the eyes of war

You get up one morning, after seven, and turn on the radio because it will be two years since you linked your relationship with the media to the emergency code.

At that time, it was March 2020, you connected as soon as you opened your eyes to the screen of your mobile and to the voice of the announcer to find out how many died that day, how many more than yesterday, the record, the curve.

Then you got used to it.

Two years later, you wake up one morning and turn on the radio and also the heating because it's still February and it's cold.

The gas bill has not yet arrived and you do not know that you will have to pay three times more than what you paid in previous years for the same period and less consumption.

You still can't guess if it will finally be the energy crisis that takes everything ahead.

The radio says that Russia has attacked Ukraine at dawn.

Artillery bombardment, heavy equipment and small arms.

Land, sea and air.

Dozens of dead.

Vladimir Putin has warned that any interference will have consequences the like of which have never been seen.

It is the largest attack on European soil since World War II.

There is a war in Europe and this obviously transforms everything.

Social networks are pregnant with fear, with condemnation, with empathy.

The new and macabre reality sweeps the pandemic from the news and from your mobile screen, it also sweeps away the disorders in the opposition party, which were so entertaining just a few days before, the demands of the self-employed become will-o'-the-wisps.

It is the first time an army has crossed a border to invade a country in this precious and peaceful land since World War II, but it is not the first war.

The last war in Europe was fought in the Balkans, on the ruins of what was Yugoslavia.

So much blood was spilled in that civil, ethnic, and religious strife.

Millions of people were uprooted from their homes.

There were approximately 200,000 dead.

You no longer remember if that war scared you, also on European soil.

There were no social networks.

The distances were abysmal then, perhaps real.

They killed each other.

This is different.

You make your life as if nothing but it's different.

There is a background noise, something that tenses the already tense atmosphere.

The distortion will only grow.

The comments begin: “I have seen images of Ukraine, people like you and me, fleeing.

A woman from Kiev was hiding in a bookstore with her children.

A bookstore that could be like this.”

Like you and me, the same heart.

Around you, that environment that only exists in the crystallized and luminous centimeters of the screen of your smartphone, there are people who invoke sadness.

They are sad, because there is a war in Ukraine.

Sad, because the world order is about to crack.

The world order, a mess of increasingly tangled cables.

You do not decipher the tangle.

Everything inside your house

Even that utensil that you kept in the back of a kitchen drawer months ago and have never seen again, made from a synthetic polymer made up of silicon and oxygen atoms, has a geopolitical behavior.

But the truth of the world is elusive.

You have a slight headache.

Perhaps it is that dull fear, the horror of others, when they look like you.

The afternoon that the Kremlin bombs the television tower in Kiev and warns the population of various areas of the capital to leave their homes in the face of an upcoming attack, you return from work by car and lose the signal of the station when you enter the bypass tunnel.

For a few minutes, nothing happens anywhere.

But the reserve pilot lights up.

He has to refuel.

Forty euros, you tell the man at the gas station.

Well, better fifty, you rectify.

It will be over soon.

When you start up again, the needle barely marks the middle of the gas tank.

It is inevitable to wonder how much time is left.

There is a snake of military weapons that measures 64 kilometers and advances towards Kiev.

It gets closer every time.

“Many children have remained on the border, more than four hundred, at three in the morning, like a small herd, but they were not children that we are used to seeing suffer on television, but blondes, with blue eyes;

that is very important”: it is an informative, the testimony of a Spanish man who has managed to leave Ukraine.

In 1939, thousands of people crossed the border with France fleeing the Spanish civil war.

In France alone, there were 440,000 Spanish refugees.

But also Mexico, Argentina, the Soviet Union, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the United States, the United Kingdom.

Today, more than 82 million people in the world live forcibly away from their homes due to wars, violence, violations of fundamental rights, extreme poverty, desertification, floods.

Syria is the first country of origin of refugees in the world.

That war started eleven years ago and still.

Nearly seven million Syrians have been forced to leave their country.

Then there are Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Eritrea.

And more.

The European Union will allow the unlimited reception of Ukrainians displaced by the war and the temporary residence permit to move and work.

In addition, Ukrainians who have arrived in Spain in recent months will have residence and work permits.

You remember a sign, under the clock and the flag of the Madrid City Council, that said:

.

2015 was a century ago.

Spain was only a transit country.

That is also very important.

You remember that you did not go to the demonstration on February 19, two weeks ago, where 500,000 signatures were requested for 500,000 people in an irregular situation.

You remember you didn't even sign.

You only gave a couple of

.

On the seventh day of the wicked war in Ukraine, there are already more than a million people fleeing death.

Women saying goodbye to their children at the border, placing their lives in other hands.

They take them to safety and some return to the siege, because the men are not allowed to leave.

And there are mothers who have children who are already men.

A huge explosion near the central station of Kiev causes thousands of evacuees.

You must sleep, tomorrow the alarm clock will ring, a little after seven, and another day awaits you in which you will have work, gasoline, gas, electricity, water and also food.

Friday dawns with the news of the Zaporizhia plant, the largest in Europe, taken by Russian forces.

The fire has been put out.

There has been no leak of radioactive material.

No one can run from Energodar anymore.

More information

War in Ukraine, last minute live

What does it mean to be a people?

Aimé Césaire said that a civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a wounded civilization.

What does it mean, at this moment, to be a people?

Who does this land belong to?

The hands of the Moroccan woman who collects the red gold that you put in your mouth, the sweat of the Peruvian man who nailed the wood to the door frame of your bedroom, the lumbago of the Romanian woman who cleans your toilet every week.

Solidarity undergoes different gradations in this wounded civilization.

The restlessness increases.

It will lead to anxiety.

And as much as you update the news, as much as you read, as much as you watch videos where crying and barbarism, you can't make terror your own.

Yours, as much yours as the panic at the word nuclear.

To the word now.

To the word here.

But one day it will come, Pavese already said,

, your own eyes, and then, don't worry, then yes, you will have understood everything.

Lara Moreno

is a writer.

In 2020 she published the essay

(Destiny).

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