In these most up-to-date years of struggle, quite a bit has modified. In Mariupol, there was a group heart known as Halabuda — a spot the place Japanese and pc literacy had been taught, the place e book launches and concert events had 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. Immediately 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 struggle, however whose bearers can not do the issues they could have been fated to: write books, open eating places or uncover a remedy for Alzheimer’s illness. Their smiles now exist solely in images.
Among the many issues which have modified, maybe, is the will to inform the world what the Russians have completed and are doing to Ukrainians, up to now and immediately. It was so vivid, so resonant, making a second self for me — a self with tales of slain associates and photographs of mass burials, together with a agency conviction that each loss of life, each sorrow should be instructed, documented and avenged.
That feeling is gone. There are nonetheless the tales, photographs and convictions. However I don’t wish to inform the world about it anymore. The world is literate. It has entry to the web, to the information; it may see every part itself. I’m grateful to the 1000’s, maybe hundreds of thousands of individuals to whom we don’t have to clarify 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 sort folks — in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and even in locations the place the entrance line is a kilometer away.
Then again, nothing has modified, probably not. We have now the identical sense of readability that we had in 2014. The identical religion, the identical love, the identical rage. Do I wish to return to my prewar self, the one I used to be in 2013? No, I don’t. I don’t wish to discover myself again among the many lies about “one folks” from which genocide, struggle and homicide will sprout once more. I don’t wish to be again within the time when Russia’s assault was inevitable. I would like us to win and there to be no struggle.
