Victoria Amelina (1986–2023), Ukrainian writer who left her literary career to document war crimes and was killed in a missile strike in Kramatorsk in June 2023, wrote words that now belong to the irreversible archive of this war:«Я документую воєнні злочини і слухаю звук обстрілів, а не поезію.» / “Ya  dokumentuiyu voenni zlochyny i slukhayu zvuk obstriliv, a ne poeziyu.”“I document war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poetry.”

In this sentence, poetry does not disappear. It changes function. The writer becomes witness. Language ceases to interpret and begins to preserve. What is at stake is no longer expression, but truth itself. The poet does not renounce poetry; poetry is displaced, deferred, waiting for a future in which words may again emerge from life rather than from its destruction.

Four years have now passed since the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Much has been said in the vocabulary of geopolitics: sovereignty, security, alliance, deterrence. These terms describe necessary realities. Yet they do not fully reach the anthropological depth of what began.

For what returned on that winter morning was not only war. It was, it remains fratricide.

For more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many believed that Europe had crossed a threshold beyond which such events had become improbable. The Cold War had ended without a final battle. Ideological confrontation dissolved into administrative transition. A new era appeared possible, governed less by existential struggle than by economic integration and institutional stability. Borders remained, but they seemed to have lost their fatal character.

Yet this apparent stability rested on a fragile foundation. The Cold War had frozen tensions without resolving them. It had preserved trauma without healing it. Beneath the surface remained famine and deportation, compromise and survival, silence and adaptation. Entire populations had learned to live in conditions where language itself was often separated from truth, where public speech and private knowledge followed different laws.

What freezes does not disappear. It waits.

When frozen ground thaws, it reveals what had remained intact beneath the surface.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought “local-styled liberation”, but it also brought disorientation that corresponds to the recurrent internal of the immense Russian Empire territories. Structures that had governed life for generations disappeared rapidly. New political and religious realities emerged, often under intense internal and external pressure. Identities that had coexisted uneasily within imperial frameworks were suddenly required to redefine themselves in absolute terms. What had once been ambiguous became categorical.

On the first days of the invasion, Metropolitan Onuphryi, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, spoke words that bypassed political explanation. He invoked the most ancient narrative of human violence. This war, he said, is the sin of Cain, who killed his brother.

He spoke not as a political actor, but as a witness formed within the very spiritual and historical space now fractured by war. He belonged to a generation for whom Russian and Ukrainian were not opposing identities but expressions of a shared ecclesial and cultural continuity. Yet the war imposed a new clarity. His speech shifted decisively into Ukrainian – not as a symbolic gesture, but as an existential realignment. Language itself had become a site of responsibility.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky understood this process during the violent upheavals of the twentieth century. He saw that the gravest danger facing his people was not only external domination, but the corrosion of trust within society. He understood that historical fracture penetrates the human interior, reshaping perception long before it reshapes institutions. He witnessed how political powers, ideological systems, and even religious realignments could deepen division while claiming to restore order. Yet he insisted on the enduring dignity of the human person, even in circumstances designed to erase it. His witness belongs not to one confession alone, but to the broader moral history of Europe.

The present war unfolds on the same civilizational terrain where Yiddish was born, lived, and nearly extinguished. Yiddish is not foreign to this geography. It is one of its buried moral strata and, by miracle, did not die out from the Slavic regions. For centuries, it carried the daily speech of millions across Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the wider region. Its near destruction did not erase it completely. It remains present as a submerged layer of memory, inseparable from the forests, towns, and roads that now again witness displacement and loss.

When such a land returns to war, history does not begin anew. It resumes.

די ווערטער בלײַבן שטיין צווישן אונדז, פֿאַרפֿרוירן אין לופֿטן.Di verter blaybn shteyn tsvishn undz, farfroyren in luftn.The words remain standing between us, frozen in the air. (My poem: Kholodomor/חאלאדאמאר in Yiddish)

Distrust becomes ordinary. Silence acquires weight. Words themselves seem to hesitate before crossing the space between human beings. Language, which once served as bridge, becomes threshold. Each word must now cross an invisible frontier.

The origins of this war lie not in a single decision, but in the long aftermath of imperial collapse, in fragile processes of national and ecclesial realignment, and in the complex interplay of internal aspiration and external influence. Political and religious actors alike participated in shaping new structures intended to stabilize emerging realities. Yet the depth of shared historical and spiritual continuity – East versus West, diaspora confronting the native nations – proved more resistant to redefinition than many had anticipated. Efforts to clarify identity sometimes accelerated separation. Processes intended to resolve ambiguity sometimes hardened fracture.

The Cold War, it now appears, did not truly end. Its external structures dissolved, but its anthropological legacy remained. Coldness persisted – not as climate, but as disposition. The Cold War was sustained on both sides through military, political, economic, and financial systems that extended far beyond the battlefield.

Yet the internal realities of those systems differed profoundly. In the Soviet and Eastern European world, daily life unfolded under conditions of ideological constraint, restricted speech, and pervasive surveillance, where truth itself often survived only in private memory. In the West, pluralism, economic openness, and individual freedom were formally protected, even as Western societies remained deeply engaged in geopolitical competition and global strategic calculation. These different conditions formed different habits of thought, different relationships to authority, and different ways of understanding responsibility. Coldness, in its deepest sense, is not the property of one system alone. It emerges wherever human beings are reduced to instruments of historical necessity, wherever empathy yields to abstraction, and wherever the full reality of the other ceases to be seen.

This coldness is not confined to the battlefield. It circulates through language, through institutions, through systems of information. In the course of decades that followed the end of World War II, it also implied a lot of financial exchanges. It shapes perception itself. It creates distance where proximity once existed.

After four years, the most profound transformation may be temporal. What was first experienced as rupture risks becoming condition. Human beings adapt even to harsh catastrophes. This capacity for adaptation ensures survival, but it also threatens moral perception. The abnormal becomes familiar. Sirens no longer produce shock. Destruction becomes part of the background of awareness.

Yet language continues to resist complete normalization.

The Ukrainian poet and combat medic Yaryna Chornohuz, writing from the front, addresses those who will inherit the consequences of this war:

«Вітання вам із мого часу – тим, хто народиться після моєї смерті.» / Vitannya vam iz moho – tym, khto narodyt’sya pislya moiei smerty.”

“Greetings to you from my time – to those born after my death.”

Her words do not assume survival. They assume transmission. They acknowledge that war reshapes not only the present, but the moral horizon of the future. Thus, they testify to the fragile continuity of human voice under conditions designed to extinguish it.

Many Ukrainian poets have fallen. Others continue to fight. Poetry itself has crossed a threshold. It no longer stands outside history, observing. It has entered history, bearing witness where ordinary speech fails. The Slavs deeply feel this in their identity: words require to be put into the poetic mental order verses.

Beneath this instability, something older persists.

און דער ברודער רופֿט נאָך, פֿון אונטער דער ערד.Un der bruder ruft nokh, fun unter der erd.And the brother still calls, from beneath the earth.

Where is your brother?

Four years after the outbreak of this war, that question remains suspended – not only over those directly involved, but over a civilization that believed itself to have moved beyond such thresholds. The question addresses not only nations, but individuals. It asks whether human beings remain capable of recognizing one another beyond ideology, beyond fear, beyond historical grievance.

History did not end. It returned, carrying within it the unresolved tensions of memory, identity, and truth.

And it continues to ask what human beings are prepared to see — and to answer.

This year, as the fourth winter of war draws to its uncertain close, the calendar marks another passage almost unnoticed. The seventh of Adar, the day tradition remembers as both the birth and the death of Moses – the one who led his people out of bondage and yet did not cross with them into the land itself. He died in exile, not as abandonment, but as witness. Not outside the promise, but at its threshold.

Exile, in this sense, is not only separation from land. It is separation from origin, from the clarity once given. Nations, no less than persons, may find themselves living at a distance from their own founding gifts, unable for a time to recognize what once formed them. The waters of baptism in Kyiv, in 988, marked such a beginning – not of empire, but of a shared spiritual horizon. That memory has not disappeared. But it now remains, like many things in history, present yet inaccessible, awaiting recognition rather than possession.

ער איז געשטאָרבן אויפֿן גרענעץ, און דער וועג איז געבליבן אָפֿן.Er iz geshtorbn afn grenets, un der veg iz geblibn ofn.He died at the threshold, and the path remained open.

Perhaps peace, when it returns, will not announce itself through treaties or declarations, but through something simpler: the moment when one can sit with another human being, without fear or suspicion, and drink a cup of coffee in silence. Not as metaphor, but as life restored.

אַ גלעזל קאַווע אין שטילקייט — דאָס איז שוין אַ גאַנצע וועלט.A glezl kave in shtilkayt — dos iz shoyn a gantse velt.A small cup of coffee in quiet – that is already an entire world.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)