August 10-11, 2022 Mychailo Wynnyckyj, Taras Prokhasko, Iryna Vikyrchak, Valerii Pekar

Flash essays from the collection “Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity” tell about the insights, experiences, and beliefs of Ukrainians, which ignited their society in 2022, when the full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine began.

The Cultural Hub community and curators carefully collected, translated, and illustrated these texts in order to capture the values ​​of Ukrainians — Freedoms, Bravery, Dignity, Responsibility, and Humour. 

A series of publications in partnership with Chytomo introduces this collection to the English-speaking audience. Volume 27 continues to present the series. You can get acquainted with the previous collection here.

Mychailo Wynnyckyj: The root of evil blurred by Amnesty International. August 10 

Last week, Ukrainians, and friends of Ukraine throughout the world, were shocked by a series of outrageous statements from supposedly respectable international organizations. By rigorously pursuing some idealized concept of “impartiality” the International Red Cross and Amnesty International (among others) compromised not just themselves, but the values of humanism, common decency, and sensible ethics.

Why? Why would such respected organizations discredit themselves, and then defend their obviously untenable positions even in the face of widespread criticism?

One of the poorly understood aspects of this war, is the destabilizing effect that it has had on the philosophical foundations of the western institutional order. russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, and the very public brutality of its soldiers, has undermined a fundamental principle on which western civilization is based: the belief that people are fundamentally good.

Here’s the problem: they’re not. No matter how difficult it is to accept, Evil exists.

Since Augustine and Acquinas, western philosophy has preached that Evil is simply the absence of Good, that Evil does not actually exist. Hegel and Heidegger supported this claim: Evil is privation, absence, deficiency of Good.

According to this view, Evil has no independent existence. Its manifestation is the result of disease or deviance. It can be treated by medication, education, correction. Sometimes individuals deviate from their natural state of goodness (due to psychological illness, social neglect, inequality), and they do things that are not good. Then they should be helped to right their ways.

In line with the Judeo-Christian tradition, Evil cannot exist as a separate ontological category because God exists. If one denies the existence of God then the existence of Evil becomes more plausible, but Atheists rarely get that far in their philosophies. For believers, God is omnipotent (capable of destroying evil) and omnibenevolent (infinitely good), so if God exists, Evil can exist only because of the inadequacy of the human will — as “sin” or error.

But as we see in this war, Evil exists not as a shortfall or defect. It has agency.

It exists in the russian soldiers who massacred over 400 civilians in Bucha. It exists in the russian soldiers who murdered women and children in Mariupol. It exists in the russian soldiers who have raped infants and castrated Ukrainian POWs. It exists in the russian field commanders who regularly order indiscriminate attacks on civilian houses, schools, hospitals…

Why russians engage in such barbarism is beyond comprehension if one accepts established paradigms. This is not about sin or error. Their actions are pure Evil.

russian barbarism cannot be healed or rectified. It is not a deficiency. It is a real manifestation of Evil: one that the ethical theories on which western civilization is based, cannot comprehend.

Naturally, the people who work for international organizations believe their work fosters Good. Their mission is to ensure impartial resolution (or at least relief) of conflict.

Because people are essentially good (so says the dominant paradigm) some measure of Good must be present in both sides of any conflict. Each side is said to have interests that reflect its own interpretations of “good”. In war, the job of a mediating organization is to find “balance” between the conflicting parties: to recognize the legitimacy of the interests of each side.

To admit that one of the parties is Evil (lacking any Good) would amount to a failure not only of the intermediary mission of the organization, but of the foundational values on which western institutions are built. It would amount to denying the potential decency (humanity) of one of the warring parties.

In this view, war is never cast as a conflict of good vs. evil. Its essence is a difference in interpretations of “good” — a disastrous form of misunderstanding. Differences between the warring sides can be “healed” because both are fundamentally seen as good. Hence, to mediate means to “balance”; to be impartial, publicly neutral.

On August 4th, Amnesty International issued a statement that quotes its Secretary General as saying “We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas”. Clearly, the once respected international organization aimed to “balance” its previous denunciations of russia with a public admonishment of Ukraine. Its leadership believes that some “good” is present in the actions of russia and some “evil” (mistakes that can be rectified) is present on the Ukrainian side as well. Demonstrated neutrality can facilitate mediation and even eventual peace — so says the paradigm — because both sides have “sinned” and must see the error of their ways.

Understandably, this search for “balance” has caused outrage in Ukraine. On August 6th, Oksana Pokalchuk, the Director of Amnesty International Ukraine, resigned her position in protest against the position of the organization’s central office.

Like her, many Ukrainians are asking: when will the world wake up to the evil that is russia? Why does the international community insist upon “balance” when this war is clearly black-and-white? When will they stop blaming the victim?

Previously, on August 3rd, in response to the staged bombing of Olenivka prison by russian forces during which over 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed and over 100 more injured, the International Red Cross issued a statement claiming the organization did not guarantee the safety of the POWs. Apparently, when Ukrainian forces in Mariupol were ordered to surrender, the Red Cross “facilitated the safe passage of combatants out of the Azovstal plant, in coordination with the parties to the conflict. Given they were then PoWs we registered their information… We did not guarantee the safety of the PoWs once in enemy hands because it is not within our power to do so.”

This sounds much like the reaction of western powers after russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine: a justification for doing nothing based on strict adherence to written words in a document signed by the world’s major powers twenty years earlier. Then it was argued that the stipulations of the Budapest Memorandum did not actually guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its relinquishing nuclear weapons. The “security assurances” merely required the signatories to “consult in the event a situation arises.”

Consultations and diffused responsibility make sense if one believes in the fundamental goodness of homo sapiens: If POWs are counted and registered, they will be safe. If countries agree to respect each others’ borders, they will keep their promises. These conditional sentences seem sensible if each side respects human dignity, if agreements are worth the paper they are written on…

What if the signatory on a document has no respect for dignity? What if there is no intention to keep to the agreement? What if the concept of negotiating “in good faith” has not basis?

Closer to home: what if the enemy is fundamentally evil? What if their evil is not an aberration, but rather their essence?

The very possibility of these questions requires a total rethink of all that is foundational to western civilization; a recalibration of the paradigm on which international institutions have been constructed. That’s not an easy thing to do, but it must be done.

And Evil must be recognized for what it is. And destroyed.

#ThoughtsfromKyiv

Taras Prokhasko: My longest text message. August 10

Problems, whether intellectual ones and worldview-related, whether strategic or tactical, the problems do not depress me, but rather get me excited. Mostly because the everyday life is filled with absolutely real practices you cannot abandon, like a little kid who requires increasingly more words and sentences to use, like the old mother who requires care, both sanitary and verbal: you need to say something and somehow. Besides, I am lacking resources to support all that microworld, but I cannot achieve more in that sense because I have no time and energy, if I want to be honest in taking care of my mum and my kid. And that is a huge advantage in the times when my home country experiences the full-scale war. People living with hardships will understand that there is no way around, and the troubles will still be there when some more severe challenges come. However keen you are to fight in the front, to the utmost extreme, you cannot abandon your section of the front which is the same significant fragment of the war as any other.

Current developments in Ukraine are truly existential. They are trying to obliterate Ukraine. Not for resources or for settling their people in the lands of plenty. The sole objective is to exterminate it. To destroy the intellectuals, and also the paralyzed old mentally disordered people, and the unconscious children who speak Ukrainian with their parents, for some reason; to destroy the books, documents, memories, intentions, and the ability to enunciate the phrases “I am, I am the way I am.”

The contemporary world literature, and to be more specific, the films as the largest manifestation of literature, have been irritating me for many years with a nasty trend. When employing the historical topics, being of top interest, the authors create the dangerous untruth, even when they precisely follow the facts and details. This kind of most horrible untruth is about the fact that mindset and customs of the past (regardless of whether it is the 12th century, or the 19th, or the late 20th) acquire meaning and interpretations of the film’s production year. Morale and ethics are presented disgracefully: on the basis of the paradigm of the modern and the currently relevant things. The impact of such approach, and such representation, of such an inadequate discourse, is scathing. It blurs the consciousness, and kills the ability to feel what reality is.

Something similar is happening to the russian-Ukrainian war. It is so deeply archaic that no contemporary motivation can explain it. Despite their highly rich and multifaceted history, present-day European people, nations, and countries cannot venture and admit that it is happening so close to them. They cannot realize that the last time Europe could comprehend these mental and, therefore, corporal, things some thousand, three hundred, a hundred, or eighty years ago. To ride this time machine, you need more than empathy and compassion. You need the conscious memory about the skills and reflexes, about fears and horrors, about the divine price, divine pricelessness, and divine futility of human life. You need to imagine the continuity of every person’s ego-centric rather than historical perception. To become yourself to the extent when you are losing yourself. To dissolve to the point when you emerge from nothingness.

Checkmate, stalemate, gardez a.o. of Ukrainian culture are in the fact that it is a key cause of the war. This culture that has been growing not on degrading others but on the composed certainty of their own right to existence, has become a reason to a complicated and gradual process of Ukrainian self-identification. It stopped being the ghetto culture. But it was too contagious and condemned itself to become a key target for aggression. russia, the entire russia, not only a handful of putinists, cannot stand Ukraine’s existence, as a country that defines itself. russia destroyed hundreds of peculiar self-important nations. russia despises all other nations they have not destroyed yet (Germans, Poles, Americans, among others). russia treats its own people with the utmost cruelty and is killing itself with the utmost joy (and all the great russian literature confirms it). But russia has one major weakness. They love Ukraine so much that they hate the Ukrainian above all. russia’s underlying core is about denying all things Ukrainian.

In that case, we, the Ukrainians, are left with a convenient dichotomy. Either we stop being Ukrainians and continue to suffer, like all other russians. Or, we continue being Ukrainians because this is who we are. In that case, the war comes. Self-defense, Krav Maga… What a concept of peace. Ukrainian culture, for which sake the tango of death is done, cannot be pacifist. You can ask in the most horrendous Balkan brothels – don’t you, girls, like the sex?

However, there is one defining thing, that culture in the war is not reduced down to war-related topics and motifs. Life goes on. It is multifaceted. Although it is fragmented, like the pomegranate, into multitude of pieces. Those in the front, those staying far away, those who lost their homes, those who stayed… when you peel off the pomegranate, you cannot put it back together to the integral whole. But you can undo all the blood-colored segments with the intact membrane, and place them all on one plate. You mix them up and intersperse, blindfolded and trusting your fingers. Each and every pomegranate seed will look like you never can tell where they used to belong.

Iryna Vikyrchak: The replaced cultures. August 11

I used to have a friend in Poland who owned a small travel agency, offering original exotic (from the European point of view) trips to the East (of the EU), to Ukraine in particular. And first, I thought, “Wow, they are organizing some innovative, fascinating, and unique trips to unexplored corners of my own country, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, Moldova and Georgia, and many others”. All my life, I have always traveled westward and have never been farther east than Kharkiv. But those routes made me think of my father’s youth when he crossed all of the soviet union. I grew up with travel books on former republics at our home. These books were full of colorful photographs. I remember one of them, in particular, on Mongolia, depicting yurts, women in bright national clothing, the tradition of hawk hunting, and the authentic beauty of the Mongolian nomadic way of life and pristine nature. So at first, I thought it was such a brave and authentic project — this adventure of connecting with the colorful worlds from my father’s travel albums. 

Yet once, the said former friend of mine decided to share the experience of the expeditions his company organized, and I asked for Mongolia anticipating the authenticity I saw in the albums from the previous century. He showed me the selection of the best photos from their numerous tours. I did see the country’s amazing nature in them. But almost nothing from the former glory of the rich and authentic cultural life. Instead, the eyes of the European tourists were entertained by whatever relics of the soviet occupation they could find: a tiny lenin bust on a dusty window sill, an old soviet “bobik” jeep, a Tumen scale in a village shop, anything with the hammer and sickle on it. Et cetera. My friend presented those images to me with pride as the biggest trophies of their voyages. And suddenly, I realized they saw my own country likewise. Its trauma and biggest tragedy were  mere objects of their interest. soviet staff — it’s amusing, you know. 

When the russians created the soviet union, their only way to keep this colonial utopia together was by erasing the authenticity of the people who lived within its boundaries. In Mongolia, they started by destroying the ancient Buddhist monasteries scattered around the country. Because you cannot impose a new artificial identity without making a space for it, you know. Without terror and mass murders, without crimes against the world’s diversity and cultural heritage. And then, the language, of course: Cyrillic was imposed in the 1930s to make it closer to the russian language, providing another excuse for the “brotherly nations” propaganda talk. Imagine the scale of the heritage loss for the generations to come violently caused by russians in those times. Another example of their crimes was the execution of Mongolian Queen Genepil in 1938 as part of the stalinist purges. And it was her figure that inspired the character of princess Leia in Star Wars. Just google her image, and you will see. 

The same methodology, same persecutions and terror against the country’s identity, culture, language, and people were used in Ukraine and every other republic of the ussr. But unfortunately, we, the educated Europeans of the 20th century, couldn’t see the difference between those layers of reality. What is genuine and what is fake. What was erased and what was imposed. Many of us found the soviet staff amusing. Making fun of the culprit of the hybrid post-colonial cultures. Admiring the aggressor and the destructor. Luckily (and it’s the only time that I’m using this word in this context), the full-scale war against Ukraine showed the world that russia and the nations suffering from it are not “brotherly” and never have been. Hopefully, we learn to see beyond the surface and look at the wild, the original, the authentic. 

Valerii Pekar: For your freedom and ours! August 11

The day before yesterday was International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

I wrote this short text, but did not press ‘post,’ so it remained unpublished.

Well, I’m posting it now, even though belatedly.

We need this day for two things.

1. We need this day to remember that the Crimean Tatars, Karaites and Krymchaks have Crimea as their homeland, and there’s nowhere else for them to go. And although today Crimea is still occupied, and they are scattered across Ukraine and the world, but the day when they return to the land of their ancestors will come. Crimea is Ukraine, and I personally believe: Crimea can be Ukrainian only when it is Crimean Tatars’ land, and it can be Crimean Tatars’ land only when it is Ukrainian (according to the results of the “Crimea 2050” foresight, see in the comment section below).
2. We need this day to remember that the indigenous peoples of the russian empire (which is a “federation” only on paper) remain unliberated. Avars, Adyghe, Altaians, Balkars, Bashkirs, Buryats, Dargins, Ingush, Erzians, Kabardians, Kalmyks, Karachays, Karelians, Komi, Kumyks, Laks, Lezgins, Mari, Mokshans, Nogais, Ossetians, Tabasarans, Tatars, Tuvans, Udmurts, Khakas, Circassians, Chechens, Chuvash, Yakuts (these are only the most significant ones) — indigenous, aboriginal peoples oppressed by the empire, russified and destroyed as it was with Ukrainians in the empire for centuries. They are now being driven into an imperial war of conquest, just as Ukrainians were driven into imperial wars of conquest for centuries. Therefore, we must distinguish between individuals who have committed war crimes and deserve a just punishment and peoples as a whole, to whom the old Ukrainian political principle should be applied: For your freedom and ours!

Ukraine will not be safe as long as there is an aggressive empire nearby. Only the freedom of the oppressed indigenous peoples and peaceful reconstruction of the post-imperial space will bring our country and the whole of Europe long-term security. From this perspective, the Ukrainian interests and aspirations of the enslaved indigenous peoples coincide (see an article on the collapse of the empire in the comments section).

I do realize that for most of you, most of the above names are just empty words. But in fact, behind these words are stories of enslavement, resistance, genocide, deportation, extraordinary efforts to preserve their culture and language, historical memory, and identity. We don’t know these stories like the world didn’t know our stories (and still doesn’t, except in Europe). We know only russian myths that contain no more truth than russian myths about Ukraine and Ukrainians.

To learn more and find the truth and justice — this is the reason why we need this Day of Indigenous Peoples.

The editorial “rule of small letters” or the “rule of disrespect for criminals” applies to all the words related to evil, like names and surnames of terrorists, war criminals, rapists, murderers, and torturers. They do not deserve being capitalized but shall be written in italics to stay in the focus of the readers’ attention. 

The programme “Wars. Ukrainians. Humanity” has been created by joint effort and with the financial support of the institution’s members of the Cultural Business Education Hub, the European Cultural Foundation, and BBK — the Regensburg Art and Culture Support Group from the Professional Association of Artists of Lower Bavaria/Upper Palatinate.

Authors: Mychailo Wynnyckyj, Taras Prokhasko, Iryna Vikyrchak, Valerii Pekar 

Translator (from Ukrainian): Svitlana Bregman (Taras Prokhasko’s essay), Halyna Bezukh (Valerii Pekar’s essay)

Illustrators: Victoria Boyko (Mychailo Wynnyckyj & Iryna Vikyrchak’s essays), Yuliya Tabenska (Taras Prokhasko’s essay), Max Palenko (Valerii Pekar’s essay), and plasticine panel by Olha Protasova

Copyeditors: Hanna Leliv (Iryna Vikyrchak’s essay), Yuliia Moroz, Terra Friedman King

Proofreaders: Iryna Andrieieva, Tetiana Vorobtsova, Terra Friedman King

Content Editors: Maryna Korchaka, Natalia Babalyk

Program Directors: Julia Ovcharenko and Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski