I'm more concerned that a lot of friends in our parish called for war and justify censorship or strict sanctions. I guess this are not Christian values.

Sure, we should help. But not only Ukrainian's but all people that are damaged by war. We should also pray for our enemies.

I am greatly in support of Ukraine and the destruction of the invaders, but

> the suffering and pains of that country are the greatest seen in many decades

Could this really be true?

> Could this really be true?

The shear amount of large-scale artillery barrages going on is large enough to be picked up by NASA's FIRMS satellite. And there seems to be many Twitter threads where people collect information from that FIRMS / Forest Fire satellite to document the artillery strikes in realtime.

Not even in the earlier wars of Russian aggression (Second Chechen War or Georgia War) seem to have this level of artillery.

That being said: a fair amount of it is Ukrainians counter-artillery striking Russians and fighting back (which Chechnya and Georgia were largely unable to do effectively). So perhaps your point is that Ukraine isn't a one-sided massacre and has mounted at least some effective means of defense?

Ukraine would be suffering more if Russia managed to get within Artillery Strike of Kyiv for example, but the Ukrainian forces have stalled out that advance... largely keeping Kyiv safe from destruction (well... to a greater degree than we've seen so far anyway). Mariupol on the other hand isn't as lucky, and widespread artillery is clearly being used upon that city.

With humanitarian corridors closed, its clear that Mariupol is being sieged, Leningrad style, and there's widespread reports of starvation to death. There's also reports of many civilians being transferred to Russian camps. Then there are also the famous "hospital strikes" and "theater strikes" have have killed hundreds alone.

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But I guess you're right. Things could be worse for some other cities / areas who were unable to fight back against their oppressors. Most of the genocide events of the past decades are pretty horrible as well.

But there needs to be something to be said about the huge, large-scale use of artillery that really hasn't been seen since WW2-era mass combat.

Countries don't suffer or experience pain, people (and other living things) do.

The notion that individual suffering can be added up for some total of inhumanity is somewhat dubious, as are comparisons of individual deaths: is it the number of casualties that matters, does it suffering experienced before death factor in, and does it make a difference if it was caused intentionally and without good cause, accidentally, naturally, etc.?

But yeah, it's rather gruesome. Syria is very similar, for some reason.

> Could this really be true?

In the years following the Second World War, a timeframe that could be construed as ‘many decades’, I’d call it true.

Unless your reading of the referent is ‘all humans everywhere’ in which case, it’s probably debatable. Either way, it’s bad.

I think it's context specific.

Suffering caused by armed conflict, in Europe? Probably. (I'm from Sarajevo and I think we are a close second if not the first.)

Mass suffering by any cause anywhere? Between the Tsunamis and diseases and earthquakes and awful civil wars and genocides, sadly, I think the competition is quite stiff :(

There is also the pandemic that killed around 1 in 400 worldwide and is still causing around 15'000 deaths per day.

Usually elder people (average 78y) with other comorbidities. Yes, we are mortal.

Seems unlikely given wars that are going on now, like Yemen, or resource wars like Congo, or genocide like Burma, Rwanda, Cambodia…

Humans’ abilities to make others suffer continually amazes and horrifies me.

I think that this is larger and more intensive than the Yemen war - it seems that already in this month the combatants in Ukraine have had as much or more casualties than all the years of Yemen war; Yemen has had 15000 civilians directly killed by war but I think Mariupol alone will see that much when the fighting ends and bodies are dug out of the rubble, if we look at displaced persons, Wikipedia states that Yemen has displaced 4 million but this conflict has already displaced 10 million, etc.

The last weeks in Ukraine have seen more damage than Yemen-like conflicts had on their worse year, the Russian invasion firepower is simply on a different scale than what Yemen or Houthi forces could muster. The intensity of this war, as a mass full scale industrial land war, actually is unusually large.

This gets at what I was talking about. I think people in other regions have also suffered greatly. This is not to detract from the suffering of the Ukrainians, but is just to clarify the facts.