I accompany the German television team, so I get around more. At a checkpoint at the entrance to a village, for example. It is a Romanian village very well known in the region where wedding dresses are made. You see houses that look like small castles. Quite a few stood empty because a lot was built for prestige and not really used for residential purposes. Now all are rented. Many cars with license plates from other regions are checked at the checkpoint. Many are from Kyiv. Many are not checked either, you already know the guests. Each community has formed so-called local defense groups that control access to the villages and patrol the streets at night.
In the afternoon we are at the train station. An evacuation train from Kyiv arrived around 2 p.m. Now it’s 3 p.m., and only a few dozen people are standing in front of the train station, waiting for the free bus to the Ukrainian-Romanian border crossing. We talk to a young woman. She is traveling with her mother and her 93-year-old grandmother. It goes to Bulgaria, where an uncle lives. The young woman speaks English and Ukrainian, she comes from Kyiv. She didn’t believe in a war, and she can’t even describe the shock of the morning when the first rockets landed. Have we heard of bombs exploding or rockets hitting here? No, we don’t have that yet. Then you are happy people, she says. The worst thing is the uncertainty, you don’t know at all how the situation will develop and for how long you’ll be gone. When is that damn bus coming? They’ve been waiting outside for more than an hour. I’m so sorry for them, for everyone, I know there’s another long wait waiting for them all out at the border. But at least there are many fire engines that you can get into as soon as you’re through. Is it not possible for our city to organize the transfer better? Finally there are two buses. There is a simple foldable wheelchair for grandma, but she prefers to walk herself, especially when she realizes that she is being photographed by journalists.
What motivates a person to destroy their hometown from the air?
A young couple from Kyiv, acquaintances of acquaintances, have now moved into my sister’s semi-detached house. The woman is nine months pregnant. O. and K. come from the south, they are at home in the Cherson and Mykolaiv regions, their hometowns are not far apart. At the beginning of the war they wanted to go to their parents, but O.’s father said, don’t do it, stay in Kyiv, they won’t give up the capital, or go west. There’s no telling what will be here. O. says his father was in Nagorno-Karabakh during the war. He talked a lot about it, O. always had a great, irrational fear of war. Now he caught up with him. You came by car. They have a suitcase full of children’s things with them. My niece can help out with a cot and a stroller, her younger daughter is two and doesn’t need her anymore.
I’m concerned with the question of what the war is doing to us, what it will do to us in the future. We weep over our dead and rejoice over the enemy’s dead. We, as a civil society, are trying everything in our power to equip the soldiers, because many things are lacking, and to help the needy refugees, and often despair when some officials assure that everyone has everything they need. We are overwhelmed by the solidarity of the world and disgusted by compatriots who rent their apartments or houses to the refugees at exorbitant prices. But none of this is new, you somehow already know it, if only from literature.
General Makovetskyi, on whose orders Kharkiv is repeatedly bombed, was born in Chuhuiv, the city in Kharkiv Oblast where the rockets fell on the first day. What motivates a person to destroy their hometown from the air? What motivates Russian soldiers to shoot at civilians, including children, not in the indirect sense, when they fire on hospitals or schools, but directly – as concrete targets when the parents of these children are desperately trying to escape with them through an evacuation corridor? Not that these questions are new, we know similar pictures in recent history, from Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, from everywhere where the “Russian peace” was sent. It just wasn’t that close to us, to “Europe”, or why else did it have no consequences for the Russian commander-in-chief – apart from the “insufficient respect” of the West?
Read more episodes of this column here.