Ukraine Lab E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Ukrainian Voices
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 202

Beschreibung

Ukraine has often been called a laboratory for global challenges in the spheres of environment, information, and security. The site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in history, the primary target of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns as well as the country to spark the collapse of the Soviet Union and to stand up to its neo-imperialist successor: Ukraine has been the first to face and, at times, to set in motion processes with worldwide consequences. After Russia’s full-scale invasion compromised the global system of security, the value of Ukrainian knowledge and experience can no longer be dismissed. The urgency to learn with and from Ukraine is now existential for the rest of the world. This unique collection presents essays, in English and Ukrainian translations, by emerging authors from Ukraine and the UK who employ cross-cultural dialog and the art of storytelling to open up Ukrainian perspectives on the challenges facing humanity worldwide. The volume’s contributors are Olesya Khromeychuk, Sofia Cheliak, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Olena Kozar, Kris Michalowicz, Phoebe Page, Jonathon Turnbull, and Mstyslav Chernov. “If you want to understand the impact of Russiaʼs invasion of Ukraine from the inside, read this vivid, moving, urgent collection of essays.” —Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian “Moving, heartfelt and often deeply personal, these essays off er a compelling portrait of life in Ukraine under the shadow of war. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the reality of Russiaʼs invasion and its terrible human consequences.” —Luke Harding, The Guardian The editor: Sasha Dovzhyk completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2022–2023, she was Associate Lecturer in Ukrainian Literature at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, UCL. Since 2021, she is Special Projects Curator at the Ukrainian Institute in London. Her previous books include Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley (ed. with Simon Wilson, MHRA 2022) and Ukrainian Cassandra: New Translations of Works by Lesia Ukrainka (Live Canon 2023). Her articles have been published in, among other outlets, Modernist Cultures, British Art Studies, the Oxford Handbook of Decadence, CNN, The Guardian, New Lines Mag, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Ecologist. The foreword author: Dr Rory Finnin is Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Contributors

List of images

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Ukraine Lab: Lessons from the Frontlines

Theatre of War

Ukrainian Lottery

Luhansk, Stolen

Black, White, and Colourless

The Kyiv Thickets

How Do You Know?

On Which Side?

Передмова

Українська лабораторія: Уроки з лінії фронту

Театр війни

Лотерея по-українськи

Украдений Луганськ

Білий, чорний та безбарвний

Київські хащі

Звідки ви знаєте?

По який бік?

Contributors

Sofia Cheliak is a TV host, cultural manager, translator from Czech, and a member of PEN Ukraine. Since 2016, she has been a Program Director of Lviv BookForum. In 2022, she started work at the Ukrainian Book Institute, as the curator of Ukraineʼs national stands at International Book Fairs. Since 2020, she has been working for Ukraine Public Broadcasting Company. Cheliak is the author of three collections of poetry in translation: Václav Hrabieʼs, Jana Orlovaʼs, and Petr Chikhonʼs.

Mstyslav Chernov is a Ukrainian videographer, photographer, filmmaker, war correspondent, and novelist known for his coverage of the Revolution of Dignity, war in eastern Ukraine, including the downing of flight MH17, Syrian civil war, Battle of Mosul in Iraq, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the Siege of Mariupol. His video materials from Mariupol became the basis of the film 20 Days in Mariupol, which was included in the competition program of the Sundance festival in 2023. Chernov is an Associated Press journalist and the President of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF). Chernovʼs materials have been published and aired by multiple news outlets worldwide, including CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. He has both won and been a finalist for prestigious awards, including the Livingston Award, Rory Peck Award, Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Prize, and various Royal Television Society awards. Chernov has been wounded several times while covering the war. He has been a member of PEN Ukraine since July 2022.

Sasha Dovzhyk completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Since 2021, she is the Special Projects Curator at the Ukrainian Institute London. In 2022–2023, she has also been appointed an Associate Lecturer in Ukrainian Literature at the School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, UCL. Her previous books include Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley (edited with Simon Wilson, MHRA, 2022) and Ukrainian Cassandra: New Translations of Works by Lesia Ukrainka (Live Canon, 2023). Her articles and chapters have been published in, among other outlets, Modernist Cultures, British Art Studies, and Oxford Handbook of Decadence. She has also written for CNN Opinion, The Guardian, New Lines Mag, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Ecologist.

Rory Finnin is University Associate Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He launched Cambridge Ukrainian Studies in 2008. His primary research interest is the interplay of literature and national identity in Ukraine. He also studies Turkish nationalist literature and Crimean Tatar literature. His broader interests include solidarity studies, nationalism theory, human rights discourse, and problems of cultural memory in the region of the Black Sea. He is author of Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocityand the Poetics of Solidarity (University of Toronto Press, 2022) and co-author, with Alexander Etkind, Uillieam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo and Matilda Mroz, of Remembering Katyn (Polity Press, 2012).

Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian and writer. She received her PhD in History from University College London. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at the University of Cambridge, University College London, the University of East Anglia, and King’s College London. She is author of A Loss. The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2021) and ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians. Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division (Peter Lang, 2013). She is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London.

Kateryna Iakovlenko is a Ukrainian visual culture researcher, writer, and curator focusing on art and culture during sociopolitical transformation and war. Currently, she is Cultural Editor-in-Chief of Suspilne.media (Kyiv) and a visiting scholar at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (2022–2023). Among her publications is the book Why There Are Great Women Artists in Ukrainian Art (2019) and Euphoria and Fatigue: Ukrainian Art and Society after 2014 (special issue of Obieg magazine, co-edited with Tatiana Kochubinska, 2019).

Olena Kozar is a Kyiv-based journalist. Her articles have been published in Bird in Flight, It's Nice That, Kunsht, Post Impreza, and Telegraf.Design.

Kris Michalowicz won the Creative Future Bronze Prize for Fiction in 2019. In 2022, he was a writing resident with the Ukrainian Institute London. His work has been published in Ukrainskyi Tyzhden and the Mechanics' Institute Review.

Nina Murray is a translator, poet, and writer. She holds advanced degrees in Linguistics and Creative Writing. She is the author of the poetry collection Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) and several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe, and Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra.

Phoebe Page studied Ukrainian literature and culture at the University of Cambridge as part of her BA in Modern Languages. She recently participated in the Ukrainian Institute London’s writing residency Ukraine Lab, which tackled global themes through the prism of Ukraine. Phoebe is currently a Masterʼs student in Political Sociology at UCL’s School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, focusing on Ukraine. She is interested in security and the role of culture and soft power in the context not only of malign influence but also as counter offensive and resistance to hybrid aggression.

Jonathon Turnbull completed his BA and MSc degrees in Geography at the University of Oxford. Since 2018, he has been a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Cambridge funded by the ESRC. Previously, he held visiting research positions at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Turnbull is a founding member of the Digital Ecologies research group and the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities Network. He is co-editor of Digital Ecologies: Mediating More-Than-Human Worlds which is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. His articles have been published in scholarly journals and other outlets including Progress in Human Geography, Progress in Environmental Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Dialogues in Human Geography, The Geographical Journal, cultural geographies, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Today, ACME, The Ecologist, and more.

List of images

Cover image: Mstyslav Chernov, Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

1.Mstyslav Chernov, A Ukrainian serviceman shelters on a position at the line of separation between Ukraine-held and rebel-held territory near Zolote, Ukraine. 7 February 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

2.Mstyslav Chernov, A Ukrainian serviceman in front of the destroyed headquarters of the Mykolaiv regional military administration in southern Ukraine after a Russian strike. 5 August 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

3.Mstyslav Chernov, Birds fly over the residential building in Kostyantynivka, eastern Ukraine. 8 February 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

4.Mstyslav Chernov, An aerial view of the centre of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. 29 January 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

5.Mstyslav Chernov, The bodies of eleven Russian soldiers lay in the village of Vilkhivka, recently retaken by Ukrainian forces near Kharkiv, Ukraine. 9 May 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

6.Mstyslav Chernov, Mariupol residents. 6 March 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

7.Mstyslav Chernov, Destroyed town of Bucha, Kyiv region, Ukraine. 6 April 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

8.Mstyslav Chernov, A fire burns at an apartment building after it was hit by the shelling of a residential district in Mariupol, Ukraine. 11 March 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

9.Mstyslav Chernov, Ukrainian BM-21 Grad shoots towardRussian positions at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. 2 August 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

10.Mstyslav Chernov, Fire burns at a factory after a Russian attack in the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine. 15 April 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

11. Mstyslav Chernov, Houses destroyed by a Russian attack in the Saltivka district in Kharkiv, Ukraine. 25 April 2022. Visual interpretation for Ukraine Lab, September 2022

Acknowledgements

The essays in this collection emerged from the online literary residency Ukraine Lab held in the summer of 2022. It was run by the Ukrainian Institute London in partnership with PEN Ukraine and the Ukrainian Institute (Kyiv) as part of the UK/UA Season of Culture, funded by the British Council. As the residency’s curator, I am grateful to the dedicated team of Ukraine Lab workshop leaders to whom the collected texts owe much of their creative power and depth: Olesya Khromeychuk, Tamara Hundorova, Peter Pomerantsev, Iryna Shuvalova, Katie McElvanney, David Savill, Khobir Wiseman-Goldstein, and Julia Bell. The bilingual aspect of both the residency and this collection was realised thanks to the brilliant translator Nina Murray. I thank dedicated proofreaders Catherine and Aidan Jaskowiak, Maria Shuvalova, and Mariana Matveichuk for their precious time and attention to detail. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the British Library and Becky Rowlatt for hosting the online launch of the project and keeping the record for history.

Foreword Rory Finnin

In early May 2022, a russian missile tore into an eighteenth-century estate nestled among groves and birdsong in a village in eastern Ukraine. The premises housed a small library and museum dedicated to Ukraine’s legendary philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794). It was a deliberate, targeted strike. The walls collapsed; fire quickly consumed the premises. Miraculously no one was killed.

Photographs of the destruction circulated online the next morning, just more evidence of russia’s genocidal war against the people of Ukraine1 and their identity and culture. But there was also something standing astride the tragedy in these images, something moving and inspirational. Amid the dense smoke and charred concrete, one thing was clearly visible: the large statue of the philosopher Skovoroda himself, singed but unbowed.

The symbolism is simple and striking, and its message is at the heart of this book. Out of the horror of a brutal, unprovoked invasion can come defiant knowledge. From the fog of war, philosophy can still emerge. For Skovoroda, who never stood still, forces of ignorance and aggression would ultimately surrender to those who pursued a radical commitment to dialogue and solidarity. ‘Untruth may attack and oppress’, he wrote, ‘but the will to fight it is stronger’.

Ukraine Lab practises this dialogue and solidarity; it undertakes this fight. The essays collected here and edited by Sasha Dovzhyk are the product of ground-breaking workshops and conversations between six emerging writers in Ukraine and the United Kingdom about loss, trauma, and the possibility of truth in a world out of joint. The photographs of Mstyslav Chernov talk back to each essay, gesturing to the limits of documentation and representation in wartime.

In the wake of the Chornobyl catastrophe, the poet Ivan Drach (1936–2018) wrote, ‘I envy those who have words. I have none… Silence weighs heavily on the soul, but language is dull and arbitrary’. Each essay overcomes Drach’s paradox by putting to work a precious, hard-won skill: listening. Nina Murray’s translations into both English and Ukrainian are paragons of the practice. From the voices of indefatigable volunteers to the stirrings of verdant thickets, the writers and translators of Ukraine Lab listen closely and call on us to do the same.

What we hear is an urgent invitation: not only to learn about Ukraine but to learn from Ukraine. As Dovzhyk explains, these essays position Ukraine as a ‘prism’ through which to understand global problems anew: disinformation, the persistence of empire, the rampant abuse of our environment. In offering us access to a vibrant civil society committed to dialogue, solidarity, and truth, they also position Ukraine as a prism through which to envision solutions.

One weapon of russia’s war against Ukraine has been our ignorance. One of the targets is still our knowledge. The volume you hold in your hands is a barricade. Let it also be a vector of our counter-offensive.

1Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, many Ukrainians and Ukrainian allies have refused to capitalise the name of the aggressor state and its institutions. Ukraine Lab pieces use lower or upper case for ‘Russia’ in accordance with each author’s preference.

Ukraine Lab:Lessons from the FrontlinesSasha Dovzhyk

Ukraine has been often called a laboratory when it comes to global challenges in the spheres of environment, information, and security. The site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in history, the primary target of the Kremlin’s troll farms and disinformation campaigns, the country to spark the collapse of the Soviet Union and to stand up to its neo-imperialist successor: Ukraine has been the first to face and, at times, set in motion processes that have worldwide consequences. Outside of Ukraine, this fact has become undeniable after Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. From resorting to nuclear blackmail to weaponising food and energy, Russia’s war has never been just against Ukraine although it is Ukraine that bears its most brutal and immediate cost.

Russia’s all-out attack became a wake-up call for the international community. The world was first shocked by the sheer brutality of the invasion, then by its own ignorance about the country invaded. It turned out Ukrainians were not ready to surrender to the seemingly superior military power: neither in 72 hours, as was predicted by many western intelligence agencies, nor after many months of the full-scale war. It turned out Ukrainians were defiant. It turned out their defiance had a history of which the world knew little. It turned out the outsiders’ perceptions of Ukraine were largely shaped by Russia’s imperialist narratives. So were the outsiders’ perceptions of Russia, the country’s supposed military strength, and the professed humanism of its culture. It turned out the Russocentric stories that captivated the attention of the world had little to offer when it came to understanding Ukrainian resistance.

Today, ‘glorifying Ukrainian resilience without understanding its roots is another form of misunderstanding the country and its people’, points out the writer and historian Olesya Khromeychuk. ‘The root of that resilience is the intolerance of imperialist oppression, both historic and recent’.1 The centuries-long experience of repelling Russia’s deadly brotherly embrace has turned Ukraine into a treasure trove of resistance strategies, and the urgency of learning from them has today become existential for the rest of the world.

For the eight years that Russia has waged its undeclared war against Ukraine, the international community has been appeasing the aggressor while fearing a nuclear strike. For those eight years, Ukrainians have been warning the world about a different kind of nuclear threat: six of the country’s fifteen nuclear reactors, situated dangerously close to the frontline in the south-eastern region of Zaporizhzhia. The world finally discovered that region in March, when the Russian military shelled and then occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), the largest one in Europe. For the first time in human history, Russia brought war to the site of civilian nuclear infrastructure, storing weapons in the machine halls of the plant and using physical violence and other forms of coercion against its staff. The list of personnel tortured by the occupiers runs into dozens of names, from the diver Andrii Honcharuk who was beaten to death in July to the head of ZNPP Ihor Murashov, who was kidnapped in October and, thanks to unprecedented international pressure, expelled to Ukraine-controlled territory soon after. The plant is operating under frequent Russian shelling, with constant disruptions to the supply of water and electricity. Radioactive plumes are notorious for disregarding country borders: if an accident were to take place at the militarised nuclear power plant, the aftermath would not be contained within the territory of Ukraine.

Targeting the environment has become one of Russia’s chosen means of war. In winter 2022, the invasion of Ukraine from Belarus involved Russian troops marching through the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Their digging of trenches in the Red Forest, one of the world’s most dangerous burials of nuclear waste, has revealed their lack of schooling on basic radioactive hazards and on basic facts of late-Soviet history. By contrast, the tragedy of Chornobyl is a topos of collective memory in Ukraine, where even state independence bears a nuclear birthmark. In 1986, the Kremlin’s cover-up of the disaster became a powerful cause that enabled Ukrainian environmentalists and dissidents to mobilise Ukrainian society and shake the foundations of Soviet rule. Five years after the catastrophe, Ukrainians voted themselves out of the Soviet Union. For Russians, the lack of environmental awareness goes hand-in-hand with the country-wide amnesia concerning the genealogy of the Russian imperialist project.

In spring and summer 2022, Russia’s military campaign involved setting fire to those Ukrainian fields that captured the imagination of dictators in the twentieth century: of Stalin who starved Ukrainians in the Holodomor of the 1930s by confiscating their agricultural produce, and of Hitler who fought for the control of the rich Ukrainian earth. With around 25% of the world’s reserves of high-yielding black soil concentrated in Ukraine, the country has been a major contributor to global food security since gaining independence in 1991. Russia’s war has damaged not only the crops Ukraine normally exports to the African continent and the Middle East but also the complex ecosystems of the Ukrainian steppes, which might take years to restore. Satellite images reveal the ulcers of bomb craters scarring the fields in eastern and southern Ukraine where the heavy fighting continues. What used to be the continent’s most fertile soil is now heavily mined and contaminated with toxins from missiles. The invasion created the biggest minefield in the world, its territory of 250,000 square kilometres larger than the entirety of the UK.

In autumn 2022, the escalation of Russia’s nuclear blackmail went hand-in-hand with the shelling and mining of dams and hydroelectric power stations which threatened Ukraine with catastrophic flooding. More industrial sites, more waste facilities, more oil depots were targeted and destroyed, releasing pollutants and poisoning Ukrainian water, air, and soil.

Russian crimes against the environment in Ukraine closely follow an independent expert panel’s proposal in 2021 to adopt a new, fifth crime into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: the crime of ecocide defined as ‘unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts’.2 In the twentieth century, two of the core international crimes were introduced to the legal lexicon by lawyers who studied at Jan Kazimierz University in what is today Lviv, the westernmost stronghold of Ukraine. Both lost their families in the Holocaust and played significant roles in the Nuremberg trials. The lawyers are Hersch Lauterpacht, who developed the concept of crimes against humanity, and Raphael Lemkin, who put forward the concept of genocide. Today, Ukrainian experience is likely to instigate a definitive change to the unregulated area of international criminal law, compelling us, in the words of the expert panel’s leader Philippe Sands, to ‘think beyond the human’ in the sphere of legal rights.3

Defined by the Chornobyl disaster, Ukrainian environmental history changed the way people of the ‘atomic era’, with its intangible and invisible dangers, related to reality itself. In the words of the scholar Tamara Hundorova, the ‘Chornobyl tragedy sharpened perceptions of virtual dimensions’, ruining our reliance on human senses such as smell and sight, let alone our belief in objectivity and facts.4 This millennial nuclear consciousness provided a fertile ground for the blossoming of ‘post-truth’ receptivity in the 2010s.

During the past decade, the international community has been shaken by Russia’s use of information as a weapon. From the run-up to the US presidential elections in 2016 to the global pandemic response in 2020, the bombardment of the public with messages that sabotage the very concept of truth has affected transnational politics. However, it was in Ukraine in 2014 that the Kremlin tried out this tactic of hybrid warfare when it broadcasted a multitude of falsehoods about the country it invaded in order to undermine the international response. From antisemitism-fueled fantasies about Ukrainians crucifying Russian children to painting the forces of Ukrainian resistance as Nazi sympathisers, the Russian troll army contrived wild plots that would appeal to the right, left, and centre of the political spectrum. In the process, they muddied the information space so that trying to make sense of it would appear unhygienic to a passerby. As Peter Pomerantsev puts it in This Is Not Propaganda, ‘With the idea of objectivity discredited, the grounds on which one could argue against them rationally disappears’.5 This compromised sense of factuality was among the factors that allowed the Kremlin to succeed in 2014: the biggest land grab in Europe since the Second World War was construed as too complex a problem to grasp. Turning a blind eye and appeasing the aggressor paved the way for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later.

Today, the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns attempt to shift responsibility for the cost-of-living crisis, soaring energy prices, and food insecurity from Russia to Ukraine, and to corrode global resolve behind bringing the aggressor to justice. Having launched an openly imperialist war, Russia is using anti-colonial rhetoric to undermine international solidarity yet again. As we are settling into a period of Russia-generated economic crisis, the value of Ukrainian experience in countering the Kremlin’s information warfare can no longer be dismissed. It is time to give our full attention to the Ukrainian side of the story.

The essays in this collection explore global challenges in the areas of environment, information, and security through the prism of Ukraine. They result from the online writing residency Ukraine Lab which took place in the summer of 2022 and united six emerging writers from Ukraine and the UK. For six weeks, they worked in three thematic pairs on creative nonfiction pieces which foregrounded Ukrainian experiences through the art of storytelling. The award-winning Ukrainian photographer Mstyslav Chernov interpreted them visually. His powerful images were brought from the ground zero of Russia’s full-scale invasion and developed in response to the essays of the Ukraine Lab authors.

Describing the first days of the full-scale invasion, Sofia Cheliak’s ‘Ukrainian Lottery’ takes a look at those surprising Ukrainians who reject the ready-made model of victimhood and resist the enemy with a sense of humour and purpose. Kris Michalowicz’s moving essay ‘Luhansk, Stolen’ reminds us that Russia’s war of aggression did not start on 24 February 2022 but has been raging on for eight years. Kateryna Iakovlenko’s ‘Black, White, and Colourless’ tells the story of the war-ravaged industrial region in the east of the country through the elements that shaped it: coal, salt, and gas. Jonathon Turnbull’s ‘The Kyiv Thickets’ drifts through the wild and weird green spaces in Ukraine’s capital that are often overlooked and yet are brimming with political potential. Set in an underground garage and at the receiving end of life-changing news during the battle for Kyiv, Olena Kozar’s essay ‘How Do You Know?’ is a poignant reflection on the effects of information overflow. Phoebe Page’s piece ‘On Which Side?’ exposes how our attention and emotions are manipulated while calling on western audiences to discern Ukrainian voices amidst the noise of Russian propaganda.

Opening the collection, ‘Theatre of War’ by Olesya Khromeychuk poses poignant questions about our consumption of violent and traumatic narratives from the country fighting for its right to exist. Her conclusion provides those invaluable lessons Ukrainians are in the position to share with the world: ‘first, when narrating war, I must do so with the aim of bringing about change. This includes victory for Ukraine, a lasting peace and justice. Second, when consuming war narratives, I must embrace my role as a witness with a sense of responsibility for what I have witnessed, and channel this in order to bring about change’.