As Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine last week my thoughts went back more than a decade, when I was covering another war with Russia.

It was August 8, 2008, and I was in Gori, the Georgian city closest to the breakaway region of South Ossetia. I was at a military hospital there when a nurse brought out a sheet of paper, took it through the front gate, and stuck it to a tree. It bore the names of Georgian soldiers who died that day in the battles that were raging just north of the city between Georgian, Russian and South Ossetian forces. Gori itself was about to get overrun by invading Russian troops in what became known as the Five-Day War.  

As a small crowd of concerned relatives gathered at the tree, I could not help thinking that the scene seemed straight out of one of the Soviet Union’s many World War II movies that I grew up watching.

Those movies depicted Russians and Ukrainians fighting together, and often featured a token Georgian character who typically spoke labored Russian.

Today, Ukrainian friends tell me the same thing, that it sometimes feels like one of those movies to them as well. “It doesn’t feel real,” a friend from Kyiv told me the other day. “The sound of the sirens, people going down to subway stations to take shelter from the bombing. It’s like one of those old movies. You know, the stories our grandparents told us.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin also seems to think that he is himself a character in one of those old movies, as he spins tales of supposed modern-day Nazis in Ukraine and of “liberating” Russian forces. But in fact he is helping destroy those memories when the peoples of this region – Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and others – felt unified by a common cause.

Generations in this part of the world will now be growing up on new stories, those of Russia’s aggressive wars. And the scars of today will be alive long after he is gone.

-Giorgi Lomsadze