In Ukraine-Russia war, echoes of WWI with artillery duels, trenches and shell-blasted landscapes
- Satellite images show fields strewn with vast craters, landscapes comparable to those in World War I
- Ukraine’s president has compared scenes in his country’s east with ‘the ruins of Verdun’ in France
Looking at the shell-blasted, trench-marked landscapes of the front lines in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from above, it’s easy to see why experts and leaders have drawn parallels with World War I.
Satellite images like those from US firm Maxar Technologies portray “war landscapes comparable to those visible during the First World War, totally destroyed villages all along the front line,” said Nicolas Beaupre, a board member at a French association for research into the 1914-18 conflict.
Pictures taken last week showed fields strewn with vast craters near the town of Sloviansk and evidence of shell blasts along the Siverskyi Donets river.
But beyond the visual similarities, the hopes and fears stoked internationally by the conflict and its difference from recent fighting elsewhere bear comparison with the “Great War” – even if the thousands of casualties in Ukraine over four months fall far short of the thousands per day seen over 100 years ago.
In 2022, many thought the fighting would be over in days or weeks as Russian forces advancing from Belarus threatened the capital Kyiv – recalling the World War I mantra that things would be “over by Christmas”.
A quick war would have been in line with recent battles around the Russian periphery, including Moscow’s 2008 attack on Georgia, its 2014 occupation of Crimea or the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict of 2020 over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.