Reflections | If Russia-Ukraine conflict seems long already, consider that China’s longest war lasted nearly 300 years
- It’s been 11 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If that seems long ago, remember the Hundred Years’ War or the 200 years of The Crusades
- Consider too the conflict that began between China’s Han dynasty and Xiongnu nomads in 200BC. The last of the nomads were not defeated until AD89
I hate to start the new year with armed conflicts but it has been close to a year since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. If one considers the Russian annexation of Crimea in February 2014 as the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, then the conflict has been ongoing for close to eight years.
Sadly, that’s how it is with media cycles and short attention spans. Our moral outrage has short expiry dates.
Tens of thousands have been killed after 11 months of fighting and millions of lives have been upended. War is a stain on the human condition that is incomprehensible. Nations and civilisations would sacrifice countless lives, scorching the earth and destroying entire cities in the process, for goals that could be as immaterial and ephemeral as ideology.
In the history of human warfare, the Russo-Ukrainian War is not a particularly long one. England and France fought for 116 years in the eponymous Hundred Years’ War from 1337 to 1453. The Crusades were a series of wars between Christians and Muslims that lasted almost 200 years from the 11th to the 13th centuries.
