Lviv under attack: will Europe finally wake up to Russian threat?

Half of my 'Czech bubble' is still discussing yesterday's election results. I myself thought and wrote a lot about it yesterday. The other half, of course, is already on the topic of the nightly shelling across all of Ukraine.

"Tonight – especially over Lviv – is a good reminder of how important all this politics is on the one hand, and on the other, how temporary and fleeting it all is. Everything is relative."

While in another country the desire for a fuller refrigerator has overcome the instinct for self-preservation, we here are once again counting explosions all night.

Dozens of explosions – Shaheds, cruise missiles, Kinzhals, then Shaheds again. And the house trembles. "Oh, our guys shot down a Shahed!", "No, that's a missile, listen to that echo...". "That one sounds like a direct hit...". Machine-gun fire as an accompaniment to Ukrainian sleep, or what's left of it. We thank our air defense. It's hard to even imagine what the casualties and destruction could have been from such massive attacks.

It all adds up to a completely schizophrenic picture. Sunday morning, people will come out of their basements and put away their sleeping bags from the hallways. And they will go – some to church, others to the book forum. There are fires in the city; information about victims and casualties is being updated. Part of the city is without electricity. A completely abnormal life has become a total routine.

And this is right here, very close, you can walk to the European Union, it's not even a hundred kilometers away.

It's a shame that we can't seem to reach a crucial part of the European communities. One wants to believe that they will be better prepared for this. But for now, it's striking how many people still do not understand the scale of the threat hanging over Europe.

Source

About the author. Radomyr Mokryk, Ukrainian historian, culturologist, researcher at the Institute of East European Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.

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