23.03.2024 / AFU (свої)

March has been a whirlwind of activity and events. This is the second part of a two-part reflection called "Свої"—a Ukrainian word that means "ours" or "us." It designates "your own people"—those with whom you feel a bond and whom you keep investing in and working on to maintain that bond.

My grandmother's funeral was a remarkable outpouring of vital energy and love in community. Liberated from the rigid expectations of filial obedience that structured our relationship to one another in life I felt a sudden freedom and responsibility in practicing what I've learned from her—the capacity to jump into any situation and improvise, making connections between what you know and what you need to know in the moment of doing. It's the skill of listening to yourself and to others and tuning while you're singing together.

Oh how comforting these cultural rituals are! The words of the prayers, the melodies of the songs. They organize the wild, unruly emotions that flood over me. When I first kneeled down before Babtsya's cold, embalmed body and my own body burst open in tears, the Ukrainian words of "Our Father," that prayer I learned as a child as a sequence of sounds without meaning, anchored me. Before I can address the person whose body lies before me, whose spirit dances freely all around, before I can compose my own sentences and thoughts, I need something to order these vibrations moving through my body.

Later, I recall that my emotions often take another form of expression. Swearing has its place in other cultural contexts, like the army, but it's something I never associated with my upstanding grandparents.

***

The evening my family members began arriving from out of town, we went to a local Thai restaurant. My sister and brother-in-law had recently returned from a trip to Quebec's wild Gaspé peninsula, and my parents had just visited Savannah, Georgia. After stories of rugged mountains that fall into the sea and photos of elegantly twisted trees on a southern beach, I announce: I took a vacation too!

It's true. Before leaving Ukraine I went to wartorn Mykolaiv for a couple days of respite from my panic about traveling to the USA.

The air raid siren blares just after the train arrives in Mykolaiv at 6.20 AM. Same sound, different city. The station windows are still boarded up after a russian missile strike in April 2022, though train service resumed last November. It's been a year and a half since I visited the city where I spent the summer of 2022 working as a fundraiser attached to a newly formed aerial reconnaissance unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Now I am a civilian from Kyiv. And I'm instantly aware that my body has gotten used to living in a different mode. The way my mind drifts to remember the last time I was at the train station—on summer vacation in 2017—does not suit the present conditions. There are guys in fatigues with large duffel bags, and even the civilians are all business. I've come here to visit friends in the army, but mine is a leisure trip. I've come here to see the city and to FEEL THIS. I need this sense-reminder of the war.

***

The cab driver is from Kherson. He is hyper-alert in an environment that is less saturated with impending danger than it was a couple years ago. He looks offended when I buckle my seatbelt, as if it were an insult to his driving skills. "Old habit," I say and smile apologetically.

His heightened alertness looks like a tic. It reminds me that the war is still with us both in fact and in the bodies-minds of everyone who has lived through it.

My friends take me to a yoga class. The instructor, a spirited woman in her mid-30s, is both demanding and attentive to our needs this morning. Her husband was recently killed while serving in the military.

Afterward we stroll through the city center, past one building after another with the windows boarded up, some still baring shattered glass. Some hotels are missing a chunk of their roof and upper floors. Mykolaiv is a living testimony to russia's relentless airstrikes on Ukraine's civilian infrastructure—by which I mean hotels, residential buildings, schools, hospitals, administration buildings, i.e., entire cities.

This is our tourist photo at the Mykolaiv regional administration building. Looks familiar right? It's a weird feeling to stand at the site of a brutal russian attack ingrained in your imagination through images on your computer screen.

***

Sasha invites me for a walk along the riverfront beach—my favorite place in Mykolaiv, where I spent many an exhausted evening watching the sun set (with the faint sounds of artillery battle in the distance). Let's be honest: the summer of 2022 was tense, uncertain, rife with violent destruction, but also pulsating with energy, urgency, even hope. Driven by the horror of our compatriots' deaths, we were trying to build something out of nothing in Ukraine's fragile, chaotic, and transforming army.

The river is just as beautiful, but the mood is completely different as Sasha and I talk about the Ukrainian army. She tells me how some of our weapons and equipment spend months out of service because they need spare parts. In order to get those parts you have to send in a report and someone in another city has to sign off on it. The parts exist. They're in Ukraine. They're lying in some warehouse but for somebody to get that part and send it to the place where it's needed somebody's gotta sign a piece of paper… And the process gets held up and the parts remain in the warehouses and the frontline equipment stays inactive.

"How can that be?!" I'm indignant while walking along the beach as the sun glints off the river in Mykolaiv. Our soldiers are dying because some people in the army cannot be bothered to sign a piece of paper to get a spare part from a warehouse to the front... "They're sabotaging our own war effort!"

It's a frightening thought: that you are at war with "your own" at the same time as you are fighting a powerful and brutal foreign enemy.

"What could be motivating them?" I ask.

Sasha answers, "They don't give a fuck."

"Then why not just give up at the very beginning, if they don't give a fuck? It could have saved a lot of bloodshed."

"Because somebody does give a fuck—or did."

This is a terrifying thought: that this war could kill everybody who gives a fuck.

A friend recently used the term "non-Soviet army" (нерадянська армія) to refer to that part of Ukraine's army that does give a fuck. It's a brilliant move to distinguish that thriving, vital, inspiring (and vulnerable) part of the AFU from the army as a whole. Because the entire AFU is not like this. Nor is the AFU completely Soviet.

Ukraine's army (like other institutions and systems) includes the people who make up this non-Soviet army, people like my friends, the Zli Ptakhy, those "angry birds" that I went to help in Mykolaiv in the summer of 2022. Then they were a motley group of specialists, smarty-pants, and enthusiasts scrambling to make something to improve Ukraine's military capacity but to do it their own way. Their perseverance has produced brilliant results. The more people who are inside the system insist on thinking and acting with their own minds, the greater the chances that the system will change.

***

My friend D., a bright young woman trained as a sociologist, spent months agonizing over whether she should join the army. On the one hand, somebody's gotta do it, on the other, why should she burden the overstretched army with training her from scratch? Her whole body radiates with measured excitement when she talks about the weekend course in basic military training for civilians that she's now attending. They practice handling weapons, digging defensive trenches, and disciplined physical exercises. She was surprised to discover that exercising control over your body's movements feels invigorating and empowering (when she's always enjoyed the freedom and contemplation of contemporary dance and mindful movement practices). Now she has a foundation of basic skills were she to join the AFU; genuine experience to counter her anxiety about how she imagined her responsibility for her country; and a new perspective on what her compatriots in the military go through.

When we avoid accepting our power to destroy and to harm, although sometimes that’s the best way to protect yourself, we risk losing control over that power.

On some level this war is not just about Ukraine. It is about the survival of those who give a fuck. You have to be vigilant about taking care of yourself because you, who does give a fuck, are irreplaceable.

There is no guarantee that the system won't kill you.

***

Perhaps the greatest lesson my Babtsya Maria taught me is that it's okay and even valiant to assert yourself and your needs in whatever ways that work, because your vital energy, like the spring flower pushing out of the ground to reach the sunlight, is a gift to be shared.

As I opened my computer to compose a brief eulogy for her wake I saw on Facebook that Anton Smirnov, artist Kseniya Hnylytska's husband, father of two kids, was killed in action. It may be more than a decade since I'd seen him, back when I consorted with Ukraine's contemporary artists. But the photo of him in uniform is an instant reminder of what I sensed then: that this is a good man.

Війна забирає найкращих (The war takes our best people) is a cliché. It's also true. It takes the best and the worst and everybody in between.

Each death of one of my irreplaceable people slices off a layer of the self-indulgent self-consiousness that serves as a protective shield between me and what’s really happening. Don't hesitate, say it now, bare your emotions, and be open while you have the (fucking) chance. I am beginning to understand why my grandmother and her people were so raw.

PS My friends in the Zli Ptakhy (Angry Birds) combat drone unit are hard at work — I saw it on my trip to Mykolaiv earlier this month! Please continue to support their efforts via PayPal: heroesukraine.org@gmail.com (Illia Shpolianskiy) or credit card: https://heroesukraine.org/en/donate/