Exactly four years of war, as of today. The cemeteries in Ukraine are larger than they should be. Fresh graves change the landscapes, as seen from a car or a train; the short spans of life, seen inscribed in stone, alter the reaction of the heart.
I find myself on daily walks counting to two hundred and sixteen.
Uzhhorod, February 2026
Towns in Ukraine recall local men and women killed in combat in public places. One such memorial here in Uzhhorod is on a hill that rises over the River Uzh, on a square named after the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresia, on a wall that faces the Greek Catholic cathedral.
Two hundred sixteen is an assemblage: 2x2x2x3x3x3, two cubed times three cubed; or (2x5x2x5x2) + (2x2x2x2), two cubed times five squared plus two to the fourth power.
On that wall on that square facing that church up that hill are two hundred and sixteen plaques with photographs of men and women from Uzhhorod who have been killed in combat since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We can divide that number by the four years of the war: an annual average of fifty-four, about one every week. We can divide by the population of the city and see that about one in five hundred of its people have been killed in active service. This would fit the estimate that about one hundred thousand Ukrainian soldiers overall have died in the full-scale invasion. That is about as many as American soldiers who have died in all American wars taken together since the war of 1941-1945 — and our population is about ten times larger than that of Ukraine.
The numbers two, three, and five, from which one builds 216, are primes: they can only be divided by themselves and by one, they have only two factors.
Two hundred and sixteen faces, two hundred and sixteen dates of birth, two hundred and sixteen dates of death. I try to look at each of them one by one, but I can’t resist counting. And my mind escapes into combinations.
One is the simplest of numbers and the most profound. The number one is not prime, since its only factor is itself. If one is multiplied by itself, the product is one. If one is divided by itself, the quotient is one. It can be seen as the smallest positive whole number — but also as the whole, as embracing everything. In Lviv, north and east of here, now the most important city in western Ukraine, some the world’s best mathematicians and philosophers sat in a café and mused over the question of just what a number is. Until war came for them in 1939 and 1941.
Two hundred and sixteen, I learned last night, is not the correct number of people from Uzhhorod who have been killed in action. Not all of the dead have been memorialized on the wall. So says the bishop, as he steps out from the cathedral and sees me.
Uzhhorord, River Uzh, February 2026
The highest number in a list is just one more. But the latest number in a list of people also expresses a totality, the wholeness of a life. That life was one life, but it contained within itself its own personal infinitude of memory and joy and hope and pain. The number one as a whole contains everything, including the things it cannot confine. Part of the wholeness of a single life is what goes beyond that single life, the connections to other people.
Not all of the parents, understandably, wanted the faces of their sons and daughters to be displayed in a public place. And so it is the faces that are missing from the wall that remind us of relationships. Every soldier had their people. The wholeness of each soldier’s life was connected to other lives. The number of the dead is just a beginning of the cost of the war, since each number on the list is a particular one, connected to particular others who still live. The quantum of death, meaningful in itself, also suggests a quality of life.
We can be on a list, we can be quantified, as one of many. And we can be one of a kind, our own person, whose loss means the absence of a unique whole, a whole which includes even the things it does not include. But even the number one, extended to all of its meanings, fails us. In Uzhhorod I spoke with a former prisoner of war who survived more than two years of torment. He wants us to remember his comrades in captivity. Are they alive? We don’t know. Someone I expected to see in Uzhhorod left for the front just before I arrived. The last time I heard his voice it was summer and he was reciting a love poem in a café. How is he now? We don’t know. And that uncertainty, too, is part of everyday life.
Exactly four years of war, as of today. And so today we will be asked to think about what that anniversary means, or told what it means. The number four can of course help to orient us: this war is longer than the war that the Americans fought against the Nazis and the Japanese beginning in 1941, or the war that the Soviets fought against the Nazis beginning in 1941.
A number cannot end a war. An anniversary is an abstraction that separates us from responsibility. How long will the war go on, we ask, as though the war existed on its own, as though we were not a factor, as though (for example) European purchases of Russian hydrocarbons did not enable the invasion in the first place, as though Russian ships with liquid natural gas were not docking in European ports right now (one, quite literally, today), as though American and other Western technology in Russian missiles and drones did not kill Ukrainians, as though American politicians were not siding with the aggressor.
The number four did not come to us. We brought it with us. Like 216, or like 100,000, the number four arrived because of what we failed to do. Do we count? Or are we just counting?
TS, 17 February 2026, Uzhhorod, Ukraine, set to publish 24 February 2024.
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