In the end, the machinery of conquest always reduces human life to the most humiliating arithmetic. A grandmother weighs the certainty of an empty pantry against the lethal lottery of an unpaved road. A grandfather measures the distance between his doorstep and a bag of flour not in kilometers, but in the density of tripwires and unexploded artillery shells. In the occupied Ukrainian town of Oleshky, just across the swollen Dnipro River in the south, that arithmetic has governed daily existence for years. To read of civilians walking through active minefields simply to find bread is not merely to encounter a dispatch from a European war zone; it is to recognize the oldest, most brutal story of imperial subjugation known to our world.
Oleshky was already a landscape of sorrow before the winter set in. It was here, downstream from the Nova Kakhovka dam, that torrents of water submerged entire neighborhoods when the barrier was breached, drowning livestock, washing away gardens, and turning low-lying communities into toxic marshes. For the residents who remained, mostly the elderly, the poor, and those physically unable to flee, the flood was followed by an even deeper isolation. Russian forces turned the settlement into a heavily militarized buffer, cloaked in checkpoints and seeded with ordnance. When food supplies withered and local shops were shuttered or looted, survival became an exercise in terror. Stepping out to forage meant navigating a perimeter designed to keep human beings penned like cattle under the watchful gaze of foreign soldiers.
In the corridors of power, whether in Moscow or in Western capitals that treat the conflict as an abstract chess match, these human realities are routinely erased. Russian state television dresses the invasion in the gilded robes of historical destiny and anti-hegemonic triumph, claiming to shield Russian speakers from Western encirclement. But there is nothing anti-hegemonic about forcing pensioners to navigate minefields for a tin of fish. There is no liberation in a garrison that cuts off electricity, water, and medicine, leaving civilians to rot in the damp ruins of their own homes. The occupation of southern Ukraine is an exercise in classic imperial extraction: land cleared of its rightful inhabitants, resources appropriated by a foreign army, and human dignity dismantled through systematic violence.
Too often in discussions across the Global South, observers fall into the intellectual trap of false equivalence or selective silence. Decades of Western hypocrisy, from the wreckage of Iraq to the unconditional backing of colonial displacement in Palestine, have understandably bred deep cynicism toward European and American moralizing. When Western leaders suddenly discover the sanctity of national sovereignty only when European borders are breached, the irritation across Africa, Latin America, and Asia is justified. Yet our rightful disdain for Western double standards cannot become an excuse to excuse or minimize the crimes of another imperial power. An empire based in Moscow is no less predatory than one directed from Washington, London, or Paris. When the boot is on your neck, it matters very little what language the soldier speaks.
The struggle of the peasant or the shopkeeper in Oleshky is intimately familiar to anyone who knows the history of the Global South. It is the story of Vietnamese farmers dodging cluster bomblets in their rice paddies; it is the reality of Angolan villagers losing limbs to unmarked landmines decades after foreign proxies withdrew; it is the daily ordeal of Palestinians in Gaza navigating sniper fire to find a potable sip of water. In every case, ordinary people are stripped of their land and agency by a heavily armed occupier who insists that their suffering is merely collateral damage on the road to a glorious civilizational victory. The communiqués issued from diplomatic summits never record the sound of a plastic bucket scraping against the bottom of a dry well or the terror of hearing a drone overhead while carrying groceries.
If progressive internationalism means anything today, it must mean an uncompromising solidarity with the occupied, whoever and wherever they may be. Our solidarity cannot be conditioned by the ideological posture of the oppressor, nor by the geopolitical convenience of the moment. It must begin and end with the human beings who are forced to scavenge for sustenance under the shadow of heavy artillery. To turn away from the people of Oleshky because their tormentor claims to stand against Western dominance is to abandon the core moral promise of anti-colonial politics.
Those who recently made the harrowing journey across the front line to Ukrainian-held territory described their survival as coming back from hell. For those left behind in the ruins, the hell continues, quiet and largely untelevised. As long as great powers believe they have the divine right to carve spheres of influence out of other nations' soil, ordinary families will continue to walk through minefields just to feed their children. Our task is not to choose between empires, but to insist, patiently and without apology, that no human being should ever have to risk their life for a loaf of bread.