a Kind of Refugee / 23.12.2022
Wake up, flick the lamp switch: no power. Under three blankets it’s toasty warm. The air in the room is 12 C. Generators stutter outside every other storefront. Their noise pollutes the air, so does their exhaust.
The coffee shop near home is open, but not sharing power or wifi. Turn away from the gorgeous brownies on display and move on. The vegetarian cafe near the metro where I’ve spent many hours this month is warm—and crowded. Before placing an order I scan the dining room: every outlet is taken. I’m starving but the priority is charging my devices and getting online.
Outside the day is sunny and mild. My trusty cafe on the right bank is without power. The air raid alarm in the city is the least of my concerns. For an hour I am a dejected nomad: hungry, directionless and disconnected.
Then suddenly I am a “normal” person, sitting at my laptop in a hipster cafe, energized by rock music plus a flat white and sumptuous croque madam (pricy by Ukrainian standards is still less than $10 USD). The coffee shop (with power strips and extenders in every outlet) is packed with young, fashionable people, their dogs and devices.
In the 1930s Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals lived well in Kharkiv while the peasants in the surrounding villages were being starved to death. Today in Kyiv you can wake up in an apartment with no heat, electricity or running water and spend the afternoon catching up on email while sipping aromatic coffee. Only the latter is getting more difficult by the day.
Lately I’m lucky to get 2-3 hours by the computer with power and Internet per day. You have to think quickly to work through everything that needs to be communicated online today. Sometimes I just open Facebook or the Guardian and stare at the screen.
Invincibility is the stuff of myths and children’s cartoons. In Ukraine it’s beginning to show its cracks.
***
It’s insidious to kill through conditions, the way russia is trying to wage war by making Ukraine unlivable for everybody. Struggling with your environment is part of survival. But the environment is not your enemy. Fighting or killing it would also involve destroying yourself. Confusing the enemy with the environment muddles your thinking, which plays into the enemy’s hands.
russia can’t break us by attacking our “civilizational” infrastructure because electricity and city-wide heat is not our environment. It felt like it was in more peaceful times, but these are merely the specific solutions we collectively took to support our urban living together (primarily relying on the infrastructure left over from the Soviet period without giving enough thought to its efficiency). Yes, it hurts to lose this and to suffer the resulting more direct encounter with one’s winter environment (that I, for one, am not really equipped to handle alone). But we must also fight to not get lost and not lose ourselves in these new conditions.
***
In the morning the room is cold, but a flick of the lamp switch shows that the power is on. You need to do everything right away — the moment you realize that the conditions are right. In this case, for taking a shower. Of course you can boil a pot of water on the stove and wash by candlelight, but it will be colder than when you have heat and can also steam up the room with hot running water. Did you know that you can dry your hair over a gas burner on the stove (make sure you stand on a chair, keeping your head far above the flames) if there’s no power for your electric hair dryer?
The Kyiv municipal telegram channel shows there was an air raid alarm overnight—a long one. And then another in the morning. And some critical infrastructure was struck on the other side of the river.
My friend is supposed to give me a haircut at noon, and I write to check if we’re still on. Yes, he replies. And then: the salon just wrote that they don’t have power. Can you wash your hair at home?
I check the faucet, still running warm in the dark, before replying: Yes.
He did not even suggest that we cancel or reschedule, just spelled out the situation and offered a way to deal with it. The salon’s front wall is a row of glass windows, so there’s plenty of daylight to snip by.
–What are we doing today?
–I want a wartime haircut.
–Oh no, that’s too short!
–Of course not a buzz cut—I could do that myself! (laughing) Something shorter, cuz it’s cold and I want less hair to dry in the winter. I won’t wash it more than once a week, but I still wanna look pretty.
***
russia is pounding away at civilization, turning the areas it ostensibly wishes to embrace (through illegal annexation) into rubble, transforming places that once were alive, including Ukraine’s fertile black soil, into dirt and dust and minefields.
You are watching this destruction from afar. You can keep up with the news because you have power and Internet; it’s probably warm enough for you to sit still with your phone or computer and imagine the horrors that Ukrainians are enduring. The war in Ukraine is part of your media environment. You struggle to keep the constant flood of information from inundating your attention or messing with your emotions. But you control the time you spend looking at your phone, checking the news. It’s in your power to create a more “healthy media environment.” It’s also in your power to shape the world in which the war is happening and to influence the outcome of the war.
The war in Ukraine is not a natural disaster. russia is arguing that Ukraine belongs wholly to it and is trying to prove that Ukraine is a concentration camp by concentrating its missile barrages (except for that close call with Poland last month) and genocidal efforts on the territory and people within Ukraine’s 1991 legal national borders. While Ukrainians are proving in battle that our freedom and right to govern ourselves are more than nice ideas. Our resistance itself is an expression of our freedom and our fierce fighting protects our right to organize our life together at this very moment, even in the midst of war. These two positions—Ukraine’s and russia’s—are absolutely irreconcilable. And which position will prevail will be decided by a fight to the death.
In a recent interview with The Economist*, General Valery Zaluzhny, Commander in Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, said, “Russians and any other enemies must be killed, just killed, and most importantly, we should not be afraid to do it.”
This is no easy task (and I’m not talking about being a good shot). I imagine the Ukrainians I know—dancers, entrepreneurs, leftist activists, historians, etc.—who enlisted in February and March. You sign up for the Armed Forces to defend your home and your people from attack, not because you want to kill people.
If you want Ukraine to win you have to accept the will and effort and work to destroy the enemy. If you want to not hurt russia you will not be able to support Ukraine.
“We have already realised through a number of operations that the main thing is not to be afraid of this enemy. It can be fought, it must be fought today, here and now. And in no way should that be postponed until tomorrow, because there will be problems.” said Zaluzhny.
Thinking as an American, I wonder: Does our support for Ukraine come from considering Ukraine and its freedom-loving will to self-government to be like our own? Or do we engage because we consider russia and its great culture and imperial heritage and even the murderous Soviet experiment part of our own world history? Is this the moment when the US takes responsibility for its own history in shaping 20th-century Europe?
***
I’ve lost the sense of perspective that stretches into the future. It’s as if the time in which things happened is in the past. My friend said she feels like there’s not enough time to get into whatever is going on these days: it feels like it isn’t real. I get what she’s saying, but I know this is real, that this is it. There really is no time and you can’t relax.
You do it now or you don’t and you have to live with the undone. It will be on your conscience, only you won’t actually have time to think about it because you’ll be dealing with the consequences.
*https://www.economist.com/zaluzhny-transcript
PS Zippo refillable 12-hour handwarmers have become a “hot item” for our defenders stationed along the front. I’m ordering 60 today so that they reach Ukraine before the end of January. You can help defray the cost to the soldiers by donating via paypal: larissa.babij@gmail.com / note: Hand warmers