Yesterday it’s been six months since the Russian-Ukrainian war started. And before I couldn’t bring myself to write anything here, but I still feel the need to express my small thoughts because silence is worse.
I’m not Ukrainian. Although as a child I spent almost every summer very close to Ukraine at the Black Sea where my relatives live.
I can 80% understand Ukrainian language, and my grandmother speaks it almost fluently. After spending yet another summer over there, I’d come back to school and life in Moscow, and my mom would always laugh at my ‘Russian-Ukrainian’ accent that I’d acquire while being there and that is typical for that area, and I would also laugh with her bearing fond and happy memories from those times..
What’s happened on the 24th February can be described as millions of children won’t have such happy memories from their childhood. Millions of them and their families. Because of a single man’s terrible, ambitious and stupidly blind decision. Because those who surround him are too scared to lose their so-called financial freedom (which is quite temporary as we can see now following arrests of their precious belongings all over the world), - too scared to stand and speak out...
This war never shouldn’t have started in the first place, as we’ve always been friendly countries / nations / neighbors with lots of friends, relatives or coworkers on both sides - the aspect that we, Russians, might have lost now for generations in the future if not forever...
The war that is unfair to neither of the nations.
The war that is bringing only hate, death and despair.
The war that can’t even be called ‘war’ in Russia because of ongoing dictatorship, thriving propaganda and practically limitless power of police.
The war that is personal for one very scared coward man but that concerns lives of millions on this planet.
The war that separates families not only in Ukraine but also in Russia as lots of brainwashed people keep watching state TV channels and almost happily prefer to stay blind and deaf because their own lives didn’t quite change (for now..).
The war which horrors and irreversible consequences our grandparents knew from their own experience in the 1940’s, and which they almost prayed (as praying was not allowed in the USSR!..) for it to be the last one.
The war that made us enemies and practically new fascists in the face of civil world.
The war we never thought could happen in the first place, and that either of us will ever forget now...
I stand against this and any other war. I want peace for Ukraine and for my own home country. I want freedom for political prisoners like Navalny and other thousands of brave heroes who preferred to speak out instead of pretending that nothing has happened, and who are now more free than those brainwashed ones by choice.
This war should stop, and we, Russians, should begin our repentance immediately with the hope that maybe, if we try hard, in a few decades we could be friends again. With Ukraine and the whole world. Which right now seems just imposible.
Don’t be scared and don’t be silent, only together we can bring this nightmare to an end.
