In the final analysis all wars are stupid.
Yes, some like the Second World War were fought in the name of good against evil and in the cause of freedom, but ultimately the human cost of any conflict is a terrible indictment of mankind's apparent inability to find a better solution to our differences.
I was reminded of this yet again last week while visiting those communities straddling the frontlines of the war in eastern Ukraine.
It's almost exactly one year on from the start of full hostilities there, some of which I was to witness first hand last April in flashpoints like Donetsk and Sloviansk.
For the record can I point out straight away my understanding of the fact that most places here have two spellings one Ukrainian one Russian, serving itself as a reminder of the political divisions that currently wrack the region. For convenience though in this instance I will stick to using the Ukrainian spelling.
Returning now a year on to the country's volatile eastern Luhansk region, I was struck above all else by two things. The first is what appears to be the utter pointlessness of this conflict, and the second the terrible human cost of its recklessness. That this is a bitterly contested war is in no doubt, a reminder of which came in an Amnesty International report over the last few days in which the human rights group says it has evidence that pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine summarily killed four Ukrainian soldiers they were holding as prisoners. The victims were shot they say at point blank range.
Talk to people in this region and they will tell you this is nothing new, such views borne out by
rights groups who insist both sides in the conflict are guilty of abuse and atrocities.
Combatants aside as ever though it is ordinary civilians that are bearing the brunt of the pain and hardship this war has brought.
In the last year alone the fighting has claimed some 6,000 lives and left more than a million people without homes. Over the last week I have met some of the people behind these statistics.
Among them was young mother Nadezhda Kalashnikova who one day last November was walking with her nine-year-old daughter Valentina in the village of Triokhizbenka when a shell dropped from the sky.
When Nadezhda regained consciousness in hospital she had not only lost her left leg but her daughter too. In that same village I listened also to eighty-year-old Maria Petrovna Goncharova recall how during the Second World War, Nazis troops bundled her family into a truck and they feared for their lives before later being released. Today Maria and her hsuband still fear for their lives after a mortar round destroyed their house and they lived for three bitterly cold winter weeks without electricity using only firewood for cooking what food they had.
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