BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. Look and see the first 15 days of March 2026… 1483rd day of the ongoing inhuman Russian full-scale peaceful “Christian” terror… There is a verse in Lamentations that does not try to explain anything. It only says: “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” (something like that depending on a translation). Not a theodicy. Not a lesson. Just look. What follows is an attempt to look clearly at fifteen days in March 2026 in Ukraine… first in the language of military statistics, then in the more terrible language of human cost, and finally in the only language that remains when both run out…

In the first fifteen days of March 2026, Russia deployed 200,279 individual weapons against Ukraine: an average of over 13,000 per day, or one every six seconds, around the clock.

Russians conducted 1,305 air strikes and dropped 4,057 guided bombs across the country. Two major infrastructure attacks, which we call “cherry nights” (March 6–7 and March 13–14), involved 509 and 498 aerial weapons and used 113 missiles: Zircon hypersonic, Iskander-M ballistic, Kalibr and Kh-101 cruise, and Kh-59/69 guided missiles. Long-range strike UAVs (Shahed, Gerber, Italmas, and others) totaled 2,637. There were 136,169 kamikaze drones, hunting civilians, eroding Ukrainian air defenses, civil infrastructure, and morale nonstop. Artillery hit Ukrainian settlements 54,724 times, about 3,650 daily, including 1,274 from multiple launch rocket systems…

These numbers do not fall into emptiness. In January 2026, Russian attacks killed at least 161 Ukrainian civilians and injured 757, a toll that, according to the UN, is itself an undercount. February brought heavier fire: roughly 220 killed and approximately 1,000 injured. The month opened with a massive combined strike on February 3 that the energy provider DTEK called the most powerful blow to Ukraine’s energy sector since the start of the year. The first fifteen days of March added an estimated 100 killed and over 350 injured, figures that will rise as UN reporting catches up to reality. Across these eleven weeks alone, somewhere above 480 people were killed, and over 2,100 were injured: verified civilian casualties only, not counting the thousands of soldiers whose blood waters the same ground…

It is the fifth year of the ongoing unprovoked full-scale Russian war of terror. Not a metaphor: a fact that accumulates like sediment, layer upon layer of mornings that begin with air raid sirens and end with tallies. Ukrainians have learned to count in a particular way: not by years or seasons, but by strikes. How many last night? How many were downed? How many got through? Then checking with each other every single night and morning, if we are still here, still alive… The 136,169 short-range kamikaze drones in 15 days means that, somewhere in Ukraine, in every hour of those 15 days, roughly 380 small machines of death were hunting human beings. And still people go to work. Still, a mother walks a child to school between alerts, calculating the risk with the quiet mathematics of those who have no other arithmetic left…

But the phrase “between alerts” is misleading. For at least six million people living in cities and villages near the frontline (Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kostiantynivka, Odesa, and many others), there is no real “between.” And with each “cherry night” for the territory of the whole country… The strikes do not pause to let life happen. Instead, our lives occur within the strikes, uninterrupted, because there is no other option for us to keep up with the job description, ministry, and ongoing, endless volunteer work… It is not our resilience that is meant to inspire outsiders. It is simply our refusal to stop existing, regardless of how people outside name it…

And perhaps that is the question the fifth year forces on everyone watching from elsewhere: not “how do they endure it,” but “what does it mean that endurance has become the entire content of ordinary life?”

The church has always known how to honor the dead and martyrs… the memorials, the candles, the words, the research… after dozens of years, with more sanitized memory and theological perspectives… But what does it owe the living, now… now, in the fifth year, while the toll still climbs? 480 verified civilian dead in eleven weeks. Each is someone’s whole world. Does the God who counts our hairs also count these, and if so, what does it mean that the tally grows, and the weapons persist? He promised bread of life instead of stones of death, but in the fifth year of our “resilient” prayer, the stones of death keep coming… Does the evangelical church count the victims killed by aggressors in war-affected countries, not the aggressors? Now, not after dozens of years afterward…

So when the global institutional evangelical church finally finishes its careful theological reflection on the problem of evil… when the last conference paper is submitted, and the last footnote verified… what comfort will it have left for the widow sitting alone in her March 2026 kitchen in Zaporizhzhia, her hands trembling as she remembers, in every aching bone, which way to open the window?

There is a word in Ukraine – витримати – which means something between endurance and staying true to oneself under pressure… It is neither heroism nor numbness… I would define it simply: remaining yourself… After 200,279 Russian individual weapons in fifteen days, I ask – not rhetorically, but in genuine bewilderment – how long can a people in Ukraine be asked to витримати before those outside who claim power and discuss “complicatedness” politically and institutionally must name their watching honestly? I do not know… I did not mean to offend you… just unsanitized existential honesty and reflection here and now, in the midst… Keep your children away from war, Taras D (Ukraine)