24.02.2024 / Here

Last year, as February 24 approached there was widespread hesitation about how to call the day marking one year of russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now, after two years, I see "anniversary" everywhere. I think this word is one more way of domesticating the war, assimilating its continued existence into language that is familiar and benign. I refuse to celebrate the beginning of a long partnership with russian war and occupation in Ukraine.

But if that's what you want to call it, then let's think about what this anniversary actually commemorates. A moment of utter clarity, when it was impossible to ignore the reality literally exploding in your life? Or was it yet another moment of revelation that we failed to see?

This past week I've found insight in pieces published in 2022, when our senses were sharpened by constant, imminent danger, our minds not yet dulled by two years of non-stop battle against a ruthless and relentless enemy. Many of the hundreds of thousands of people killed by russia's unilateral, unjustifiable invasion were still among the living then.

“My advice to the Ukrainians is this: Cooperate with the West and take those weapons and aid because you need it, but never fall under the delusion that the West is doing this to defeat the Russians. You may have everybody’s eyes and ears in Western capitals right now, but soon people will get used to horrible news from Ukraine. It just becomes normal news. Don’t lay down your weapons if you want to fight for your dignity and country, but never count on any external help to liberate your land. . . . You have to prepare for the worst-case scenario—being left alone to face your own destiny. Seeing your cities turned into rubble and your people enslaved by your enemy. Becoming refugees in a foreign land, living among people you thought would care about you forever, but didn’t. Be prepared to be blamed for your own death and destruction if at some point you refuse to surrender.” (1)

“Why do you think that the great crimes committed by the Soviet Union went unpunished? Why were European countries so eager in the 1970s to begin working with the criminal in order to access cheap energy? Was it not because this territory was considered not European?” (2)

“The experiential knowledge of Russian imperialism and resistance to it possessed by Ukrainians and others in the region – for instance, the Baltic States, Poland and Finland – if taken seriously, could have better prepared 21st-century Europe for Russia’s full-scale invasion of a sovereign state. Maybe it could have even prevented it altogether. At the least, it might have awakened us from our slumber of inaction in 2014, when Crimea and Donbas were occupied.” (3)

“For Russia, Syria was a laboratory for dirty tricks—not just a place to field test weapons, but a way to test the effectiveness of their propaganda strategies. Putin and his regime mastered exploiting the free speech environment of Western social media to inject doubt about anything and everything. They figured out that you don’t actually have to have a consistent narrative to counter the truth; all you need to do is create confusion about the facts, so people who aren’t news savvy don’t know what to think.” (1)

“It is the Russia experts who were well placed to warn us that widespread support of Putin’s annexation of Crimea meant that the Russians could be expected to show the same widespread support, and not condemnation, of Putin’s so-called ‘special operation’ of shelling civilians, looting and pillaging in Ukraine. It is these experts who could have warned us that annual Victory Day parades – which included driving around in cars with stickers that said, ‘To Berlin for German women!’ or ‘We can do it again!’ – were not just a peculiar Russian way of commemorating the Second World War. That there was a chance that they would do it again.” (3)

“Now it is impossible to not notice that Russian culture has formed the Russians who support Putin in this inhuman war. It turns out this culture is incapable of teaching people to differentiate between good and evil. We believe that this culture should have a rest, for it has been raped by Soviet ideology, and it has been used for far too long by those powers solely as a means of covering up their actual intentions.” (2)

“you’ll either be in solidarity or you’ll be in war. but it’s not something that you decide and then you sort of comport yourself to be in solidarity with ukraine because it’s the right thing to do. no, you do the thing that your heart tells you to do and then you understand who you’re in solidarity with. and the thing that is truly grotesque . . . there is evil carried in the devotion to abstract ideas. like anti-war declarations that refuse to know war.” (4)

“People want to convince themselves that they have no dog in this fight, no reason to try to stop it. It’s much more comfortable that way. Then you can ignore it and go on with your life. Dictators have always understood this, and they know exactly how to distort the facts just enough to give people the excuse they’re looking for not to care.” (1)

Your attention is a battleground. Your mind has the power to change the course of world events. Today, February 24, 2024, I urge you to think about how your country's actions have empowered russia while you've been supporting and “supporting” Ukraine. We have not defeated russia yet.

Irpin (Kyiv suburb), February 23, 2024

Today I listened to a discussion featuring human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties. The hope she carries has weight to match the heaviness of Ukraine's wartime experience.

"We still see that a lot of politicians abroad believe that they can return to the status quo, to the 23rd of February 2022. But it's not possible. You can't return to the past. You have to accept this reality, even if it's horrible, and do everything you can in the present to build a future, which you want." (5)

I recommend reading / listening to the following in full.

Reading List:

(1) Adnan Hadad, a Syrian in exile who had joined the Syrian revolution because he wanted to live freely in his own country, in conversation with Claire Berlinski, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, April 2022 (and recently republished)

(2) Ukrainian artists Larysa Venediktova and Oleksandr Lebediev, Open Letter to a German Friend, spring 2022

(3) Olesya Khromeychuk, Where Is Ukraine?, April 2022

(4) Larissa Babij, Letters from Lviv, spring 2022

(5) Oleksandra Matviichuk on Ukraine: The Latest in conversation with The Telegraph editors, February 24, 2024.

PS You can support the advancement of Ukraine's domestic military capacities by donating to Hero of Ukraine. Paypal: heroesukraine.org@gmail.com (Illia Shpolianskiy) / Other methods: https://heroesukraine.org/en/donate/