monday's mulling: ukraine

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which had started in 2014. The invasion, the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since WWII has caused hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties. As of 2025, Russian troops occupy about 20% of Ukraine. From a population of 41 million, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. 

In March 2022, just a couple weeks after the invasion, Todd and I drove to Washington DC to watch the Dayton Flyers play in the A10 men's basketball tournament. Our hotel was in Georgetown, very close to the Ukrainian Embassy. People had placed sunflowers and other items of support in front of the embassy the pile of items grew. To see these items accumulate day by day during our visit was eye opening and inspiring. People cared.

We also discovered another memorial dedicated to Ukraine, the Holodmor Memorial, which honors the victims of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933.

Holodomor comes from the combination of the Ukrainian words holod (hunger) and mor (to exterminate or eliminate).

Under Josef Stalin's regime, the Soviet Union engineered a famine that killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainian citizens. The Holodomor famine was part of an attempt by the Soviet regime to not only destroy individual peasants, but also the Ukrainian culture. The Soviet state believed that the Ukrainian peasantry was counterrevolutionary, and their distinct culture and nationalism provoked the Kremlin leadership.

Again, people from far away cared about what was going on thousands of miles away. Little guy vs. the bully. A way of showing support from across the world. Three years have passed and my heart breaks for the Ukrainians who live with this every single day.