Ukraine's Secret Weapon Is Its Collective Determination

Whether fighting or sewing or bandaging or cooking, Ukrainians have weaponized an intangible, collective unity of purpose that is as difficult to define as it is to defeat. And all the more powerful for that. JL   

Katija Petrowskaja reports in The Hive, image, The Telegraph:

The whole country is working like a beehive. Concrete support for people fighting, for people helping to help—that seems the ultimate choice. This is a substitution for hope, to act. It is not only because horror would swallow you if you were to stop, it is the decentralized initiative of survival. People are creating new supply systems and information networks, organizing evacuations, cooking for the army, buying medicine and supplying those who remain in occupied zones, rescuing pets and protecting monuments. The chain of deeds in a common endeavor has spread across Europe and beyond.
As I write, six weeks have passed since the war began. We are starting to adjust. The death of a person becomes a statistic. It is impossible to adjust. We are watching the war online. The stories we encounter are emerging as if out of a ripped belly, multifaceted grief, without hierarchy. They block any means of perception. How to bear it? The young woman from Mariupol who was rescuing others, killed; wounded people; huge halls in Poland filled with refugees and their pets; children in Kharkiv living in the subway; the ghost buildings of Odesa; ruins everywhere. My writing cannot protect a single person under the bombs, a single house.

 

The war is quicker than any speech against it.Today I again woke up at 5:07 a.m. as if from an explosion or an air raid siren. The exact time the war started on February 24. Each time, upon waking, I hope that this war is my personal nightmare. It takes a few seconds for evidence to break through. O. is killed, M. is killed, N. is killed, A. is killed. The skeletons of charred houses hurt me from the inside. I cannot grasp the war, I have to stop it. I am in Berlin, and thousands of people are arriving every day from Ukraine to the main railway station. They don’t want to be called refugees. They are homeless, mostly women and children, the men left behind. Their future is uncertain, they are looking for the next step. The family from Mariupol was euphoric, still not believing that they were alive, in Europe, trying to feed me with everything that had just been donated to them. A very old man from a village near Zaporizhzhia held both my hands—his daughter did not want to leave but forced him and her mother to go. A small girl from Kharkiv, jumping around and saying “Papa did this” or “Papa did that,” her mother silent. That family from Hostomel—I had promised to help them, a father and his disabled son, but I forgot to come back and lost them in the crowd. Now my mother, a child of World War II, has made it to Berlin. She taught history her whole life. Back in 1941, she, a six-year-old girl, had to leave Kyiv for the Urals, fleeing the German army. Now she has fled Kyiv for Germany, escaping the Russian army. It is perhaps the smallest absurdity of this war.

 

Whatever I do, my thoughts are in Mariupol, a city that before the war was home to more than 400,000 inhabitants. I try to imagine so many people, starving, under bombs, trying to flee, unable to bury their dead, bombed again, dying while I am writing, dying while Western leaders debate and hesitate. Mariupol already recalls the siege of Leningrad and the battle of Stalingrad in one. We don’t dare to imagine the scale of devastation caused by the Russian army. And yet we know enough to say that this army, trained in Grozny and Aleppo, now turns its atrocities on Ukraine, all of them, encyclopedically. A few weeks ago I asked one high-ranking military expert: How many dead civilians does the West need in order to start acting? He said, “It might sound cynical, but we need pictures.”

Bucha, Irpin, Vorzel—a trio of small satellites around Kyiv. I saw the pictures at night: a palm and smashed faces peeking out from brown soil, the hand of a dead woman with a professional red manicure. A mass grave. Some 300 bodies. Others lying along the street with tied hands, in fashionable shoes, tortured, shot. The street was newly repaved. Bucha had been getting richer. Lootings. Reports of mass rape, the killing of whole families. My brain refuses to understand, my body goes through withdrawal. I went to Bucha in the summer as a child. In recent years, visiting Kyiv, I joined friends there: My university classmate Taras has a big family in Bucha. They all gather in summer on the lake to make huge pots of plov, to swim and to sing, to stroll through grass taller than we are. Friends of friends, musicians, kids, slightly hippie-like, one of the sweetest gatherings I ever experienced. Danila played bagpipes. I picture them all in my head at once and shiver. Taras wrote the next day. His relatives are out of Bucha, spread across Europe. Safe. The mother of one of my friends in Berlin is also safe after two weeks in a cellar in Bucha, discovering now, in the pace of everyday life, who is and is not alive among her neighbors. The violence is spreading everywhere where people just used to live, further, unpredictable. My friend, a photographer, met a woman in a village on the road to Kyiv. She was watching cars pass by as if she were waiting for something. She had spent her life teaching Russian language and literature. Now she had lost her only son. Russian soldiers had taken a few men to repair their machinery, treated them politely, and then killed them all.

Russia misuses Ukrainian war victims for propaganda in order to kill more people and to indulge further killing, justifying the newly killed as a premise to kill even more. Everything that does not help to break the pace of this war seems hollow to me. We know this dystopian nature of dictatorship. It reproduces death. How many times have we thought about what could have been done to stop Hitler, had one acted in time, had people believed in their own power and the need to resist for the sake of the others. Now we think of this war. It is too late to think in the subjunctive. Accepting our powerlessness, we accept their violence.

From the first days, work became for many a method of resistance to war, became a proof of existence, since the mere idea of sovereign existence is questioned. Not just the Ukrainian army and Territorial Defense Forces—the whole country is working like a beehive. Concrete support for people fighting, for people helping to help—that seems the ultimate choice. Perhaps this is a substitution for hope, to act. No normal life, only frenetic actions. It is not only because horror would swallow you if you were to stop, it is the decentralized initiative of survival. People are creating new supply systems and information networks, organizing evacuations, cooking for the army, buying medicine and supplying those who remain in occupied zones, rescuing pets and protecting monuments. This irrefutable enthusiasm reminds me of the Spanish Civil War. The chain of deeds in a common endeavor has spread across Europe and beyond, and I am also a part of it. There is no time to tell the stories, to tell others what we all are actually doing. For the first few weeks we lived in a tempo of orders. There are thousands of such groups, emerging sporadically. But there is so much grief that even helping all the time, you cannot heal the wounds. The war lasts and multiplies calamities.

This merciless knowledge inevitably makes witnesses out of us. I wonder, who is this “we”? We Ukrainians? We who live in Europe? Anyone who agrees that Putin has to be defeated by all means? “We” can admire those who are fighting, feel compassion with those who suffer, we, who sometimes experience powerlessness. Others can pretend that this war has nothing to do with them. But the Russian war has already changed the order of things, exposed the vulnerability of the most powerful world organizations. The war could be stopped by a common act of resistance, but so much depends nowadays on how we define this “we,” expanding it beyond the institutions and methods that have proven themselves insufficient.

 

Spring has come and people’s wish to return to Ukraine grows even stronger. My mom, my friends, people I met at Berlin’s train station, so many want to go home. Even if there is no home left. I could never have expected that our life would once turn as simple as a folk song: to chase away the enemy, to reunite with loved ones, to touch the soil, to enter the apartment, to plant, to mourn, to see the orchards blossoming, to go back to work, to rebuild or just to visit the place you came from—simple, hardly reachable things.