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On this day last year, Ukraine celebrated the 30th anniversary of its independence from Soviet rule. 46 countries were represented at the celebrations, national costumes were worn, world leaders assembled. Today, 6 months after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, no public events will be held. One Kyiv resident has said that he looks forward to the day when once again independence will be marked by ‘flowers and dancing’ instead of defended with guns and bombs. And today, in a hall built for music in the destroyed city of Mariupol, Ukrainian soldiers who are prisoners of war will be paraded by the Russian army who will seek the death penalty for them. As much as days like today are moments for a nation to take stock, affirm its identity, and in Ukraine’s case defend independence, they are also dangerous days, when as President Zelensky has warned, ‘ugly things’ can happen as the anniversary draws near. The prosecution of a war brutalises all affected by it. War makes soldiers of lovers, liars of truth-tellers. Everything that once seemed normal is suddenly far away. In an instant everything is lost. The huge global challenges brought into focus by Ukraine’s independence day may be reported as separate items on the news but are intimately linked and go to the heart of what it is to be human in this generation. War between nation states demands unimaginable sacrifice, to the extent that an individual’s independence is given up to fight with others for the independence of the whole. But the weaponizing of energy supplies in this war, along with the drought and flood causing so much suffering around the world serve only to indicate human beings interdependence. Not only with each other, but with everything that lives on the earth. To create and maintain just and peaceful human societies on a planet teeming with its own life is in itself a daily challenge. Every day the building of human society that knows itself interdependent with the earth demands creativity, patience, resilience and a strong commitment to defending that idea against all that would atomise and separate us. Alongside working for the peace yearned for by so many dehumanised by war, the Christian tradition urges that we human beings know ourselves to be interdependent too. We need each other. And that this is in itself an ideal worth defending. The anti-apartheid campaigner Alan Paton wrote that when he got to heaven, he believed that God would ask ‘where are your wounds?’ If he said he didn’t have any, then God would ask him ‘was there nothing worth fighting for?’