War is the loudest form of stupidity.
Four years ago today—February 24, 2022—Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border, and the world changed. Not in the way Vladimir Putin imagined. Not with a swift "special military operation" wrapped up in days. Instead, what began was the largest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War, a grinding, bleeding wound that has now claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions more. I'm writing this from my wheelchair in Tirana, Albania, and I can tell you: distance doesn't dull the horror. It sharpens it.
I've spent my life studying the stars. The universe doesn't care about borders or flags. But down here, on this small blue planet, borders and flags get people killed.
The Lie That Started It All
On February 21, 2022—three days before the invasion—Putin delivered what analysts at CSIS called "a bizarre and at times unhinged speech," laying out grievances about NATO expansion, about the supposed illegitimacy of Ukrainian identity, about the fantasy that Ukrainians and Russians are "one people" who must share a common political fate. He invoked history the way a drunk invokes an old grudge at a bar—selectively, loudly, and with no interest in the truth.
Let me simplify the science of propaganda for you, because it works like a bad equation. You take a real variable—shared Slavic heritage, genuine post-Soviet grievances—and you multiply it by a fabricated constant: the claim that Ukraine "is not even a country." The result? A number that doesn't exist in reality but looks convincing on paper. Putin's entire justification was built on this kind of mathematical fraud.
The Russian regime claimed it needed to "denazify" Ukraine. RAND Corporation research has documented how Russia's narratives relied on ethnic slurs and dehumanising language to justify violence against Ukrainians . Denazify a country led by a Jewish president. The irony doesn't stretch—it snaps.
A Putsch, Not a People's War
Here's what matters, and what too many commentators miss: the Russian people didn't want this war.
Alexander Baunov, a journalist and political analyst formerly at the Carnegie Moscow Center, called what happened "a putsch—the capture of the state by a clique bent on its own imperial projects and survival." He said plainly: "There was no demand for this in Russian society" . Many Russians have accepted the war—sent their sons and husbands to die in it—but nobody was clamouring for the bombardment of Kherson or Zaporizhzhia. The capture of Crimea in 2014 had been celebrated, yes. But a full-scale invasion? That was Putin's project. Putin's ego. Putin's catastrophe.
I want to be very clear about something. When I say I want a Russia free from Putin, I'm not speaking against the Russian people. I'm speaking for them.
I grew up in a country—Albania—that knows what it means to live under a regime that claims to speak for its people while crushing them. I know the smell of propaganda. It smells like fresh paint over rot. The Russian people deserve better than a plutocratic regime that sends their children to die in Ukrainian mud while oligarchs park their yachts in Dubai.
What Putin Got Wrong About Ukraine
Putin's grand miscalculation was about identity. He genuinely believed that enough Ukrainians—especially in the east—would welcome Russian forces, or at least accept reintegration into Moscow's sphere of influence . He wagered that shared language and family ties across the border would override the desire for sovereignty.
He was spectacularly wrong.
The past three decades—and especially the years since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity—witnessed a massive consolidation of Ukrainian civic identity. This isn't just about Ukrainian speakers in Lviv. It's about Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Kharkiv and Odesa who chose their country over Putin's fantasy of a reunited Slavic empire . The war didn't fracture Ukraine. It welded it together.
I think about this a lot. Identity isn't something handed down from a Kremlin speech. It's forged in choices—daily, painful, sometimes impossible choices. I know something about that. When you live with a body that doesn't cooperate, when dystonia turns every movement into a negotiation, you learn that identity isn't what happens to you. It's what you decide to be despite what happens to you.
Ukraine decided.
The Cost Nobody Can Calculate
Let me give you the numbers that keep me awake at night. Russia now occupies more than 19% of Ukrainian territory as of mid-2025 . Hundreds of thousands are dead—the exact figures vary, and that vagueness is itself an obscenity . Millions have fled their homes. Cities that once hummed with the sound of trams and children's laughter now echo with the dull thud of artillery.
And the cost isn't only Ukrainian.
Inside Russia, the noose has tightened beyond recognition. Before the war, you could still find pockets of independent journalism, still hear dissenting voices. One of the New Yorker correspondent's friends had spent ten days in jail just for protesting construction in his neighbourhood—and joked that "he met a lot of interesting people" . That dark humour has curdled into something far grimmer. Alexey Navalny was "slowly being tortured to death in prison" , and he did die there—a man who represented the possibility of a different Russia, silenced forever.
The war has consumed Russia's future as surely as it has devastated Ukraine's present.
The Geopolitical Reckoning
Three years into the full-scale invasion, there's still no clear path to ending the violence . The story shifts daily. Negotiations stall, restart, collapse. European leaders oscillate between resolve and the temptation of appeasement—as shown by the phone call between German Chancellor Scholz and Putin in November 2024 .
Here's what the research tells us, stripped of diplomatic niceties. The German Marshall Fund's analysis is blunt: Putin's ambition "extends beyond subjugating Ukraine." Russia's war is part of a larger aspiration to assert domination over a perceived sphere of influence that includes regions of NATO member states . The International Crisis Group warns that even if Kyiv loses on the battlefield, Moscow would face "a hostile Ukrainian population" that it would struggle to control, with European capitals looking to make life harder for the Kremlin .
In other words, there's no scenario where Putin truly "wins." There are only scenarios with different distributions of suffering.
And let's not forget the nuclear shadow. Russia's nuclear signalling has partly achieved its purpose—the West has self-imposed red lines and hesitated when calibrating support to Ukraine. The high cost of that cautiousness, as the International Centre for Defence and Security notes, "is being paid by Ukraine" .
Why I Can't Look Away
People sometimes ask me—Gerd, you're an astrophysicist, you run a science communication platform with tens of thousands of followers, you live with a disability that makes every day a physical battle. Why do you spend your energy on geopolitics?
Because science without conscience is just mechanics.
I founded FreeAstroScience on the belief that science is a tool for human and cultural development. Not just for publishing papers or launching satellites, but for building the kind of world where knowledge replaces fear, where curiosity defeats dogma. You can't champion that vision and then stay silent when a nuclear-armed state invades its neighbour based on historical fabrications and imperial nostalgia.
I've had a DBS implant put in and taken out. I've been through surgeries that left me wondering if I'd ever sit upright again. I studied astronomy at the University of Bologna and physics at the University of Milan from a wheelchair, in lecture halls not designed for people like me. I did an Erasmus semester at Sabancı University in Istanbul, navigating a city of 16 million people with wheels instead of legs.
Never give up. That's not just my motto—it's my operating system.
And it's what I see in Ukraine. A nation that refuses to give up, despite everything.
A Stupid and Immoral War
Let me say it without diplomatic cushioning: this is a stupid and immoral war.
Stupid because it has achieved the opposite of every stated Russian objective. NATO is stronger and larger. Ukrainian identity is more consolidated than ever. Russia's economy is warped into a war machine that enriches oligarchs while ordinary Russians bury their sons. The regime that was supposed to project strength has revealed brittleness.
Immoral because no geopolitical grievance—real or imagined—justifies the bombing of maternity hospitals, the deportation of children, the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. The regime invested decades into commemorating victory over fascism in World War II; to then bomb Kyiv and Kharkiv, "just as the fascists had once done," stretches irony past its breaking point .
This war was wanted by a plutocratic clique that has humiliated Russia and its valiant people. It wasn't born from the Russian soul. It was born from the paranoia and ambition of one man and the circle of enablers who profit from his power.
What I Pray For
I'm not a theologian. I'm a physicist. I deal in equations and observations, in data and doubt. But I also deal in hope—because without hope, what's the point of any equation?
I pray for a just peace in Ukraine. Not a peace that rewards aggression. Not a peace that hands over territory like loose change. A peace that respects sovereignty, that accounts for the dead, that gives Ukrainians the security guarantees they need to rebuild. Research suggests Ukraine can defend itself effectively after a ceasefire by creating a multilayered territorial defence system for the roughly 80% of its pre-2014 territory it still controls . That's a start. But security on paper means nothing without the political will to enforce it.
I pray for a Russia free from Putin. A Russia where journalists don't disappear, where opposition leaders don't die in Arctic prison colonies, where the word "democracy" isn't a punchline. The Russian people have produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. They deserve a government worthy of their history—not one that weaponises it.
I pray that this will happen. I don't know when. I don't know how. But I know that history bends, sometimes violently, toward the collapse of regimes built on lies.
Looking Up
Tonight, if the skies over Tirana are clear, I'll wheel myself to the window and look up. The same stars shine over Kyiv and Moscow, over the trenches of Donbas and the rubble of Mariupol. Light that left those stars hundreds of years ago, long before anyone drew the borders we're now killing over.
The universe is indifferent to our wars. But we don't have to be.
Four years is too long. One day was too long. Every day this war continues is a day stolen from the future—from Ukrainian children who should be learning physics instead of hiding in basements, from Russian mothers who should be welcoming their sons home instead of receiving flags.
Never give up on peace. Never give up on justice. Never give up on the belief that human beings are capable of something better than this.
I'm Gerd Dani, writing from a wheelchair in Tirana, president of Free AstroScience, and I refuse to look away.
This article was written on February 24, 2026, the fourth anniversary of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The scientific and geopolitical concepts discussed here have been simplified for general understanding. The opinions expressed are my own—rooted in a lifetime of fighting battles, some with my body, some with my mind, all with my heart.
Post a Comment