Watching the rapacious power grabs by strongmen such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, or the remorseless churn of social media algorithms as they stir unrest for profit, it is easy to feel alienated by our helplessness as individuals. For most of us in the West, as I argued then, “We guard our sanity by recognising our powerlessness as individuals. But we owe it to history to bear witness to our times.”
The outlook is bleak. The recent successes of the Ukrainian military – Operation Spider’s Web, which launched drones from within Russian territory to hit warplanes this weekend, and Tuesday’s explosion at the hated Kerch Bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea – are Ukraine’s way of showing the world that it has plenty of fight left. But the bigger picture is largely unchanged.
This was Russia’s way of thumbing its nose and making clear it’s not serious about this round of peace talks. It doesn’t need to be. As long as Donald Trump remains aligned with the values of Vladimir Putin rather than those of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia can still aim to grind out an eventual territorial victory and a shamefully brokered “deal”.
These children have been taken from Ukraine in order to be raised as culturally Russian. The moving documentary After the Rain: Putin’s Stolen Children Come Home, depicts the challenges of reintegrating some of the few who have since been rescued, by following two traumatised children attending an animal therapy centre. Baroness Helena Kennedy, who co-chairs a task force working for their return, tells me that “the children we have so far managed to bring back describe indoctrination and denial of their identity: ‘There is no Ukraine – you’ve been lied to!’”
Trump himself has gone uncharacteristically silent while this dumbshow peace negotiation plays out in Istanbul. There have been no wild social media posts since he broke cover on 25 May to call Putin “absolutely crazy” following Moscow’s largest aerial assault on Ukraine.
Fundamentally, however, Trump is tied to his ideological alliance with Putin. His own voters believe the propaganda – pumped out by Trump’s own team all through the election – which casts Ukraine as a minor Russian province, overrun simultaneously with Nazis and the modern woke. Autocrats are his tribe, liberal Europeans his enemy. Any real support for Zelenskyy, whom he tried to humiliate this February at the White House, would be an extraordinary volte-face.
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When Putin stepped up his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a team of researchers vowed to document the atrocities that followed in its wake – they call themselves The Reckoning Project. They may not be able to stop Putin from carving up Ukraine and its people, but they are not prepared to let him rewrite history.
As a play, The Reckoning focuses on the tale of a janitor near the city of Bucha, tied up and forced to watch his building be requisitioned by the Russian army as a sniper base for shooting down fleeing civilians. Across the rest of its work, however, The Reckoning team have also continued to look into the issue of child abductions. Even amidst the nation’s determined blitz spirit, this issue is particularly dispiriting: in recent survey, The Reckoning’s team found that 58 per cent of Ukrainians themselves do not believe that Russia will ever return all the abducted children.
We may not be able to save Ukraine. We may not even be able to achieve the return of her stolen children. We can attempt to pick our way through truth and lies. And we can, as with so much in our current chaos, find meaning by bearing witness.
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