Report from Ukraine, 2023
“What can I tell you? I have nothing to tell you.” Alla talks, and talks, and talks — about her inability to talk. Her words and her tears are coming from the same source. This is pain that cannot be expressed — and yet, it is expressing itself, all the time.
We meet her in the village Bezruky, Kharkiv region, 15 kilometers from the Russian border. A place where heavy fighting took place in spring and summer, 2022.
On one of those summer days Alla lost her daughter Julia and her granddaughter Rita. Rita was 8 years old. She was killed by a Russian cluster bomb while reading a children’s book in their courtyard.
You enter this small village house and walk up a staircase. This is where she was killed. Entering one’s own house now means passing a place where your child was killed. Crossing the threshold of hell, every day.
In Rita’s room we see her drawings. One is addressed to her mother. In it, Rita shows her how much she loves her. She draws a cat holding two little kittens in her hands. The cat is surrounded by little hearts of various colours, flying in the air like butterflies. The palette is all pink and rose.
Another drawing marks the New Year. Cat again, in a New Year’s party hat. A pine tree with the year 2022 painted over it. Snowflakes falling. Stars in the sky. Neatly wrapped new year’s gifts under the Christmas tree, waiting to be opened.
Alla tells us how loving Rita was. How often she repeated to her mother and her grandmother how much she loved them. She didn’t like eating rice. Her mum would bribe her by saying that if she ate her rice, she could go to see her grandmother. It worked every time.
Cluster bombs, “kassetki” as they are called here, are some of the most destructive weapons of all. After exploding they send out dozens of fragments flying just above the surface of the ground with mortifying speed. Julia, Alla’s daughter and Rita’s aunt, had over 20 little fragments removed from her body in the local hospital, and anotherdozen in a hospital in Kharkiv. She lived for one more week before she died from wounds. Rita died immediately.
In her modest children’s library we find children’s books in Ukrainian and Russian. Moya persha abetka, My first alphabet. Koliorovi huseniata, Colored goslings. She loved reading. She was killed while reading a book.
“Every time I come here, those memories return,” Alla tells us. “I can’t tell you how it hurts. I can’t tell what it means when you wash your house from the blood of your child.”
The sound of her words is full of wounds. This is a language most of us don’t know. A language of a woman who will not hear “I love you so much grandma” from Rita ever again. Every inch of the space in which she lives reminds her of what happened.
When she speaks, a small black kitten comes to us from Alla’s house. This is Rita’s kitten. She began taking care of her as soon as the kitten was born. She gave her a name, Myshka: Little Mouse. A cat called Little Mouse. Myshka has grown a bit since June, but she is still a kitten. Bright green eyes on her black as night body. Through her, Rita is present here too.
The void which opens when a child dies can never be filled. As if the heart of earth itself has been scooped out.
***
The death of children is the most unbearable death of all. War multiplies such deaths beyond counting. “A child was killed” means: a future was shattered. A love for life is gone. We have one less lover of life on this earth. Every time we lose someone we love, the gates of the Inferno yawn open.
In November, 2022, official statistics revealed that 437 Ukrainian children were killed by Russian artillery, missiles or bullets since February 24th. 437 New Year's drawings. 437 fewer homemade drawings for their mother’s birthdays will be posted on refrigerators. 437 unfulfilled futures.
437—in November. Maybe many more. We don’t know for sure.
Ancient Greek philosophers believed that the goal of life was for every individual to fulfill their internal nature. Ukrainian philosopher Skovoroda, writing in the 18th century, agreed. But it’s one thing to die an old man or an old woman. The death of a child is another matter altogether. A child’s murder is a crime against life itself. It’s the suicide of life, an amputated future.
Hundreds of these futures in Ukraine have been amputated. Who might these kids have become? Photographers able to capture the invisible? School teachers who might reveal something new and unknown to children? Musicians who would reach emotions hidden deep in our hearts? Scientists who would help humanity solve the most difficult problems?
All of this they won’t be. They will never become who they might have been, they will never discover their deep internal nature. Their future has been amputated. They will never grow old. They will never tell you that you were wrong. They will never tell you how much they love you.
***
In a car cemetery in Bucha we see dozens of civilian cars shelled and burnt by the Russian soldiers when Ukrainians tried to escape their bombarded towns in late February and March.
The Russian tactics were the same as in Syria several years before: open “green corridors,” shoot the civilian cars, in order to provoke fear and horror among civilians, and break the capacity to resist. Many Ukrainian citizens, including women and children, were killed in this way in February and March, 2022.
After that, dozens of these cars, brown from fire and rust, were lying for months under the open skies. With the smell of the burnt flesh, with their windows and doors full of traces of bullets and ammunition fragments. Sometimes with the remains of hair inside. These are the car cemeteries. Silent witnesses of the horror.
A man approaches us near one of these cars. A big strong man. He makes an effort to hold in his tears. He says he recognised the car of his neighbor and friend. They tried to escape from a neighboring Hostomel but were shelled by Russians. There were four people in the car: a man, his wife, and his two daughters.
The man says he recognised the car and recognised his friend’s folding knife. Both are brown from rust; both are impossible traces of the somewhat peaceful past. Both are witnesses of happiness you can never bring back. Both are humane, as they were intimate belongings of these humans.
The owner of the car was burnt alive. The man who approaches us invites us to look inside the car, through its deformed windows. Look, there are remnants of his bones, the man says. We look inside and see something which looks like a small bone, white from fire, the colour of ash.
The man’s wife and daughters survived. The younger daughter lost her hand, she is now wearing a prosthetic. They are abroad. I am not sure they will ever come back to this place.
This was the beautiful town of Bucha. Once a paradise for the middle class. A place where young families were buying their apartments and homes with hopes for a happy life.
Bucha will never be the symbol of this happiness. Bucha will always be something else. A place where memories leave wounds.
***
When we enter a temporary housing unit in Irpin’, a town near Bucha, a security guard stops us. He approaches our cameraman and says it is prohibited to film here.
We talk to this man and ask him where he is from. Bucha, he says. It seems he was both proud and horrified to name this place. Being from Bucha makes you a person from a different world. A Dantean person who went through hell and purgatory and came back.
Russian soldiers occupied Bucha in late February and March, 2022. After they left the town under pressure from Ukrainian troops, a horrible picture appeared in front of our eyes. Over four hundred people were tortured and killed in Bucha, some randomly shot in the streets, others brought to the underground, tortured and killed. Bodies found on the streets were brought to improvised collective graves; the biggest mass grave was near St. Andrew church. We spoke to a priest there, himself Andriy, who was burying the bodies of victims in this improvised cemetery. Over 100 of them.
The man who stops us in Irpin shows us a video from his phone. We know this video. It’s filmed on Vokzalna Street in Bucha, where the fierce fighting took place. In March, it went viral on social media. A man was moving through the devastation showing burnt Russian tanks and cursing Russian soldiers.
Suddenly we understand who this man was. His name is Valentyn, he is 64 years old. When a battalion of the Russian tanks came to Vokzalna Street, where he lived, he shot their fuel truck with a mortar gun issued to him as a member of the territorial defense. The shot provoked a huge explosion and fire. Later, he sent coordinates to the Ukrainian army, which destroyed the battalion. Then he took his phone, went into the street, and filmed the remains of the burning Russian tanks.
Valentyn is an old, retired man, now working as a security guard at a temporary housing unit.
There’s an enormous simplicity and pride in the way he speaks and behaves.
He is an ordinary man who’s done extraordinary things. Like many Ukrainians during this time.
***
Death for us is no longer an abstract word. It is no longer something you think will not happen to you. It is not something beyond your doors.
Death wears the faces of people you love. Smiles of your students. The smell of flowers in your friend’s garden. Death takes the form of kids’ toys. Death is the absence of future. Impossibility of response.
The war makes death not only possible but highly probable. And yet nothing is more false than the monuments built to make the war heroic. The war is about ruins, fragments of bodies, cut legs and hands, rotten corpses, the end of hope, the amputated futures.
Some big thinkers from De Maistre to Proudhon tried to make a theology of war. They were saying that the war is a divine fact. They were wrong. War is an act of the devil.
The problem is that sometimes you can no longer avoid it. Sometimes, if you avoid evil, you multiply it.
Volodymyr Yermolenko is a philosopher, essayist, translator, and president of PEN Ukraine. He is editor-in-chief of Ukraine World, a multimedia project about Ukraine. Yermolenko co-hosts a series of English-language podcasts which have featured Marci Shore, Timothy Garton Ash, Serhii Plokhy, among others.