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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The essential, deeply penetrating diary of life in Kiev during the first days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine by the acclaimed author of Lucky Breaks'An essential document of the Ukrainian people's experience of the conflict' Wall Street JournalThe artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. For her and millions of Ukrainians, reality changed overnight. She set out to document the war and its effects on the ordinary residents of the country: the relentless sound of sirens and gunfire; intense moments of connection and solidarity with strangers; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day.Published each day in German by the newspaper Der Spiegel and in English by ISOLARII, War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide. Issued here with a new preface and more recent entries by the author, it stands as a unique monument to the devastation and resilience of a city under siege.
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WAR DIARY
Yevgenia Belorusets
Translated from the German by Greg Nissan
PUSHKIN PRESS / ISOLARII
contents
Why is there fire on this path?
Preface
March 16, 2014–July 16, 2022
When the war first started in 2014, it wasn’t clear that it was actually war. It dressed itself in the form of a revolution, a protest mounted by the newly invented people of the Donbas. It sold itself as an allegedly peaceful and civil annexation of Crimea. The peacefulness as well as the civility of this process were supposed to point to something other than war. But to this day, that something has no name of its own.
In the spring of 2014 while I was living in Berlin, I listened to the news reports of the Donbas events from various sources. It felt like I was being lied to from almost every side. Crimea had already been annexed; Russian tanks were on the move in eastern Ukraine. Here in Germany, a blind eye was turned to the tanks and the heavy artillery. At that time, the news doubted whether the weapons existed at all. And this doubt resembled a denial in practice. As if it were so uncomfortable to admit that at this very moment in Europe an aggressive war had been created out of thin air, one sacrificed a sense of reality in favor of the old familiar way of life. If the war seemed like it might disappear of its own accord, perhaps that was only because it wasn’t recognized as war.
On numerous talk shows and on the front pages of newspapers, pundits debated what the people of the Donbas actually wanted out of their protests and speculated as to how Russia viewed Ukrainian political events.
In the process, nobody asked the people of the Donbas—these inhabitants of Ukraine, a country that before this war had not imposed any great national idea on its own regions—how they actually wanted to live, or whether they even wanted to live at all. Step by step, the Ukrainian Donbas transformed into a battlefield.
But this battlefield was difficult to recognize from afar. Geographical distance functioned like a broken camera lens, blurring the subject of the photograph.
The war, which at first was deemed no more than a conflict, developed in opposition to the annexation of Crimea. Crimea was annexed in a civil manner. The Donbas was spared any of this so-called civility. Ukraine began to fight back. In the towns and cities of Ukrainian territories controlled by Russia, people began to disappear: they were kidnapped, tortured, forced into silence, or obsessively mobilized into a slapdash army to fight against their own country, against the Ukrainian army, with heavy artillery from Russia.
Already in spring 2014, it was clear that despite rapidly deteriorating living conditions, residents of Russian-occupied cities didn’t want to leave their own apartments and houses. Ukrainian society discussed what to make of this. Did it mean that people from the Donbas had become so aligned with Russian propaganda that they wanted to stay in the world it had created? Did it mean that the logic of a decision made by so many—to stay—amounted to a form of political expression? Then presumably they must have expressed themselves through action rather than speech, because the inhabitants of the occupied regions were hardly represented in debates.
In October 2014, I drove to the Donbas with my good friend Pavel Lissianski, the human rights activist and founding member of the Miners’ Union, to visit the area for the very first time.
He picked me up in Kharkiv. We planned to go to Debaltseve, the Ukrainian city in Donetsk Oblast, which was partially surrounded by Russian troops and the site of constant skirmishes.
As I write today, just any old day in Berlin, it’s hard for me to comprehend that we would decide to set off without any misgivings.
For me it was important to get to know this city and see with my own eyes what was happening. I knew that journalists hardly visited the area. Pavel’s colleague lived in Debaltseve before the war and we wanted to pick something up from her abandoned apartment.
War was still no more than a word for me, with the ring of history books and distant, nearly exotic news. I thought, the city is in danger; people’s lives are threatened. Even my imagination of danger carried the traces of peacetime, not war.
Now I know that a city—even in the midst of war, fully steeped in war—is capable of preserving little and even bigger islands of peaceful life. Much later, in Kyiv in March 2022, I entered a bakery, open despite the blaring air raid siren, and was greeted with a laughter and warmth that completely shut out the war.
During these recent summer weeks, Russian missiles have attacked Ukrainian cities almost daily. Sometimes I whisper to myself, “Mykolaiv, Vinnytsia, Odessa, Kremenchuk. Kharkiv, Mariupol, Lysychansk.” Again and again people are seized on the streets, at bus stops, in their houses. These are city dwellers who can’t imagine that their lives, in some new and unbearable manner, can be valued one minute and destroyed the next.
There exists in this war a strange calculation, which obeys no clear logic, that devalues everyday life to the point of negation. In the eyes of those who order an attack on a peaceful city, life in this place has already ceased to exist long before the strike.
Evening was approaching. Pavel was driving very fast through the empty streets. No other cars were heading toward Debaltseve. I wanted to take a picture of this empty road with my big SLR camera. Pavel seemed a little nervous, looking intently ahead. He noticed my camera and asked me in a quiet but emphatic tone, “Please, don’t take pictures here, hide the camera. A sniper can catch the glint from your lens and aim to shoot.”
That the two of us, hurrying along, immersed in fantasies about the Donbas, could become a target in this war was a new and strange idea to me. I looked with distrust at this landscape entrusted to me. Something was burning up ahead. We quickly approached the blaze. It was a wall of flames—a patch of land and a bush burning as if spontaneously. Not far away there was a black and half-scorched car that seemed to have skidded to the side of the fire.
I stared at the clear evidence of Pavel’s concern and hoped it was the remnant of a catastrophe that had long since passed. Pavel patiently explained that apparently this place had fallen under attack only a few hours ago, if not within the last hour.
I felt nauseous and tried to stop looking at the burning car. We drove past. We drove on. For the first time in my life, I felt myself changing with each passing kilometer. Me, taking pictures, reading, writing, thinking, laughing—almost all my traits and abilities lined up and slowly vanished from sight. Nothing mattered anymore; my biography contracted to the fragile assertion of my existence.
These old ideas about myself, so deeply ingrained and somewhat naive, began to thaw, just like the snow woman in the fairy tale: when spring came knocking, the snow woman could no longer resist going out into the sun. Before the eyes of her loving family, she melted drop by drop and disappeared abruptly, without the chance to say goodbye.
Human rights, especially the fundamental right to life, took a palpable form on this journey, like clothing or even a part of my body. And to see the loss of this fundamental right, only because I had traveled to a certain part of my country, led to an almost instinctive search for a replacement.
But it was not to be found. I simply knew it was important to impose this experience on myself. I thought, “There is a chasm between those who have never experienced such a state and those who live in it, who have no say in the matter, who are expected to go on with their lives.”
Today, July 16, 2022, I learned from an acquaintance from Mariupol, who now lives in Berlin, that people are returning to this city in ruins. “I can’t imagine it,” she said with sadness, “we have no water there, no heating, no electricity, nothing! But people return, intent to remain. After everything that happened, with all that has been lost and will never be found again, they return. Doctors are coming to start working in the hospitals. Some live in the rubble and the rest in half-rubble.”
When the war first began in the spring of 2014, it was still a child, so fresh that it introduced itself to the world without its own date of birth. Its emergence spread out through time and place over several months. In its first weeks of life, there were days when I kept thinking, maybe I’m wrong and it’s not a war after all, just a giant mistake that will soon be fixed and then disappear from reality.
day1Thursday, February 24
The Beginning
I woke up early this morning to eight missed calls on my cell phone. They were from my parents and some friends. At first, I thought something had happened to my family and that my friends were trying to reach me because my parents had alerted them before me. Then my imagination traveled in another direction, and I envisioned an accident, a dangerous situation in the center of Kyiv, something to warn your friends about. A cold anxiety gripped me. I called my cousin because her beautiful voice, brave and rational, always has a calming effect on me. All she said was, “Kyiv has been shelled. A war has broken out.”
Many things have a beginning. When I think about the beginning, I imagine a line drawn very clearly on a white surface. The eye observes the simplicity of this trace of movement—one that is sure to begin somewhere and end somewhere. But I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war. Strange. I was in the Donbas when war with Russia broke out in 2014. But I had entered the war then, entered into a foggy, opaque zone of violence. I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who could leave at will, because I lived somewhere else.
The war was already there, an intruder, something strange, alien, and insane that had no justification to happen in that place and at that time. Back then, I kept asking people in the Donbas how all this could have started, and I always got different answers.
I think that the beginning of this war in the Donbas was one of the most mythologized moments for the people of Kyiv, precisely because it remained incomprehensible how such an event is born. At that time, in 2014, people in Kyiv said, “The people of the Donbas, those Ukrainian Putin-sympathizers, invited the war to our country.” This alleged “invitation” has for some time been considered an explanation for how the absolutely impossible—war with Russia—suddenly became possible after all.
After I got off the phone with my cousin, I paced around my apartment for a while. My head was absolutely blank. I had no idea what to do next. Then my phone rang again. One call followed another, friends came forward with plans to escape, some called to convince themselves we were still alive. I quickly grew tired. I talked a lot, constantly repeating the words “the war.” In the meantime, I would look out the window and listen to check if the explosions were approaching. The view from the window was ordinary, but the sounds of the city were strangely muffled—no children yelling, no voices in the air.
Later, I went out and discovered an entirely new environment, an emptiness that I had never seen here, even on the most dangerous days of the Maidan protests.
Sometime later I heard that two children had died from shelling in Kherson Oblast, in the south of the country, and that a total of fifty-seven people had died in the war today. The numbers transformed into something very concrete, as if I had already lost someone myself. I felt angry at the whole world. I thought, “This has been allowed to happen. It is a crime against everything human, against the great common space where we live and hope for a future.”
I’m staying with my parents tonight; our buildings are a five-minute walk apart. I’ve visited a bomb shelter next to the house, so I know where we’ll all go when the shelling comes later.
The war has begun. It is after midnight. I will hardly be able to fall asleep, and there is no point in trying to calculate what has changed forever.
day2Friday, February 25, Morning
Air Raids
I wake up at seven in the morning to the sirens warning of air raids in progress. My mother is convinced that Russia will not dare to shell the thousand-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral in our city. She believes that our house, which is in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral, is safe. That’s why she decides against going to the bomb shelter. My father is sleeping.
I think if a UNESCO monument could actually stop the Russian army from shelling, this war wouldn’t have started in the first place. My head is throbbing with thoughts: Kyiv under fire, abandoned by the whole world, which is ready to sacrifice Ukraine in the hope that it will feed and satiate the aggressor for a while.
Kyiv is being shelled for the first time since the Second World War.
I am struggling with myself. I know that slowly the world is waking up and beginning to see that it’s not just about Kyiv and Ukraine. It’s about every house, every door—it’s about every life in Europe that is threatened as of today.
Friday, February 25, Night
Tense Silence
All of a sudden, the night is silent. Just an hour ago, around midnight, you could hear the sirens, then distant thunder, perhaps the impact of rockets or artillery. And now—a tense silence.
We should be in the shelter by now, but I’ve already been there twice today. My parents are tired, and I’m staying in the apartment with them for the night. The idea was that we could rest more comfortably up here, if only for a little bit. We are ready to leave the apartment at a moment’s notice and take shelter in the basement of the house.
I find it difficult to collect my thoughts. All of today’s distinct experiences crumble into the sensation of many identical days, standing gray next to one another. The space of the city is changing. The walk from my house to the nearest grocery store, which used to take no more than ten minutes, stretches out, the route becoming a long trek.
The fact that the store was open at all was a miracle. I bought apples, vegetables, and buckwheat—but when I returned to the area an hour later, I saw the disappointed faces of two women standing in front of a closed door. Someone said there was another grocery store 500 meters away, down the same street. But it wasn’t good news for the two women—500 meters on foot? The sirens are wailing; the streets are emptying of people.
Even time is changing. On the way back from the grocery store, I found out that a kindergarten near the city of Sumy, in the northeast of the country, was shelled today. A kindergarten and a bunker. Seventeen children injured, two seriously. I stopped to lean against the wall of a house. Suddenly the day became infinitely long. Can this war be endured one more minute? Why doesn’t the world put an end to it?
It was a spring day. Spots of sunshine played on the sides of houses and the white walls of Saint Sophia Cathedral. The sirens wailed again—the signal to go to the bomb shelter. A good friend of mine, the artist Nikita Kadan, had lost his credit card, and the two of us walked the streets to find a working ATM.
One journalist had a backpack with him that contained everything he might need in the coming days. We saw some passersby and reporters standing in front of one of the big hotels with their cameras. The second day of the war has proved to be a further step in a recurring sequence.
In the evening I learned that a town in the Luhansk region had been eighty percent destroyed by the Russian army, a beautiful little town that was in Ukrainian-controlled territory. It is called Schastia, meaning “Happiness.” The husband of a friend, who was already safe, managed to escape. He left town without a toothbrush, socks, or suitcase.
A car picked him up on the road. He told my friend that as he rode along, he saw the corpses of people lying next to their houses, in front of their doors, and by the small cellars where many Ukrainians store potatoes for the winter. So these were “the people of the Donbas” that Putin claimed he was saving from “genocide.”
Happiness no longer exists there. I was in Schastia a few years ago photographing the streets, admiring a hill that looms over the landscape. People in the town spoke Russian and Ukrainian—I had written about them and their strange and comical homemade playgrounds.
Then I fall asleep in this black night after all.
