A woman was born in Lviv in 1930. At the time, the city was part of Poland. Then came the war. The Germans swept eastward. Years later, the Soviets would push them back to Berlin. Afterward, the Soviet Union itself would collapse, and Lviv would find itself inside the borders of a newly independent Ukraine.
That same woman once said she had lived in four countries, yet never left her city.
If Vladimir Putin succeeds in his ambitions, she will have been Polish, German, Soviet, Ukrainian, and Russian — all without ever packing a suitcase.
Such is the modern world’s cruel geography.
In Russian, the word “Мир” (Mir) means both “world” and “peace.”
For decades, this double meaning carried a quiet irony — that peace and world were linguistically inseparable. But that irony has now collapsed under the weight of war. Mir no longer means harmony or unity. It has come to represent the opposite: the fracturing of both peace and world — at once.
What we’re witnessing is not only a military conflict, but a linguistic one.
Language, like land, is territory. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed just how much power is held in words — in what they mean, and in who gets to define them.
The Soviet collapse in 1991 left millions of ethnic Russians outside Russia’s new borders — in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Suddenly, language became identity, and identity became political. Speaking Russian wasn’t just communication; it was an allegiance. The new nations rushed to reassert their own tongues — to de-Sovietize speech, to reoccupy their own mouths.
I was in Estonia in 1994 when the country passed a law requiring all Russian residents to learn 2,000 words in Estonian if they wished to stay. Imagine that — the difference between belonging and exile measured not by geography, but by vocabulary.
Now, three decades later, we see the same struggle playing out in Ukraine.
To the West, this war may appear territorial — about lines on a map. But to those who live it, it is about meaning itself. About who gets to name things. About who decides what Mir means.
The word once symbolized an ideal of unity — a shared peace that spanned borders. But when the same word is used to justify invasion, when “peacekeeping” means occupation, and when “liberation” means erasure, Mir becomes a mirror. And in it, we see what’s been lost — not only peace, but the shared language that once described it.
President Zelenskyy has understood this from the start. His speeches are not just acts of resistance; they are linguistic reclamations. He insists on “Kyiv,” not “Kiev.” He speaks to the world in Ukrainian-inflected English, carrying the weight of history in his vowels. Every pronunciation is a line drawn — a refusal to let Mir be defined by those who destroy it.
The woman from Lviv would understand. Her life has been a map folded and refolded by others. Her city’s name has changed as many times as her nationality. Yet through it all, she endured — not by fighting for borders, but by preserving memory. By speaking her own version of the world.
Language is our first territory. It is where we live before we live anywhere else.
And when the word for peace and the word for world are one and the same, their destruction leaves us homeless in both.
That is the true tragedy of Mir.
It was meant to mean everything that war takes away.