There are honestly a lot of parallels between the war in Ukraine and WWI, Putin’s actions remind me a lot of the leaders of some countries in WWI who were super wrapped up in their egos to the point of wanting a “gentleman’s war”, only to end up killing and traumatizing millions. Putin assumed he could just swoop in and crush the Ukrainians, much like many leaders in WWI had such nationalistic fervor that crushing other nations would be easy, instead he is now bogged down in a horrible forever war.

Of course it’s not all the same because the Ukrainians are clearly the victims here, but I feel like Putin is more comparable to a WWI style leader who just makes one suicidal push after the next than the Nazis who did in fact have some victories, not to mention that the Russian army does not do well against more modern military technologies.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

During six weeks in a coma, Bilyak underwent over 10 surgeries, including his jaw, hand, and heel, to recover from injuries he received April 22 driving over a pair of anti-tank mines.

Ukraine is facing a future with upward of 20,000 amputees, many of them soldiers who are also suffering psychological trauma from their time at the front.

Yurchuk has himself become the chief motivator for new arrivals from the front, pushing them as they heal from their wounds and teaching them as they learn to live and move with their new disabilities.

That’s a really complicated adjustment to make and it needs to be made with another human being,” said Dr. Emily Mayhew, a medical historian at Imperial College who specializes in blast injuries.

There are not nearly enough prosthetic specialists in Ukraine to handle the growing need, said Olha Rudneva, the head of the Superhumans center for rehabilitating Ukrainian military amputees.

Lytvynchuk, a former battalion commander, draws strength from his family, especially his 4-year-old daughter who etched a unicorn on his prosthetic leg.

The original article contains 999 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

It’s going to be “interesting” to track the narrative and cultural revisions of this war in the west as time goes on. However unjustified/wrong Russia’s act of aggression is and noble/just Ukraine’s defence is, I have not been able to shake thoughts of the Iraq war in regards to mainstream western treatment of the war and just how much it seems to have forgotten that war is hell. I recall, just as it was starting, it was more acceptable or normal to talk about how the war lasting a long while would probably be the worst outcome simply due to the human toll and what are/were the likely inevitable outcomes. However true that was then or is now (I personally have no clue or expertise at all), forgetting that this human toll matters, at least for us to not forget that it’s always there, seems to have generally been pushed aside (unless that’s just the bubble I’m living in).