When I was a kid, Ukrainian TV used to run an iconic social ad; it featured a slogan ‘You are not alone. We are 52 million strong’.
We don’t know how many Ukrainians have survived this genocide so far. Hundreds of thousands have been murdered. Hundreds of thousands, both adults and children, have been kidnapped and deported to Russia. Millions have been forced to flee abroad since the full-scale invasion. The shortage of people, the shrinking of our community is something acutely felt, reported, and mourned.
I feel this lack not only when my friends in the army tell me they spend weeks on the positions because there is nobody to change them. I feel it while recruiting for a new cultural and research institution based in Lviv, the capital of the home front. On employment websites, there are more jobs than applicants.
In our institutions in Ukraine and abroad, we should keep thinking of the ways to support those who can’t leave or choose not to, who keep working inside the country in spite of blackouts, sleepless nights, and murderous missile strikes in the third year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. If this land is deserted by people, evil moves further unimpeded.
Standing your ground, in a very basic physical sense, is a lesson I learned a decade ago at the Maidan. During the Revolution of Dignity, we defended our square from the riot police by putting our bodies on the line. Kyivans did not always stay in the camp at night but, at the first sign of danger that the government’s forces would attempt to disperse the protesters, they flooded the Maidan. It’s easy to brutally disperse a few hundred people; a hundred thousand, not so much.
There were a few nights when I felt so anxious for the Maidan that I took a taxi to the centre and just walked the perimeter of the square till dawn listening to Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria on an mp3 player. Nothing dramatic happened during those nights: I walked between tents and barricades stopping to drink tea with strangers. But it felt vital to reinforce the Maidan with my inadequate physical presence. And perhaps, it was.
People who keep living and working, publishing books and paying taxes, treating patients and buying soap, repairing houses and teaching children, walking their dogs and making plans in Ukraine are defending their country like some of us defended the Maidan in 2014. Our simple contribution can’t be compared to those who are actually fighting Russian invaders with arms. Yet all of us together present an obstacle to the spread of evil. In the third year of the all-out genocide, this obstacle still proves difficult to overcome.
We may not be 52 million, but we are strong, as long as we keep reinforcing each other.
How poignant. There are those who stayed and those who heard the call and made their way home. I'm a couple of generations down from a Ващук who made the decision to leave (in 1948, to avoid "repatriation" into an enemy state). While my teenaged father made his way to the US with his aunt, who adopted him along the way, my widowed grandfather (a priest) stayed behind, with his middle child, a daughter, my aunt Liuba, who had no choice in the matter. Today my father's grandchildren are Canadians, still Ukrainian enough to feel the reverberations of intergenerational trauma but safely rooted here, and her grandson is a uniformed defender.
I've met my Ukrainian first cousin (his father) only a few times; we like each other very much but are only in sporadic "contact" by social media through intermediaries. I don't know his son Андрій but know that he has managed to stay safe, perhaps because, as someone without any military experience, it made sense to deploy him in other than a combat role: as the full-scale invasion dragged on (due to inadequate military support from the West), he enlisted as a volunteer, likely because he felt an obligation to put his own life on the line. Elsewhere I have heard you speak about your guilt but you did not elaborate. I know it takes many forms and varies in degree but I think that's a pervasive feeling amongst conscious Ukrainians of conscience that will stay with all of us who survive regardless of the outcome (and the possibilities are terrifying to contemplate because they are all horrific). Have we done all we could to help Ukraine and save Ukrainians and was it enough?