Stateless

Australian Open champion Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus was not allowed to raise her flag and country for being the launching pad for Russian forces to invade Ukraine. The International Olympic Committee intends similar policy in Paris next year. Allow athletes from Russia and Belarus to compete, but as neutrals. No flag nor anthem nor color nor any other mark that identify them at any sports event. It justifies no athlete should be denied the chance to compete just because of their passport. Fair.

But Ukrainian Elina Svitolina minces no words. The tennis star twitted the Olympics are the largest platform that capture world attention. Russian and Belarusian athletes should thus be banned to punctuate world unity in punishing their countries for heinous acts of their leaders.

In fact, one of Ukraine’s rising track and field stars will never fulfill his Olympic dream after the war killed him. Why should Russian and Belarusian athletes get their chance when their leaders rob innocent people and athletes of theirs? Unfair.

Svitolina maximizes her platform to tell the world about what is right and wrong and how to right a wrong. The woman of strength and courage is not alone. The Ukrainian bet in the Miss Universe pageant wore black to represent her war-torn country’s grief. Curiously, the Russian representative wore red that symbolizes blood.

But the Ukrainian beauty was dumbfounded when she learned some candidates did not know her country is invaded, exposing pretentious women empowerment advocacy of the beauty pageant constrained to reinvent itself to reverse declining world interest, except in a country busier with entertainment than correcting its government.

They never knew that on the day the Fil-Am stunner was crowned with the wreath for most beautiful, a Russian missile downed at least 40 civilians in Ukraine with a writ of execution. At least 7,000 civilians perished since the Russian invasion a year ago, including women and children. That many, that long, but the war hasn’t resolved any. That’s the way it is, innocent civilians suffer and die in the crossfire. Collateral damage.

Inevitable. It is exactly the atrocity sought avoided by anti-war advocacy. Wait until it happens to you and your family. Easy to say property or territory lost to war is recoverable, charge it to experience. But if life is lost, charge it to resurrection? Yes, for those who believe in life after life. What if there is none, no amount of justice or fervent prayer brings them back to life. Unlucky them? No, it was not misfortune that killed them. World leaders did, in the name of massive fortune and other reasons.

The Belarusian leader hosts hostile forces to pay back Russia whose president he owes his survival to. In turn, it invaded Ukraine to punish it for flirting with America and preempt eastward expansionism by the western power that brandishes itself the world police like it was innocent of crimes against humanity. Hard to tell who is right and wrong then, depending on what the world knows. Even the current war cannot decide who is right, but who is left. Fortunately, some people would never know, if they happen to be the war casualty forgotten in the dustbin of history.