In these most up-to-date years of battle, so much has modified. In Mariupol, there was a neighborhood middle referred to as Halabuda — a spot the place Japanese and laptop literacy have been taught, the place ebook launches and live shows have been held, the place folks discovered to be businessmen and proactive residents, the place they painted, sang and developed tasks for an environmentally pleasant metropolis. After a brutal monthslong siege led to the Russian seize of the town within the spring of 2022, Halabuda needed to relocate. At present in Cherkasy, a metropolis in central Ukraine, it’s the place folks restore drones.
There’s a lot extra left unrealized. Extra destinies that performed out as heroic in battle, however whose bearers can now not do the issues they might have been fated to: write books, open eating places or uncover a treatment for Alzheimer’s illness. Their smiles now exist solely in images.
Among the many issues which have modified, maybe, is the need to inform the world what the Russians have achieved and are doing to Ukrainians, prior to now and immediately. It was so vivid, so resonant, making a second self for me — a self with tales of slain associates and images of mass burials, together with a agency conviction that each demise, each sorrow should be informed, documented and avenged.
That feeling is gone. There are nonetheless the tales, images and convictions. However I don’t need to inform the world about it anymore. The world is literate. It has entry to the web, to the information; it will possibly see all the things itself. I’m grateful to the hundreds, maybe hundreds of thousands of individuals to whom we don’t have to elucidate or present something anymore. They merely stood by us in Lithuania and Australia, Britain and Norway, america and Morocco, Japan and Estonia. I used to be fortunate sufficient to know a few of them by title. I used to be fortunate sufficient to satisfy them — fearless and type folks — in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and even in locations the place the entrance line is a kilometer away.
Alternatively, nothing has modified, probably not. We’ve got the identical sense of readability that we had in 2014. The identical religion, the identical love, the identical rage. Do I need to return to my prewar self, the one I used to be in 2013? No, I don’t. I don’t need to discover myself again among the many lies about “one folks” from which genocide, battle and homicide will sprout once more. I don’t need to be again within the time when Russia’s assault was inevitable. I need us to win and there to be no battle.
