Op-ed by Irwin Redlener in The Kyiv Independent
The hotel where we like to stay in Lviv, one of Europe's most picturesque cities, sits on a small square, a block from City Hall. Cafes and cobblestones, church towers and small shops enchant visitors, though the city bustles with locals going about their daily lives.
Kitty-corner to our hotel is the Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church, a 17th-century stone building that has long served the military and their families. Each morning during our visit, we woke to the sounds of funerals for soldiers from Lviv who had died on battlefields 600 miles to the east.
We watched the processions leave the church — the priest and dozens of mourners carrying a coffin through the city center, accompanied by a military dirge. Some of the fallen were professional soldiers; most, however, were not.
They were shopkeepers, teachers, entrepreneurs, ordinary Ukrainians who volunteered to defend their country from Vladimir Putin's invasion. Their pictures are displayed on easels along the corridor by the pews inside the church.
These soldiers died in a war provoked by an outrageous, illegal invasion — one that Russia justified with the false claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis and, anyway, he asserts, wasn't even a legitimate nation. That is the war that has cost Putin, by conservative estimate, 1.2 million of his own troops and made Russia a pariah to much of the world.
