From a lightning operation to the worst war since 1945

Just a few weeks ago, while Volodymyr Zelensky was still I was confident that Donald Trump would not make a pact with Vladimir Putin The end of the war and the future of his country brought the most surprising economic flashes: Ukraine's GDP growth in 2024 was 3.6%. A figure that the Kiev government celebrated, predicting a certain economic stability for 2025, despite the effects of the war. The World Bank does not see this prediction as entirely clear, and points to 2026 to talk about sustained recovery. That is, if the war has ended. Because, although it is true that a reconstruction operation would move large resources, we must not lose sight of what the three years caused by the Russian attack mean: the destruction of almost half of the Ukrainian economy. Another World Bank forecast is that, on average, one in five people must live on less than six dollars a day.

Talking about the balance that may be coming, the figures are burning, although there is no consensus. The war would have caused a million of casualties - 600,000 Russians and 480,000 Ukrainians - according to estimates by the Ukrainian government and Western intelligence services. There are other figures, such as confidential ones cited by The Wall Street Journal, which speak directly of the number of deaths: 200,000 Russians and 80,000 Ukrainians, plus 800,000 wounded – 400,000 on each side. Very rounded numbers that avoid identifying military and civilian victims, although the majority are soldiers. The main coincidence of most sources is to assert, forcefully, that the war in Ukraine is the one that has caused the most deaths in Russia since the Second World War. Terrible, considering that it was a "special military operation" that was supposed to last at most a few weeks.

The human tragedy in Ukraine includes the 6.5 million refugees, more than a third of whom have gone to Germany and Russia, according to UN data. There are also 3.7 million internally displaced people and kidnappings, which have particularly affected thousands of children. Contrasting data indicate that more than 20,000 minors have been deported and confined in Russian territory. But the French writer Marc Levy dares to go further: he says that "Putin has kidnapped 40,000 Ukrainian children" and speaks of a "re-education" operation to use them as a weapon of war.

Boosting Ukrainian identity and culture

In the midst of a panorama that encompasses all kinds of misfortunes, one of the positive facts that can be detected is how the nationalist polarization provoked by the attack three years ago is expressed in the fact that many Ukrainians have renounced their supposed bilingualism and the biculturalism proclaimed since Soviet times. In Ukraine, the war would be generating – or has already generated – a mutation of identity that is beginning to be detected in sociolinguistic studies. Many young people have begun to prioritize the Ukrainian language, and the French newspaper The World It is not to say that thousands of Ukrainians have abandoned Russian.

The European spirit is thus on the rise in Ukraine, especially the desire to join the EU immediately and wait the deployment of tens of thousands of European soldiers to secure the borders. If you look at it closely, depending on what happens geopolitically in the coming months, it may not even be necessary for Ukraine to join NATO, because NATO could start to fall apart. Trump and Putin would have killed it.