The everyday reality of the East: refueling a car at a station hit by a drone. Everything burned out, yet it recovers as if nothing happened and continues to operate. Nearby are a couple of fire-destroyed civilian cars—now just rusty metal. Rain drips through the ruined canopy. A pile of construction materials rises next to the blackened walls of the small store.
This is the essence, year after year in this grinder, taking a hit, surviving, getting up, moving on. And there’s no guarantee that you won’t get hit again. Sleepless nights due to the constant drone flyovers take their toll—swinging from the sadness of what you’ve seen to the romanticism of war, overwhelmed by a strange state, as if living on autopilot. Occasionally, this state is interrupted by the pain of news.
In the Kharkiv hospital, a tank shell was removed from a soldier’s leg, which miraculously didn’t explode. A piece of metal with explosives, from hip to knee, stuck in the leg throughout the evacuation, was removed by doctors in the presence of sappers. Despite the unique situation and the terrible appearance of the leg, the boy’s vessels are intact, and his muscles contract. Everyone hopes he will walk.
Perhaps a Russian propagandist can be trusted, quoting a Ukrainian prisoner of war, saying Russians bring truckloads of people to the front, while Ukrainians bring truckloads of FPV drones. And the Russian isn’t thrilled about it. I hope the trend where Russian manpower is ground down by drones, while our guys increase their chances of staying alive, is irreversible. A country that created the Soviet system and never emerged from it, today rebuilding monuments to Stalin, isn’t about progress. It’s about stagnation.
There’s confirmation of the general Russian complaining: they want the internet, but we want to live. They want to go abroad, but we want to live. They want the sea, but we want to live. Hence, they have trucks of “people,” while we have accepted the harsh reality and move on.
Photo by the author
