Sometimes this war hits home for me harder than others. Today was one of those days.
I have written a few diaries about my time that I lived in Kyiv in 2017 and 2018, that I met my ex girlfriend Olga there who is still my best friend, and that we moved away to Spain in 2018 and we lived together on and off until recently but we speak on the phone almost every day.
I will say right away that thankfully everyone I directly know is 100% safe and was never in harms way today due to personal decisions that were made a year ago.
Anna is Olga’s sister and Veronika is her six year old niece who used to call me дядя Марк (Uncle Mark).
They lived in Brovary until last year.
They chose to flee for the sake of Veronika not living with PTSD of having lived in a war zone. It was not an easy decision. Anna loves Ukraine and would 100% be there today if the war had not upended their lives. They got out the day before the fighting started and luckily so because Brovary was one of the closest spots that the Russians actually made it to with tanks before they were pushed back. At that time the war seemed incredibly personal because the maps showed the path of the tanks only a few miles from Anna’s townhome.
Today Brovary is front and center again with the helicopter crash into a kindergarden. The news was a bigger punch than usual. Veronika is a kindergartener. Happily for today she is a kindergartener in Spain. I can’t imagine how my day would have felt had they not made the choice to move out. I can’t imagine the gut wrenching waiting, wondering and hoping that my best friend’s adorable niece wasn’t the victim of a helicopter crash into maybe her school.
I know that we see the stories on a daily basis about the way that this war tears into our basic concepts of what the human experience is.
This diary is just an expression of humanization of this horrible event. I know that the sympathy, support and understanding here at Dkos run as high as probably anywhere on the internet for Ukraine so I don’t need to convince anyone of anything but I guess to throw out another reminder that the people of Ukraine are just — well, they are like …… like …… me — and maybe you.
But still, the proximity really pulls me in — dozens of people met the morning wondering if a little six year old was one of the victims of this horrible disaster and for a certain admittedly small subset of that group the answer will be “Yes”.
And every one of those people who answer that question in that fashion have had something ruthlessly taken from them for absolutely zero worthwhile or even explicable reason.
I want to qualify at the moment the reason for the crash is not yet specified. I can’t say that it was shot down, sabotaged or simply was an accident.
But actually the reason for the crash is clear — because the reason for the crash is the war.
The helicopter crash didn’t send Anna and Veronika fleeing from their home. The helicopter crash didn’t kill the thousands of innocent Ukrainians who had normal lives and chose to stay for all of the reasons that make sense.
Prior to 2022 Anna had no interest in relocating to a place where she knew a few words of the language and the locals know pretty much zero words of her own language. She wasn’t interested in learning to understand how to exist in a culture that is radically different than anything she is used to. Thankfully kids are resilient and that was the core reason for the move. Veronika is the shining light of all of this because she’s thriving in Spain. They don’t bother discussing the war with her and she’s picking up Spanish at a rapid pace and is making friends and enjoying her life. She is lucky that she will grow up unscarred by PTSD. She never has heard an air raid siren and god forbid a missile strike.
And of course she was never on her way to school at the moment a helicopter full of important government officials crashed to earth killing those inside and those in its way.
I could write about this forever. On the one hand I’m sooo relieved that they aren’t there. The personal aspect of this story is several degrees of separation removed and of course the degrees of separation for me can’t compare to Ukrainians either in Ukraine or those in exile themselves.
I guess I want to just share how real this is. Sometimes I feel like “Oh, you are a stronger advocate/supporter/passionate about this war than when you don’t care as much about other horrible situations in other parts of the world”. I feel almost like it’s a classist behavior of mine. Why do I have more sympathy for the Ukrainians than Syrians or Afghans and in particular women in Afghanistan? And then I realize that I don’t have “more sympathy” — I really feel just as awfully for all of those people and I guess the difference is simply that I’m actually closer to the Ukrainians and that maybe, just maybe I think that by helping them in the war effort there actually is some form of making this end with a situation where Anna and Veronika can eventually go back to a country that has a peaceful way of living with Freedom of speech and playgrounds where helicopters don’t crash because of some activity related to a war.
I resolve my personal thoughts on whether I am “extra sympathetic” or not with this thought. I am horrified by wars and oppressive regimes everywhere. I’ve been anti war my whole life. I hated the things that happened as a result of my own country’s actions….
And I feel like maybe one of the differences here is that — in Ukraine life was so “Normal”. Yes, the civil war was in Donbas but it felt light years away. The lives of the people around me — those I love and just those in Kyiv, In Brovary, in all of the places I visited while I was there — they were as non-tumultuous as those of where I grew up in New York, or in San Francisco, or … — wherever. It was wildly different culture, the language was completely different, a million things were different but it felt functional, safe and like — well — a democracy.
And with that compared to other places where life maybe was more chaotic to start, that societal battles had been raging, that stability never had seemed so strong — maybe the change from normalcy to having missiles blow up apartments and helicopters crash into schools and air raid sirens and a generation of children with PTSD — maybe that fall seems more tragic.
Maybe war is always senseless but this one seems even more senseless. Putin will get nothing out of this. Ukraine will never simply be a puppet state of Russia. I said even before it started because of how I knew the Ukrainian culture “This will be Putin’s Vietnam”. I told that to Olga in the week before the war and then have said it since and with that it seems even worse than senseless, it also seems like it was always idiocy, lunacy and a destructive, devastating foray to disrupt the lives of millions that literally no one will experience any net gain from…..
Or again, maybe it’s just because it’s family.
Whichever it is thanks for reading and letting me share.