November 25 – December 24, 2022 Svitlana Stretovych, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Valerii Pekar, Iryna Vikyrchak, Mychailo Wynnyckyj

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 36 continues to present the series. You can get acquainted with the previous collection here.

Svitlana Stretovych: The new black in Ukraine. November 25

The first news about the potential blackout in the capital of Ukraine shocked everyone. Finally, when all the worst news over the nine months of the great war seem to already have been voiced, every time there comes a higher level of how a citizen in our territory should be ready for the reality of war reality. 

“Are you getting ready?”, I ask my friends.

They were getting ready. 

Candles, cans, technical water, drinking water, burner, gas balloons, warm winter clothing, power banks, charged telephones, lanterns. Life in Ukraine is like a trip to the mountains. One should have all the necessary things for all possible situations, otherwise you may fail to survive.

That Wednesday there came a long air alarm, and four explosions heard over it obviously signaled that this could be the beginning of a new trial. 

“It has started!”, that is what we told each other on that day. The same as we said on February 24, the same as on October 10.

Now an important adaptation characteristic of every Ukrainian is the ability to very quickly adjust to reality.

Quickly get some water into storage facilities.

Quickly make tea if there still is some hot water in the kettle.

Quickly give calls to everyone while the phone is still functioning.

Quickly leave the streets if there comes an air alarm signal.

Night.

Centre of Kyiv.

You can see only the lights of the cars that are queuing to the car fuelling station. The queue is so long that you cannot even understand where it ends. One has to stay there for about an hour. The car fuelling station operator is skillfully doing his job. He looks more like a traffic regulator on the road. 

His voice can be heard outdoors. He welcomes everyone. Clarifies what petrol we want to buy.

“Let the good come!”, he suddenly says goodbye to the driver standing at the neighboring fuel column.

War. Night. With cold beds, apartments with no water, time with no telephone connection ahead. 

“That’s awful”, responds that other driver from the dark. “But that will be gone.”

His voice is mature, confident.

30 hours without light.

In Lviv nine transplantations from posthumous donors were made within those 30 hours. The Ministry of Health told this on November 25.

Within a bit more than 24 hours transplant surgeons transplanted two hearts, a liver and six kidneys. Teams consisting of almost a hundred specialists were working to make this happen.

Friends are writing: “45 hours without light”, “The third day and night with no light”… We can now compete who has been staying without any communications for a longer period and how (s)he has survived in this test (I feel it) blackout.

I am looking at the candle on the table that is almost burnt. I am putting together both lanterns that already do not have any charge in them and thinking about technical water of which we have too little to survive in such conditions over a long period of time.

Life seems to be more complicated in the dark, but not so desperate not to overcome all this. Absence of electricity in Ukraine opens a very important piece of knowledge to all of us: now there are even more light people here when there is no light.

Svitlana Stretovych: When will you go away, you traitor? November 25

The Ukrainian city of Kherson was under occupation for more than eight months. Having occupied the city in spite of the powerful civic resistance, on March 1 the russian army shot 17 territorial defense soldiers from tanks. The territorial defense was equipped only with machine guns. Some of them, ready to defend the city, were not servicemen and did not have any small arms. One can find a video on the Internet where local residents are walking along the Buzkovyi Park and showing the places where the Ukrainian defenders perished. That is Naftovykiv Street. It is March in that video, and a woman is commenting the terrible picture she sees around – dead bodies of men.

russian invaders assured with their billboards that “russia is here forever!”, while peaceful rallies near the regional administration gathered plenty of people who were chanting in the language not clear for the invader: “Kherson is Ukraine!” 

Invaders were issuing russian passports, tried to instantaneously include Kherson region to the russian federation through a pseudo-referendum and were legalizing occupation administration that mainly consisted of local residents. Those who had been working in Kherson all their lives long and for some reason sided with the enemy. I often asked myself the following question – who are all those people? That is the region where I grew up, but I somehow did not know the traitors. They were not known to me up to a certain point of time.

On June 14 Kherson State University was captured. In some news I heard that a lecturer known to me became its self-proclaimed rector. The former head teacher, and then – director of the academic lyceum. “O”, I thought, “some traitors have been brought.” My shock lasted exactly until the moment when I started getting comments and reactions from my classmates in the stories to the news shared by me.

They were all the same. Equally offensive.

What was memorable about that head teacher could be included to the worst experiences. She could insult not just some lyceum students, whole classes, but she could do this in public and with no serious reason for that. The teacher of law, who back in 2015 drew attention of journalists due to her separatist posts and who gave comments for russian mass media where she said that “Americans have transformed the local sanitary station into a biolaboratory”. She ran for the post of the mayor of Kherson as the candidate not belonging to any party, and since that very year she was officially unemployed.

This was her rematch. The way of getting some status from the aggressor state while she failed with her career in the state with the passport of which she had been living all that time.

Traitors could be found in any historical time. The most illustrative, as for me, seems to be the story of Ephialtes who showed Persians the path which could be used to circumvent the Thermopylae passage to insidiously defeat Spartans. The price of hundreds of lives is paid as the result of the decision of those who are not afraid of betraying the closest people.

Any disloyalty in life is the moral crime, which is often condemned in words, hence — unpunished. When we speak about betraying a person — this case does not always reach court, but when this crime refers to treason, it is, luckily, regulated by law. 

Human mind is prone to undergo different strange processes — self-suggestion, crowd effect, when the level of intelligence goes considerably down and when individual responsibility disappears. The demarcation line stands for the verification of the moral code within which we lived. It is not enshrined into the code, and, most probably, is a bit different for everyone. But! There is some limit beyond which it is absolutely the same:

When an army comes to the neighboring state to appropriate its territory, destroy infrastructure, steal works of art, and kill civilians — these crimes against humanity stop being on the verge of moral condemnation. 

They require different measures. 

Volodymyr Yermolenko: When a murderer becomes a judge. November 26

To think of the Holodomor today is to think of evil. But it is not just an evil, it’s repetitive evil. This is the evil of the demonic return, which broke the gates of hell and keeps bursting up to the surface. The present evil of putin is the result of the evil of stalin, and the evil of stalin is the result of the evil of the russian empire.

One of the features of this evil is its persistent attempts to break the chain of justice. To ensure that criminals are not punished, but non-criminals are. To ensure that only a murderer can decide who is good and who is bad. To ensure that “justice” belongs only to those who have killed or have been able to kill. In this warped world, only the one who takes somebody’s life becomes the judge. That is how the chain of justice is broken: the defendant becomes the judge, the criminal becomes the source of justice, the innocent becomes the “transgressor.”

Turning the hierarchy between the criminal and the victim upside down is a key diabolical trick of the russian empire. To make a crime not an object of justice, but its subject, to turn the defendant into a judge — it is its leitmotif. Thus, raskolnikov, the murderer of two women, becomes a “moral guide” for all russian culture and a benchmark for “higher spirituality.” That way, the victims of cruel and ruthless colonization are presented in that “culture” as bloody criminals.

The criminal’s desire is never to be brought to justice. The best way to do this is to become the judge yourself. To turn the hierarchy of justice inside out. To turn the Dante’s world so that the cone of hell transformed into a mountain of purgatory and the top of the earthly paradise.

Evil unpunished will continue to do its “judgment” because it knows that sooner or later they will come for it. Evil exists only because of its impunity, because only in this way it can continue to do its “anti-justice”, or rather, continue to be evil. The pleasure of the “russian world” is that it perceives itself as a world beyond justice: it seeks not to follow the rules but to break them. russian culture is imbued with hatred for the concept of law, for formal logic, for reason. It replaces justice with the concept of “truth” (“where is the power, brother?”), or, the denial of the possibility of justice. This russian “truth” is not truth and justice recognized by the community, society, or law. It is an unexplained subjective certainty of its own “rightness”. This is the “truth” of the murderer who does not recognize the human court and considers himself superior to it.

One of the consequences of the Holodomor is not only the terrible death of four million people, several million more of the unbegotten, a huge wound inflicted on Ukrainian society for generations to come. As a result, the self-confidence of evil has been enhanced. This horrific collective murder has gone unnoticed by the world. It remains even today, in cynical or blind theoretical discussions, “whether the Holodomor was genocide.” It remains so because evil still manages to live in the framework of “we will get away with it.”

To live in the framework of impunity, in the framework when the executioner and the victim change places, when the murderer becomes a judge. The feeling of impunity is the key engine of today’s russian war against Ukraine and the world. They enjoy the fact that “they will get away with it.” They enjoy the opportunity to kill and then judge their victims, and erect monuments to the murderers. They enjoy their imaginary victory over justice and over the sacred geography of the Divine Comedy, where hell and paradise swap places.

The worst evil is the evil unpunished. Crime without punishment. The collapse of justice. Evil is always coming back. For it seeks to cast justice deep into the cone of hell.

But for every evil, there comes a judgment day. There will be a trial for this evil, too. A doom that will restore balance in the world. Placing hell where it belongs.

Valerii Pekar: Therefore, the empire must cease to exist. December 1

31 years ago today, Ukrainians voted for independence.

russia was ready to make territorial claims, but, according to the testimony of yeltsin’s entourage, provided in Serhii Plokhy’s book The Last Empire, the results of the referendum convinced them not to interfere, and the economic problems that arose before the russian federation required focus.

Nine years ago, on this day, Ukrainians reaffirmed their desire for independence, as well as their commitment to the ideals of freedom and democracy and European values.

russia’s position had changed by the time: it was pumped up with oil money, poisoned by propaganda and fear. The war broke out.

If russia had been powerful in 1991, the war would have started back then. It is unlikely that Ukraine would have retained its current borders in that case. Few people were ready to defend the country, there was no business, the government was incapable, the army virtually non-existent. The West would have eagerly accepted russian explanations about one people and the russian lands of the East and South. Back then, Ukraine seemed to be a strange entity, which should not have existed (one of the important reasons for Ukrainians’ defeat a hundred years ago — the West recognized the right to independence of the Poles, Czechs, and Estonians, but not Ukrainians).

If the empire ever becomes powerful again, it will come back once more.

Therefore, the empire must cease to exist.

Iryna Vikyrchak: The festival of stolen culture. December 16

Recently, I have seen a poster of the so-called “Festival of russian Culture in India” in the city where I live, organized by the local russian consulate. There were three events on the list. The first one was the Dagestani dance performance. The second — the ensemble of the Cossack song “Krinitsa”. And last but not the least there was an ensemble playing in the “crossover” genre and that is also a perfect illustration to what I am about to say. 

The musical genre “crossover” is by definition associated with cultural appropriation, using the distinctive qualities of different national music traditions to appeal to mass tastes. And cultural appropriation, let me kindly remind you with a Wikipedia quote, “is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity.This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures.”

The word “krinitsa” does not exist in a russian language, it exists in belarusian and Ukrainian ones. “Krinitsa” means “a well” rendered in russian by all the dictionaries with totally different words with different roots. 

As for the Dagestani dance performance, the word “Dagestan” is of Turkish or a Persian origin and means “the land of mountains”. It is located in the Caucasus mountain range and nowadays is russia’s most heterogeneous republic with more than 40 different ethnicities most of whom speak either Caucasian or Turkic or Iranian languages. Not much to do with ethnic russian culture, but this land just happened to end up under russian rule. 

Why would a russian ensemble choose a belarusian or Ukrainian name if they were representing an authentic russian culture? Why do they think that a Dagestani dance can represent their culture? Why is cultural appropriation a core of russian culture in general? Don’t they have their own? Or maybe they just built the myth of the “great” culture while absorbing all the best from the suppressed nations and presenting it like their own? 

Let me confirm this statement with the two most known symbols of russian culture: matryoshka dolls and borscht, both so much recognised around the world. Recently, UNESCO put borscht in its “Endangered Heritage List”, officially proving its Ukrainian origin and protecting this culinary heritage from being appropriated by the aggressor. And now, matryoshkas. Guess what, the concept was also stolen! Originally, they come from Japan known there as “kokeshi”. At the end of the 19th century, a russian entrepreneur Savva Mamontow brought a set of such dolls, the figurines of the seven deities of happiness and had his painter put a peasant face of a russian woman on it. Good luck googling that! 

And so, why would you call a cultural festival with the name of the culture it does not represent? 

Volodymyr Yermolenko: It’s like we’re back in Baroque Chiaroscuro. December 16

It’s like we’re back in Baroque Chiaroscuro. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, van Honthorst, de La Tour. An era where light is rare, like revelation; where the starting point of existence and thinking is darkness, blindness, and the compression of space and time. Where light is perceived as lightning, as a rare gift, as an exception, rather than a rule. Light is not only in the sense of electricity, of course, but in the sense of truth, friendship, and happiness. These are things that are few, that are in short supply, that are easy to lose, that are not a given. The Baroque is much more skeptical of light than the Renaissance: for the Renaissance, light is the rule, for the Baroque, it is the exception. Renaissance sees the world as an organism created by God that lives by itself; Baroque understands that without constant intervention — divine or human — the world will crumble. The light will disappear.

Diana Klochko keeps repeating that Shevchenko was very fond of Rembrandt, and learned something from him. Maybe, we can also call him a baroque artist and a graphic artist? Maybe, his main visual emotion is also chiaroscuro? The rarity of light, truth, and happiness? Their fragility and vulnerability?

Mychailo Wynnyckyj: Thoughts from Kyiv. December 24, 2022

To all those celebrating tonight and tomorrow: Merry Christmas!

As you gather with friends and family please remember Ukraine in your thoughts and prayers.

• pray for the souls of the heroes who gave their lives for the liberty and freedom that the civilized world enjoys (and sometimes takes for granted). Today, the line between tyranny and humanity runs along the Ukrainian frontline. And our defense is your defense.
• pray for those whose wounds are healing in hospitals and homes throughout Ukraine. I know of noone in this country whose family and/or friends have not been affected by russian aggression. The wounds are both physical and emotional. We are tired. We are scarred. We bleed. But we will heal!
• pray for light, for heat, for human interaction. Understand that for many here, losing internet has been more traumatic than having to cope with periodic blackouts. We love life, and life is fulfilled in togetherness. Remember us in your thoughts — we’ll feel it.

The tree in the center of Kyiv is smaller than in previous years. But it stands. Resilient. Proud. Free.

Ukrainian.

#ThoughtsfromKyiv

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: Svitlana Stretovych, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Valerii Pekar, Iryna Vikyrchak, Mychailo Wynnyckyj

Translators (from Ukrainian): Halyna Pekhnyk  (Svitlana Stretovych’s essays), Svitlana Bregman (Volodymyr Yermolenko’s essays), Halyna Bezukh (Valerii Pekar’s essay)

Illustrators: Victoria Boyko (Svitlana Stretovych, Iryna Vikyrchak, and Mychailo Wynnyckyj’s essays), Nastya Gaydaenko (Volodymyr Yermolenko’s essays), Max Palenko (Valerii Pekar’s essay), and plasticine panel by Olha Protasova

Copyeditors: 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