It infuriates me when videos of burning Ma-a-oscow are accompanied by sad music by Russians, manipulating perception. It will be “russia-mother”, “suffering for the right cause” again…
A mother with two children in the Fastiv district didn’t live to see these scenes. Thousands are shot, burned alive, killed, and tortured all over Ukraine, so the burning Ma-a-oscow should not victimize itself.
Throughout the years of the great war, alongside the most known crimes of Russians in Ukraine, I remember vividly how in Kharkiv a rolling wave of fire moved down the street, engulfing private homes. Inside them, entire families were found, who perished while holding their children. A mother held three children in her arms. That’s how they were found. I remember a photo of a mother’s back, riddled with shrapnel, protecting her teenage son. I remember that basement in the Chernihiv region, in Yahidne, where Russians kept several hundred people for almost a month, and they died there from suffocation and hunger. I remember how they returned our journalist from captivity with internal organs removed. Our girls raped by Russians. Shooting at the windows of civilian houses for no reason other than seeing a light. Cars shot on the roads with naive signs “children”…
This does not allow me to live on. This does not let me rejoice in the fragile illusion that we can live like this, on islands of imaginary safety, where here something works, and there are people, but just ten kilometers away there is no city, no village, no people, and everything is black with grief. This might be life, but at the same time, it’s a waiting for justice.
The territory of Russia in my consciousness is something not inhabited by people. Because people cannot act like this. In scientific language, these are biological creatures (let Facebook not object, this is how it is). They are in a different category. Eternal victims with complexes, who go to kill, but when met with resistance, scream to the whole world about how they’re being wronged. If all the above happened to their biological creatures, would I feel empathy towards them? I don’t know where that empathy went. It burned during another shelling or drowned in Kherson.
But there are advantages to this horror too. Now we KNOW their essence better. We have perceived what they tried not to let us perceive before, because our ancestors were either killed by them or turned into “one people”—so as not to remember. So as not to tell the grandchildren. So that there were none left to tell.
In the cover photo: Mass grave near Izyum, September 15, 2022. Photo: Serhii Nuzhnenko/Radio Liberty
Copyright © 2021 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
