By Dr. Jaclyn Maria Fowler
Department Chair, English and Literature
The world watches in horror at the tragedies unfolding in Ukraine. As a family with young children attempted to escape the besieged city of Irpin, for example, they were felled by intentional Russian fire. One second, they were alive; and the next, they weren’t.
To record the war crime for posterity and potential prosecution, the New York Times published photos of the incident on its front page; their photographer had stood only feet away from the murdered family. She was not the only member of the press to witness Russians targeting civilians and the press.
A few days earlier, Sky News correspondents who clearly identified themselves as press were fired on repeatedly by Russian snipers. One man took a spray of bullets to his body armor; another was injured.
Always looking for the story, they videotaped their traumatic escape. Unbelievably, the news crew all survived, even under sustained fire from the Russians.
By Day 14 of the siege, the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) announced that power had been interrupted at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, threatening the escape of nuclear waste. That harrowing news came on the same day that the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Olena Zelenskiya, published an op-ed showing Ukrainian children killed by indiscriminate Russian bombing.
On MSNBC, a Ukrainian lawmaker summed it all up by discussing the need to defend Ukrainian citizens of beleaguered cities, especially the children. She said pointedly: “We measure time in our children’s lives.”
Obeying the Will of a Megalomaniac
Perhaps some would call it bad form for a writer like me to focus condemnation so clearly on one side. After all, the Russian soldiers dying in the fields and streets of Ukraine are human, too. They have mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, spouses and children.
Many are conscripts, serving their mandated military time after finishing high school and before beginning their careers or college. Some are bakers; others are mechanics, teachers or accountants.
Few Russian servicemembers expected their military exercises to lead to an invasion. Many have paid the ultimate price, mostly because of the will of one man.
It is clear that Putin rolled his tanks into Ukraine without provocation. In his own writing and speech-making, the president of Russia has said, without equivocation, that “Ukraine is not a country.”
In his revisionist Tsarist history, Putin sees the fledgling democracy of Ukraine as part of a greater Russia, one that he can incorporate at will just like Catherine the Great did in the 18th century. After reincorporating Ukrainian lands into the Russian empire, the empress had a medal minted with the words: “What Was Torn Away I Restored.”
Perhaps Putin is looking to do the same, but not if the Ukrainians have anything to say about it. Over the centuries, Ukraine persisted in winning its sovereignty; it has a proud history of independence that Russian autocrats conveniently forget.
Ukrainian citizens are not a little Russian tribe, as Vladimir Putin believes. Instead, they are a proud people with their own culture, traditions, and language. This sentiment is clear in a statement by the Rectorate and Operating Group of Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU): “Ukraine reminded the whole world what the idea of dignity stands for and why it is worth defending it even at the expense of one’s life.”
Related link: Coercion Theory: Understanding Russia’s Actions in Ukraine
Ukrainians Continue to Defend Their Country and Each Other
In the midst of all the tragedy, Ukrainians remember their friends. They reach out to each other, prepare meals, find places for refugees to sleep, run clothing drives, gather supplies for the soldiers on the front and care for the war-terrorized children who enter their cities. These tasks have now become routine, something unimaginable only 14 days earlier.
As the rectorate of UCU said: “Ukraine surprised the world at the moment of its deepest tragedy.” It has, indeed.
While the western city of Lviv has not yet been the target of Russian bombardment, it has been invaded by wave after wave of human suffering as refugees flee the mainly north and northeast of Ukraine. My former student Anastasiia S. wrote about the new reality of her home city in her war journal: “Lviv has become a city that holds its rear firmly. Life seems to be predictable. Lviv is not under attack. Sirens fell asleep.”
Still, by the end of the second week, almost two million refugees had crossed over the borders from Ukraine, most of them through Lviv. Of the two million, almost half of the refugees are children. The numbers are daunting and growing as more Ukrainians attempt to flee from harm.
Anastasiia adds, “It is only infinitely sad for all those civilians – Ukrainians who are forced to hide under shelling attacks, to flee in overcrowded trains and to freeze at the train stations. Within the last 10 days, a lot of my people have lost everything they have.
[They don’t have] their homes anymore. Many people lost their dearest. Russian troops killed the most vulnerable creatures–-children. Some of these children were shot at point-blank range.
Many more children are wounded. And almost all children who come to Lviv from that region have symptoms of PTSD. Old people, adults and children – none of them cannot stop crying. Why does it happen?”
Related link: International Law and How Russia Cannot Justify Ukraine
Hearing from the Outside World Provides Strength
After an initial flurry of emails back and forth to my friends in Ukraine, I purposely chose to hold back. I figured they had more to worry about than answering my emails.
But as Anastasiia wrote to me: “P.S. It is so nice to receive letters from you! It doesn’t really matter what you write there. What matters – that you write!”
It had never occurred to me that notes from the outside world helped to sustain the brave Ukrainians holding strong to their freedom. They gain strength from knowing their struggles are not in vain.
So after receiving an email from my friend, the Head of the Center for Modern Foreign Languages at UCU, Professor Halyna Kurochka, I responded with encouragement and love to her message to me. It read: “I hope you are doing well. We are ok here; doing what we have to do. Lots of love, Halyna.”
While the Ukrainians show a fierce loyalty to their friends, it would be a mistake to underestimate their equally fierce objection to Russian brutality. For example, the rectorate at UCU wrote that “Russia has never repented for its communist past, has never done moral reckoning with the atrocities that were committed on human lives in the name of bloody ideology.”
Anastasiia added punctuation to that statement by what she wrote about the new grammatical rule in Ukraine: “Ukrainian spelling now allows writing russia in lower case. I guess you understand why.”
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