Four Years of War: The Enduring Human Cost and Singapore’s Stakes
Part I: Lives Forever Changed — The Long-Term Human Impact
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Four years on, the war has claimed hundreds of thousands of military casualties and tens of thousands of civilian lives. For the individuals caught in its wake, the damage extends far beyond the immediate trauma of loss and injury — it reshapes identity, aspiration, and the very architecture of daily existence. The following cases, drawn from AFP reporting, illuminate the long arc of suffering.
The Glodan Family: Three Generations Erased
On April 23, 2022, a Russian missile struck an apartment block in Odesa, killing Kira (three months old), her mother Valeria (28), and her grandmother Lyudmila (54) in a single instant. Yuriy Glodan — a former lawyer who had reinvented himself as a baker — was out shopping when the strike occurred. He returned to find rubble where his family had been.
“Lera was a ray of sunshine. She loved Odesa, Ukrainian culture, the opera. She had a huge laugh, which I miss so much.”
The long-term impact on Yuriy is layered. Grieving, he enlisted in the Ukrainian army in 2023, only to be killed near Bakhmut by September of that year — one of the war’s bloodiest theatres. Four members of a single family were thus wiped out across less than 18 months. Yuriy’s trajectory — from civilian professional, to grief-stricken survivor, to soldier, to casualty — represents a compression of trauma rarely encountered outside of wartime.
For those left behind, such as Valeria’s best friend Alla Korolyova, the long-term costs are quieter but no less real: unresolved grief, the permanence of absence, and the particular cruelty of never knowing Kira — a child whose life was measured in weeks. The Glodan family has become a symbol precisely because their story is not exceptional; it is replicated across hundreds of Ukrainian towns.
The multigenerational dimension of this loss is sociologically significant. Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction will require building institutions, rebuilding social fabric, and repopulating a country that has lost millions to death or displacement — a demographic wound that will take generations to heal.
Volodymyr (‘Arkhyp’): Wounds, Resilience, and Shifting Horizons
Volodymyr’s story is one of physical devastation and remarkable psychological endurance. Born on the day Russia launched its invasion — February 24, 1990 — he enlisted and served in the northeastern Kharkiv region before suffering catastrophic injuries in 2024 when a Russian FPV drone struck his unit. He lost both a leg and an arm, undergoing 21 operations in a single month.
“From the very beginning, I planned to return to my brothers-in-arms.”
Speaking to AFP in January 2026 — now equipped with a prosthetic limb, attending a football tournament he once played in as an able-bodied man — Volodymyr’s determination to re-enlist in a rear-line capacity speaks to a form of trauma integration rather than trauma resolution. He has not overcome his wounds; he has reorganised his identity around them.
The long-term implications are profound. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian veterans will return from the front with severe physical and psychological injuries. Ukraine’s healthcare system, already under strain, will face decades of demand for prosthetics, rehabilitation services, and mental health support. The social reintegration of veterans — many of them young men and women whose formative adult years were spent in combat — will be one of the defining challenges of post-war Ukrainian society.
Notably, Volodymyr’s political expectations have also shifted. He told AFP that while he once believed in the absolute restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders — including Crimea and the Donbas — he now holds ‘some hope’ that a negotiated settlement might be reachable. This evolution in war aims, born of lived experience, reflects a broader tension within Ukrainian society between maximalist aspirations and the pragmatic recognition of military realities.
This psychic adjustment — the recalibration of what victory means — is itself a form of long-term damage. The gap between what was sacrificed and what is ultimately achieved will shape Ukrainian political culture and collective memory for decades.
Part II: Singapore’s Stakes — Principles, Economics, and the World Order
Singapore sits approximately 8,000 kilometres from Ukraine. Yet the Russia-Ukraine war has intersected with Singaporean interests in ways that are strategic, economic, normative, and deeply existential. Understanding these dimensions requires appreciating Singapore’s singular position in the international system.
The Existential Dimension: A Small State in a World of Might-Makes-Right
Singapore’s response to the invasion was unusually swift and principled. On March 5, 2022, Singapore imposed unilateral sanctions on Russia — the first time it had done so outside of UN Security Council authority in over four decades, since Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. This was a remarkable departure from standard Singaporean foreign policy practice, which traditionally relied on multilateral frameworks.
The reasoning was stated plainly by Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong: Russia’s justification for invasion — that ‘historical errors and crazy decisions’ warranted military action — posed an existential threat to the principle of sovereign equality that underpins the security of small states everywhere. As Lee told the Council on Foreign Relations: ‘It violates the U.N. charter, it endangers the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of all countries, especially small ones.’
This is not rhetorical posturing. Singapore, with 728 square kilometres of territory, surrounded by much larger neighbours, obtained independence only in 1965 under fraught circumstances. The ‘siege mentality’ embedded in Singaporean strategic culture — the constant awareness of vulnerability — makes Russia’s precedent deeply threatening. If powerful states may revise borders by force and invoke historical grievances as justification, Singapore’s own security calculus is directly undermined.
Vivian Balakrishnan noted to Parliament in March 2025 that the failure of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum — in which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees — has implications that extend far beyond Eastern Europe. It raises hard questions about the credibility of security assurances in a world of shifting great-power commitments, questions that are acutely relevant to Singapore’s own reliance on international law and norms rather than military self-sufficiency.
Economic Impact: Inflation, Supply Chains, and the Sanctions Regime
Singapore’s direct economic exposure to Russia and Ukraine was modest prior to the invasion. However, the indirect impact has been substantial. Russia is a major exporter of oil, natural gas, wheat, and fertilisers. Ukraine is a critical supplier of grain and sunflower oil. The war triggered a global commodity shock that fed directly into Singapore’s inflation — a city-state that imports virtually all its food and energy.
Singapore’s Trade and Industry Ministry described the war’s impact as ‘significant’, with energy and food price spikes flowing through to elevated consumer prices. An Ipsos survey found that while a majority of Singaporeans (56%) considered paying more for fuel and gas because of Russia sanctions to be worthwhile, 21% felt the economic costs were not justified — indicating real domestic pressure from cost-of-living increases.
Singapore-listed companies were required by the SGX to disclose their Russia-Ukraine exposure, and several did so, reconfiguring supply chains and financing arrangements as a consequence. The broader effect has been to accelerate supply chain diversification away from Russia and to push Singaporean businesses towards greater supply-side resilience — a structural shift with long-term consequences for procurement and inventory strategy.
The war has also reinforced Singapore’s push for energy diversification. The city-state has long been exposed to global fossil fuel price volatility; the Ukraine war sharpened that vulnerability and provided additional political momentum for accelerating transitions to LNG imports, renewable energy, and regional electricity grids.
Geopolitical Ripples: The Transatlantic Fracture and ASEAN Neutrality
Perhaps the most consequential long-term implication for Singapore lies not in the war itself but in the geopolitical realignments it has accelerated. As Vivian Balakrishnan observed in his March 2025 parliamentary speech, recent US policy under the new administration has ‘dramatically underlined a change in longstanding US policy,’ placing the transatlantic relationship under ‘severe strain.’ NATO members are urgently rethinking their strategic postures.
For Singapore, this transatlantic fracture is deeply concerning. Singapore’s security architecture rests partly on the stability of US commitments and the health of rules-based multilateral institutions. A world in which the United States deprioritises the defence of international norms — or pursues narrow transactional bargains rather than principled alliances — is a world in which small states like Singapore are more exposed.
At the same time, Singapore has carefully maintained a distinction between ‘taking a stand’ and ‘taking sides.’ It has declined to provide weapons to Ukraine, maintained diplomatic channels with Moscow, and engaged with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov directly. Within ASEAN, Singapore has been the most vocal critic of Russia’s actions — the only ASEAN member to co-sponsor UN human rights resolutions against Russia — but has framed this as adherence to principle rather than alignment with any bloc.
This balancing act will grow more difficult as the war’s legacy reshapes international coalitions. A potential ceasefire or peace settlement — particularly one brokered under US pressure rather than through multilateral consensus — could produce outcomes that validate the use of force to revise borders. For Singapore, such an outcome would set a troubling precedent regardless of which side is seen to have ‘won.’
National Resilience: Ukraine as a Case Study
The Singapore government and strategic community have drawn active lessons from Ukraine’s experience. Researchers at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) have highlighted three structural elements of Ukrainian resilience that carry lessons for Singapore: cross-sectorial collaboration in crisis response, strong civic cohesion, and the capacity to regain normalcy under sustained disruption.
Ukraine’s informal civic mobilisation — individuals misdirecting Russian troop convoys, companies voluntarily switching to military production, local communities organising relief independently — has been cited as a model for Singapore’s own Total Defence framework. The Ukrainian experience suggests that national resilience is not merely a function of military capability or government preparedness, but of civic identity and social trust.
Singapore has invested heavily in its own resilience programmes, and the Ukraine war has provided a real-world stress test of the kind of distributed, cross-sectorial response that Singapore’s planners advocate. The lessons are uncomfortable in their implications: no level of preparation fully neutralises the costs of modern warfare, but a society with strong civic identity and adaptive institutions can endure what a fragmented one cannot.
Conclusion
Four years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war’s impact registers simultaneously at the most intimate scale — a father sifting rubble for his dead wife and infant daughter — and the most global, reshaping international norms, alliance structures, and the economic order that underpins Singaporean prosperity.
For the individuals documented in these accounts, the long-term costs are inescapable: generational erasure, physical transformation, psychological recalibration, and the narrowing of what a future can look like. For Singapore, the costs are more diffuse but no less real — inflationary pressure, strategic anxiety, and the slow erosion of the rules-based international order on which a small, trade-dependent city-state depends for its survival.
The story of the Ukraine war is not, ultimately, one story. It is millions of them. And in the interconnected world of the 21st century, the reverberations of those individual tragedies extend — with attenuating but real force — to every corner of the globe.