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KYIV, Ukraine—One year ago I was in Mariupol, Ukraine, when the first cease-fire was signed on Sept. 5, 2014.
Late that afternoon I visited the still smoldering battlefields outside the city. There had been a battle that day and the day prior, involving tanks and artillery. The aftermath was tragic. Many soldiers still lay dead where they had fallen in battle, frozen in the moment and the motion of their deaths.
During the fighting, the sounds of the cannons had rattled windows in central Mariupol. The people of the city weren’t yet used to the sounds of heavy weapons as they are today, and they wore their fears on their faces. I remember, in particular, eating lunch at a seaside café when the sounds of explosions first started. The young man sitting across from me, who was sipping on a beer and eating a salad, looked up from his meal and into my eyes.
Is this really happening? We both seemed to ask each other with a shared look.
Any doubts about the terrible reality of this war were erased when I visited the battlefields. I could write my impressions again, but I think it would be best to show you what I wrote that evening, when what I had seen was still fresh in my mind and not dulled by a year of reporting on this war.
Sept. 5, 2014:
[…]Tank battles, heavy artillery, long distance rocket attacks—this kind of combat is terrifying.
But the terror is short lived, and the cease-fire appears to be holding. The bars are open tonight in Mariupol. Across town young brides and grooms are getting married, following through on ceremonies put off by the fighting.
Life goes on.
Yet out there beyond the city streets, far away from the cheesy music and the embraces of newlyweds, the scars of the last two days of battle are still smoldering. After the fighting ended today, I went out to where the fighting had been to see what war really is.
The charred bodies of Ukrainian and separatist soldiers dotted the freshly stilled battlefields. These were the bodies of men who did not die well. Not by the mercy of a gunshot to the head or the heart. Some had their bodies ripped apart by the concussion of artillery blasts. Some were missing limbs. Some with their insides spilled in the earth around them. Others burned to death, trapped inside the steel coffins their tanks became. Quite a few died in the way they desperately clung to life—bodies halfway out of their ruined vehicles or splayed on the ground in fetal positions. All young men. And all of their lives ended today. The convenient forgetting about why they died begins tonight.
And still, as Mariupol celebrates, as I write these words, many more scared and tired young men wait in trenches and in tanks poised to once again release the dogs of war.
And I was right. On Sept. 6, the day after the cease-fire, fighting resumed around Mariupol, commencing five months of escalating violence that would last until the second cease-fire, signed Feb. 12, 2015, which immediately collapsed into another six months of war, which leads us to now, and another cease-fire…
The Revolving Door of War
The Ukraine war is scheduled to end Sept. 1 with a new truce set to coincide with Ukrainian students’ return to school.
On Aug. 26, the trilateral contact group—comprising representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the separatist territories, under OSCE oversight—hashed out this latest call to end the fighting. And during an Aug. 29 telephone call, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande called for a full cease-fire on Sept. 1.
At midnight on Tuesday, guns fell silent along the eastern front, according to the Ukrainian military. “From midnight to 06:00 on Sept. 1, the Kremlin-backed mercenaries were not using weapons along the demarcation line,” the Anti-Terrorist Operation press center wrote in a Tuesday morning statement.
It feels like déjà vu in Ukraine.