The War Is Not Far Away Because the Map Fits on One Screen

A war can be geographically close and emotionally distant at the same time. Modern life has made this easier. Kyiv appears on the same screen as a football result, a restaurant recommendation and a video of somebody’s dog refusing to enter a bath.

We absorb the images. We shake our heads. Then the algorithm gives us something lighter because it has correctly understood that outrage has a limited retention period.

The screen lies politely

The map from Warsaw to Kyiv fits comfortably on a laptop. The human distance does not. A missile strike is translated into a headline, a number and perhaps a short clip. The number is factual and inadequate. It cannot show the interrupted breakfast, the missing room, the relative waiting for a call or the person who had already survived several previous attacks and had started believing that survival was becoming normal.

On 2 July, the United Nations again described a deadly pattern of strikes in densely populated areas and noted that civilian casualties had risen sharply compared with the same period a year earlier. The sentence is official, cautious and terrible.

We have become skilled at reading terrible sentences without allowing them to ruin the afternoon.

Proximity is responsibility, not ownership

Poland does not own Ukraine’s tragedy. Ukrainians do not exist to teach Europe lessons about courage. They are not symbols placed on our border for moral education. They are people defending their country while the rest of us debate the acceptable cost of helping them continue.

Proximity does create responsibility. It means refusing the comfort of pretending that the result will remain contained whatever happens. It means understanding that refugees, trade, energy, cyberattacks, sabotage, military movement and public fear do not stop at a neat line because a commentator has used the phrase “regional conflict.”

My hatred is not a programme

I have moments when anger becomes something close to hatred. I hear another story of a strike on civilians, another claim that Ukraine somehow caused its own invasion, another lecture about understanding Russia’s security concerns, and I feel the simple ugly emotion.

The emotion is real. It is not a policy and it is not a moral framework. Hatred of Russians as a people would be lazy, unjust and strategically useless. The proper object is Russian aggression, imperial ideology, state violence, deliberate propaganda and the choices of those who sustain them.

That distinction does not make the judgement mild. It makes it accurate.

The war is close enough to matter and far enough for most of us to continue our day. That uncomfortable combination may be one of the defining facts of life in Eastern Europe now.