1,569 Days: Ukraine War Surpasses WW1 in Duration | NYT
Last week, the war in Ukraine officially surpassed the first World War in duration. 1,569 days. Constant Méheut, writing with The New York Times, plays with the parallel between the two wars.
The Two Wars
World War I ended because the German home front buckled before the army did, the Kaiser fled, and an armistice arrived as the cessation of an unbearable thing.
What ends Ukraine? Not exhaustion alone, it seems. Half a million dead so far against nine to eleven million a century ago is a different order of magnitude, and yet the war persists with no clearer terminus than the Western Front had in, say, 1916.
A war that resembles World War I tactically while diverging from it in scale and political economy will probably not resolve the way World War I resolved. Drones are not gas attacks; oil refineries are not blockaded ports. The mechanisms of pressure are different even where the experience of the trench, or the dugout, rhymes.
“In this environment, the people who dig survive longer and stay safer.” –Ukrainian Soldier
That’s civilizational regression and pragmatic advice in one. Humans are returning to the earth because the sky has become unsafe in a new way, watched by machines that don’t tire and don’t need cover.
World War I drove men underground because of artillery. This war drives them underground, and then deeper, and then alone, because of persistent robotic vision. The trench was a response to firepower, while Ukraine’s foxhole-for-one is a response to all-seeing technology
Which is the more dehumanizing condition: to die en masse going over the top, or to die alone, watched by a drone?
“This is World War I, but with drones.” –Yaroslav Hrytsak, Ukrainian historian
What made WWI endable at all? Not the trenches but the collapse of four empires. Is there an empire here capable of collapsing, or is Russia’s system built to absorb this kind of attrition indefinitely, the way it absorbed Stalingrad and kept going?
Read the original piece here: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.“
