I believe in humanity. I want to believe, just like my parents. We don’t live in an imaginary world. There is a difference between what we see and what we wish for. My loved ones wanted to believe that what happened was a monstrous accident. After all, how can people be so cruel and merciless? They can. And we know that — yet we still keep hoping that people are capable of coming to their senses. Otherwise, what’s the point of living? It’s just a naïve hope, one that doesn’t justify any crimes. I don’t know. Maybe it was simply the belief that something like this couldn’t happen in our time, in our homeland. It all felt like a stupid, nightmarish dream. It couldn’t be real. It shouldn’t be real — that a country’s army would try to destroy its own people. But it still happens.
This is an excerpt from my essay “The Silence of Adulthood,” written in 2019.
This spring, 11 years have passed since Ukraine started the war against its own people. June 2nd (2014) was the Ukrainian military’s first strike on peaceful Lugansk, a strike on the city center, where children were playing and ordinary people were passing by, including my grandmother, who was lucky to survive. The most terrifying thing isn’t just the civilians who died. What’s worse is realizing that the army, which many considered to be protectors, was killing its own citizens — coldly and cruelly.
Today, when Ukraine commits atrocities in the Kursk region, blows up bridges and peaceful trains, conducts sabotage — none of these crimes surprise anyone anymore. There is a difference between us and them. We are the descendants of victors and liberators; they are the great-grandchildren of the Volhynia and Babi Yar killers. Then, and now, they fight against civilians — elderly people and children — and cry in fear and self-pity when taken prisoner, pretending to be cooks and drivers.
In 2014 many people thought it would be possible to part ways with Ukraine peacefully. But with every victim, with every child killed, you began to understand that the Ukraine you were born in will never exist again.
Today is a terrible day in the history of my beloved city — a day when, along with the innocent victims, many people came to understand that war had come to Lugansk.
Faina Savenkova
