the state of things. The nearly deserted fish market in the center of town. The empty shops on Lenin Avenue. The enormous blast furnaces of the Azovstal factory running at half power and emitting thin clouds of dirty black smoke. Mariupol is one of Ukraine’s largest cities. Before the war began, it generated nearly 10 percent of the country’s GDP. But now the separatists, unable to take control of the city, have imposed a blockade and are slowly choking it to death.

Lying eleven kilometers farther east, Shyrokyne used to be Mariupol’s seaside resort. This morning, all that remains of its two thousand residents are a couple of former hotel keepers who have come in under the protection of a national guard unit to lay flowers at the grave of a father who was hastily buried last year in the family plot. Of the formerly elegant houses that lined Shapotika and Pushkin Streets, nothing is left but piles of rubble that closely resemble the ruins that the pyrotechnicians of ISIS left behind in Iraq and Syria. Shyrokyne, insists Marta Shturma, the young lieutenant who will serve as our interpreter throughout the entire period of our reporting, was an ordinary resort. One need only walk along the coast, its waters now gray, to grasp that it had no strategic importance. So, the church with the collapsed roof; the clinic reduced to its concrete pillars and mined; the school pulverized by heavy artillery, where we find, as if after an earthquake, a section of blackboard, children’s half-burned notebooks, and a backpack, miraculously spared—did the separatists destroy them just for the fun of it or out of spite for being made to cool their heels outside Mariupol for months? Was this the urbicidal vengeance of marauding irregulars who, before pulling back, were in the habit of burning down cities? For the sadistic joy of seeing the last inhabitants, like Maxime and Tatiana, the couple who returned this morning, fleeing under heavy fire? We are in Ukraine, and the year is 2020. Even so, it’s easy to imagine an army of vandals who, failing to take New York, might lay waste to Coney Island.

But the war is not over.

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