The main thing is to get there in time.
I imagined a seventy-seven-year-old mother whose knees suffer from arthritis. She’s been walking with a stick for some time now, leaning on it with both hands. “How can she,” I thought, “make it to the ground floor in time? And what kind of time is it that she, in her advanced age, should be hiding in some basement where residents store their food supplies?”
A few years ago, while in Ukraine, I overheard a conversation between two girls playing in the yard. They were over ten or twelve years old. This was after Maidan, but the military confrontation between Ukraine and the DNR and LNR was ongoing. Ukrainian soldiers were dying and civilians were being killed. Television and radio reported on it all the time. And so, one of these girls at one point, turning to another, asked: “Do you know that we are the children of war?”
I was so overwhelmed by this childish maturity that I couldn’t help myself from the excitement, that is, from this children’s awareness of the new Ukrainian reality.
And then came the day of February 24, when Russia, covering itself with completely mendacious propaganda slogans about a supposed genocide of the Russian-speaking population, about a mythical fight against fascism and nationalism, repeating like a mantra the idea of a united nation, decided that it had found an explanation for its citizens and the world about the groundless aggression and justification for the attack on Ukraine.
Before Putin had finished declaring a so-called military special operation, and inherently a full-scale war, missiles and shells flew onto peaceful Ukrainian towns and villages on his orders as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.
That morning, I think, not only did Ukraine face a new reality, but the whole world woke up to it.
Tuesday, March 01, 2022, 09:00
Ukrainian Text by Vasil Makhno, translated into English by Ukrainianvancouver team – Mar 04, 2022