Posted yesterday at 1:00 p.m.
(Lviv, Ukraine) From Lviv, very close to Poland, the front is very far, 1200 km to the east, further than Havre-Saint-Pierre for Montreal. On a beautiful Saturday in June, on the large Place de l’Opéra, children run through the water jets of an elaborate fountain. A band is playing techno music. It looks like a European city like the others. And yet, when you linger a bit in Lviv, you see war everywhere; on the posters that line the walls of the medieval town, on the large square of the town hall which exhibits the carcass of a Russian plane recently shot down, but above all it mourns its soldiers at the military cathedral in the heart of the city.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR
Posters on a wall in Lviv
That morning, I witnessed the funeral of three soldiers who fell in Donbass. There is the military band, the friends in fatigues who leave the enclosure carrying the coffins and the families who follow the procession. I hear very loud crying, a shrill cry, and I see a lady dressed in black collapsing and young people coming to her rescue.
Scenes like this are repeated every day in Lviv. The overflowing city cemetery has even opened a whole new section. I walk through the aisles of freshly dug graves. Reading the epitaphs, I see that the vast majority of these men are under 30, the future of this country. The fighting in the east is incredibly violent, President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks of 100 to 200 deaths per day. And in Lviv, the new section of the cemetery is filling up at full speed.
I ask my young guide, Markian Kobyletskie, 20, if this maddening bloodletting doesn’t make him want Ukraine to finally negotiate peace. ” Why ? he asks indignantly. This is precisely what we are fighting for! »
The words of the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, who would like to allow Putin to save face and who suggests an “appeasement” are repugnant to him.
Markian, like all these young Ukrainians, whether they speak Russian or Ukrainian, is completely disconnected from the Soviet past, from the Russian state. Since 2017 they have been visiting Europe without a visa, they are working there and it is much easier and more fun to go to Paris than to Moscow. They are European. This war is both a fight for the survival of the nation and the desire to live in a free and democratic country as west of the border. For them, a Russian victory would be equivalent to death by asphyxiation. The unanimous decision of the European Union to allow Ukraine to be a candidate provides oxygen. But time is running out and the wounds are getting deeper and deeper.
On one of the main avenues, a convoy of three ambulances and two school buses is filling up with soldiers. He arrives from the train station directly from the front and the wounded are brought to the military hospital. In Ukraine, civilian and military casualties number in the hundreds every day. Lviv receives most of it because the city is far from the fighting, benefits from the proximity of the border and therefore from more generous international aid.
This Saturday morning, I meet Andriy Moskalenko, the deputy mayor, who is also barely 30 years old. His phone is not ringing. “Our doctors and nurses are no longer enough,” he exclaims. The world cannot imagine the cost of this war in human life, in turned upside down destinies, the tens of thousands of crippled, traumatized, amputees. All, the living forces of Ukraine! »
Andriy Moskalenko reminds us that the Ukrainians are waging this war for us too, to contain Vladimir Putin’s imperial delirium and protect our liberal democracies from the consequences of an “overflow” of this power from Moscow which feeds far-right governments and the autocrats of this world.
Because this conflict in Ukraine is defining a new world order. It will be a prelude or a grand finale. If the war ends with Vladimir Putin comfortably in power and Russia in possession of one-fifth of Ukraine, then Russia can learn the lesson that its methods are working. There, compromise or appeasement is a sign of weakness. The steamroller of the reconquest will advance slowly but surely and will continue to destabilize. Watching China will draw the same conclusions. What will happen to Taiwan?
In Lviv, there is an opinion that the end of the cold war was in fact only a mirage. This time, we resolutely want to stay on the western side.
Whether at the big meeting of Commonwealth countries in Kigali or the G7 in Bavaria, the Trudeau government will have the opportunity to play a key role in finding solutions to the Russian blockade that is holding Africa hostage. and rally to support Ukraine firmly and concretely.
All these deaths must not be in vain. Let’s not abandon Ukrainian youth who want to stay in the West. It is his future, and ours, that is at stake.