Kyiv’s Wall of Remembrance to 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers already killed vs. Russian aggression | Thoughts on my video at St Michaels Monastery

This is a simple post. I wanted to share my video of the Wall of Remembrance in Kyiv fo;r 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed fighting Russian aggression since 2014. I estimated there were photos of about 3,100 of these soldiers on the wall. I made the video 26 October 2021; by then, the photos went to July 2020.

I was in Kyiv for a congress, and the video was spontaneous, intended for family back in Berlin and the States.

This wall is around the St. Michaels Monastery. I hadn’t come up this path to St. Michaels and on into central Kyiv before. So, as I was making this video, I was discovering the soldiers’ memorial for the first time. On other visits,, I’d taken the cable car up, and passed by the Maidan martyrs’ memorial wall – which is at the end of this video. This time I had walked some kilometers, at sunset, from my hotel across from the Rada and the Presidential Palace, which are below, at the level of the Dnieper River.

Why am I posting this video now, for the public?

One reason is to put human faces on the geopolitics I analyze in this blog and in my work.

More particularly, I was reading about the classified briefings on Capital Hill last week for senators and representatives by US Secretary of Defense Austin and Secretary of State Blinken. They reportedly outlined various scenarios they deem likely for what sort of military aggression Putin is planning.

The numbers of Ukrainian casualties they reportedly projected – mostly civilians – number in the many thousands depending on the particular invasion scenario Moscow chooses (see the NYT). Of course, there are disagreements between European and USA officials as to which scenario Putin will choose; but that is irrelevant as to the essential character of what Putin’s Russian Federation is threatening: an offensive, an invasion, a war of aggression. Under any of the scenarios, many more Ukrainians will die than have died since 2014, … and I was thinking that their faces will look exactly like the faces here in my video.

So here is a medium-to-long-term scenario:

Putin’s aides & generals should remember that an invasion is a war crime. Recall, after the Balkan wars, Milošević, Karadžić plus over 100 more Serb perpetrators of Balkan war crimes went to The Hague for trial.

During the Balkan wars, I am rather sure the Serb chauvinist leadership never imagined they would ever be sent to the Hague. Indeed, perhaps they could have imagined the bad luck of somehow being captured by NATO forces and being sent for trial. However, I am rather sure they never imagined that their own country might end up arresting them and handing them over to the International Court of Justice to face trial for crimes against humanity. But, that is exactly what happened in most cases.

Meanwhile, in the immediate future Ukrainians will resist. I am quite sure of this. They have been doing so already for over seven years.