The world is listening to Russia again. From the ruins of Ukraine, it makes me want to scream | Oleksandr Mykhed
Orders and statements from the new US president come at us daily now, with unremitting speed, and international politics is reduced to an endless series of justifications and denials of unfounded accusations.
It’s hard to believe, but Ukrainian activists have had to write explainers for a global audience, reminding them who the true dictator is, that it was not Ukraine that started the war with Russia and that we are actually just trying to defend what is ours. And, you know, to survive a little bit.
These past three years of our lives have been referred to in many ways: Putin’s war, the Russo-Ukrainian war, the full-scale invasion, the conflict. Now some of the media are starting to call it simply the Ukrainian war or the Ukrainian crisis. US envoys have started objecting to the phrase “Russian aggression” in G7 communications. And we are being dragged into a paradigm in which the war crimes of the Russians will soon be called “those events” or “this situation”.
The world is trying to understand how Ukrainians feel about all this, and I have been having chats with foreign journalists. Almost everyone asks whether it is possible to get used to living in a war. Judging by their questions, it seems as if the world has long since grown used to the idea that there is a war in Ukraine and that this is simply the way it is now. One more shelling. That’s just how things are over there.
I don’t know, I tell them, how one can get used to the reality of war. Every night, the Russians launch dozens of deadly Shahed drones targeting energy and civilian infrastructure. Right now, when it’s -10C outside. A strike this month on a thermal power plant in Mykolaiv, in the south of the country, left 100,000 Ukrainians without heat. And after the latest assault on Odesa, the Russians have left 14 schools, 13 kindergartens, a children’s hospital and 250,000 residents without electricity and heating. Every night, Kyiv is shaken by explosions. Every day, Russians occupy new settlements. This week it was Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region that became a grey zone.
Ukrainian servicemen and women are defending the borders of our country around the clock. Years of grief without the opportunity to grieve, tragedy that cannot be lived through but is simply compounded by the next airstrike.
A foreign journalist asked me if I had ever felt real hatred towards Russians and dreamed of killing them one by one. I said it was an inappropriate question. I understand that you are doing your job, but please do not squeeze emotions out of us just to give yourself a headline for your report. The journalist said it was just that, when the enemy did this to your people … I said, please, hatred is destructive. Anger is a more constructive feeling that gives you strength and opportunity to at least somehow act.
A major international media outlet asked me recently to join its educational platform. I had to record a video message in English and talk about my experience of serving in the armed forces of Ukraine, so children around the world could learn English from these videos and accompanying materials. I recorded it and did everything according to their instructions.
I got a cheerful message the other day from the editorial office, saying: “We’ve launched!” I opened the presentation and had a panic attack. The lesson was structured around eight speakers, each talking about their war experience: four Ukrainians (including me) and four Russians. A Russian journalist and armed forces “deserter”. A Russian teacher. A Russian medical director. Another Russian journalist. The lesson ended with a slide. The Russian flag was at the top. The Ukrainian flag at the bottom. The question proposed for discussion: “What similarities and differences did you notice when listening to the experiences of people from Russia and Ukraine?”
The emotional negligence of this makes me want to scream. Over the years, we have been turned into research material. I am sickened by how my story has become an ideological tool to equalise the experience of the defender and the attacker. I am losing my subjectivity. Still, I must pack my screams, nausea and despair into diplomatic phrases and requests to the international media outlet, asking them to remember that the experience of Ukrainians and Russians in this genocide is not something that can be compared.
I’ve been living with the acute feeling that the world is tired of restraining its unquenchable love of Russia. The west wants to believe in the Cinderella story, that one day the dictatorship will fall and a wonderful democratic world will emerge.
Instead of imposing further sanctions and restrictions on Russia, the west is ready to crown the film Anora with all the awards, despite the fact that the Russian actor Yura Borisov, who appears in the film, also starred in a biopic of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47, which was partly filmed in Crimea after its annexation.
The world is ready to listen to Russia again: a UK television channel last year released the film Ukraine’s War: The Other Side by Sean Langan. The film doesn’t just give the other side a voice; it gives a human dimension to the stories of the occupiers and repeats the narratives of Russian propaganda. This is as consistent with journalistic standards as asking an executioner, how are you feeling as you do this, and do you miss your family who are waiting for you at home?
I accepted long ago that I should not expect justice for myself and my family. Our home was destroyed by a Russian shell in the first week of the invasion. My parents spent almost three weeks under occupation in Bucha. Our traumas are our own business.
But all these years I have lived with a keen sense of the need for justice for others. Am I being naive, wondering every day why the crimes of Russians remain unpunished? Or is it easier for the world to forget all this and pretend that none of the following events happened?
The massacre in Bucha. The siege of Mariupol and the deadly shelling of the local theatre. A missile attack on the Kramatorsk railway station. Mass graves in Izium. Torture chambers in Kherson. A rocket attack on a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Destruction of the Kakhovka dam. Nearly a quarter of the country occupied. Crimea. Parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. Hundreds of destroyed towns: Vuhledar, Bakhmut, Avdiivka. Now Pokrovsk. Kostiantynivka is next.
Thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russians. Thousands of missing Ukrainian soldiers. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians killed. Thousands in Russian captivity. Dozens of executions captured on camera, when Russians killed those who surrendered.
Every Russian war crime has a perpetrator. Someone who pulled the trigger, someone who equipped the missiles. Someone who supplied parts for their weapons. Someone who stole the children. Someone who settled in the occupied Ukrainian cities. And now, in addition to Russian and Iranian shells (and support from about 20 countries around the world) we are being attacked by the military from North Korea.
Now justice is under threat. Right before our eyes, a world order is being formed in which truth as a category does not exist. Donald Trump says, look, here is my truth. There is your truth. But my truth is on top. That was not a Nazi salute at the inauguration celebrations. Belief is not a fact. Tribunals are impossible. The rule of law is irrelevant.
If during the first term of Trump’s presidency we talked of the post-truth era, now we find ourselves in a world in which the truth is taken out, tortured and shot. This means that there will be no justice. This means that anything goes.
Russia has been living like this for centuries. But now the two macho presidents, both in their 70s, one with an arrest warrant from the international criminal court, and the other the first US president to have a mugshot taken after being criminally charged, seem to be getting along well.
The world is looking at the body of truth that is dying and bleeding before our eyes. I beg you, if you can’t stop the bleeding, at least don’t turn away from the sight of blood.
I am Ukrainian, and I am scared. Yet there is a unity among Ukrainians that I have not seen for a long time. We will survive. Together. Because the truth exists. And we know that it is worth fighting for.
Translated by Maryna Gibson
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Oleksandr Mykhed is the author of The Language of War and member of PEN Ukraine
