In these most recent years of war, a lot has changed. In Mariupol, there was a community center called Halabuda — a place where Japanese and computer literacy were taught, where book launches and concerts were held, where people learned to be businessmen and proactive citizens, where they painted, sang and developed projects for an environmentally friendly city. After a brutal monthslong siege led to the Russian capture of the city in the spring of 2022, Halabuda had to relocate. Today in Cherkasy, a city in central Ukraine, it’s where people repair drones.
There’s so much more left unrealized. More destinies that played out as heroic in war, but whose bearers can no longer do the things they may have been fated to: write books, open restaurants or discover a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Their smiles now exist only in photographs.
Among the things that have changed, perhaps, is the desire to tell the world what the Russians have done and are doing to Ukrainians, in the past and today. It used to be so vivid, so resonant, creating a second self for me — a self with stories of slain friends and photos of mass burials, along with a firm conviction that every death, every sorrow must be told, documented and avenged.
That feeling is gone. There are still the stories, photos and convictions. But I don’t want to tell the world about it anymore. The world is literate. It has access to the internet, to the news; it can see everything itself. I am grateful to the thousands, perhaps millions of people to whom we don’t have to explain or show anything anymore. They simply stood by us in Lithuania and Australia, Britain and Norway, the United States and Morocco, Japan and Estonia. I was lucky enough to know some of them by name. I was lucky enough to meet them — fearless and kind people — in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv and even in places where the front line is a kilometer away.
On the other hand, nothing has changed, not really. We have the same sense of clarity that we had in 2014. The same faith, the same love, the same rage. Do I want to go back to my prewar self, the one I was in 2013? No, I don’t. I don’t want to find myself back among the lies about “one people” from which genocide, war and murder will sprout again. I do not want to be back in the time when Russia’s attack was inevitable. I want us to win and there to be no war.