Living in Ukraine These Days
As our city is not on the frontline, the only real sights of destruction were the ones we got during the early weeks of 2022 - the bombing of a school, a hospital, a housing complex. The office building I'm usually sitting in looks onto the bombed school; oddly enough, apart from the collapsed section, it hasn’t suffered any further deterioration despite inclement weather and other factors.
There is much talk regarding what to do with the school, but the key question is whether the city needs one more school when none of the others are at full capacity. I would often visit that school because of its English speaking club.
The bombed school. Image: Volodymyr Bilyk
The alarms are just a part of life. Back in 2022, when the rockets and drones were raining down, you could feel the ground shaking and see smoke everywhere. Sometimes you could even see the drone circling the city like an actual UFO with blinking red lights and a buzzing engine sound. And you felt really stupid for doing that because if that thing blew up nearby, you're done to the point no one knows you've been there. Over time, the anti-air units prevailed and now the faraway boom is all you get, though if you're friends with the AA crew, you might see a photo of a downed drone.
But the alarms are regular. Not even frequent. One during a day, two or three during the night. Usually a couple of short ones and then a long one with lots of drones and dummies circling around. A couple of days ago (December 2024), the alarms rang for nine hours straight - pretty much all night long - and we filled the dead space with waiting and trying to find out where the drones were and whether there were any more coming. Russian disinformation seeped into the local chats with made-up stories and AI generated images of death and destruction that looked like fan art for John Carpenter's The Thing.
Christmas week was ridiculous because of that.
Imagine this: you're sitting in a bomb shelter, coffee in hand, scrolling the newsreel, when plink! - a message in a local group and, I shit you not: "Oh guys! The drone just a hit our building, I saw some women and children burning alive, screaming, I think this wasn't a Russian rocket but a Ukrainian one because it was like yellow and blue. These bastards don't care about us and just want to shoot things. When will this nightmare end?"
There's a point at which psychological terror becomes travesty and that's where we are. You get dumb shit like that all the time. Sometimes it is crudely written; other times it is slightly more eloquent, probably thanks to ChatGPT. Two neighbours argued over which classical painting had inspired the last image. One angled for Giotto, the other El Greco. Whatever gets you through the night, eh?
On the surface, you kinda understand why they send these messages: to propagate fear, uncertainty and doubt among civilians. But their absurdity often has the opposite effect. Always some doom and gloom defeatist bullshit that instantly falls apart because what the hell it just looks so phony it can't be anything else. Sometimes your own eyes reveal the untruth because you're literally sitting in front of the supposedly destroyed house drinking coffee with women and children who are supposedly burning alive screaming.
And then you hear a distant boom, which means the stasis will last a little longer. But Russians don't give up and keep on spamming and these days people don't even laugh when they get one. Yes, Russian terror disinformation blindness is a thing.
The streets are full of all sorts of military people going about their business. Sometimes you stumble into someone who wants to talk and it is better to let them talk because these guys go through hell and listening is the least we can do.
In the most recent storytime session, the narrator described an episode of trench warfare during which he was isolated by machine gun fire waiting for a supply drop. And then an enemy soldier jumped into the trench and things got dark. But instead of shooting the narrator, the enemy threw a grenade at him to create a more grotesque death scene. For whatever reason (probably arrogant inattentiveness) the grenade was not activated. Instead of dying, the narrator picked up the grenade, activated it, and threw it back at his assailant, who got his legs blown off in the subsequent blast. And the enemy screamed, "You bastard, you killed me, why?! I didn't do anything! I'm just following orders!"
Yeah, no shit, bub, the arrogance and cruelty of regular Russian soldiers is mind boggling for those who haven't experienced it firsthand and it often seems made up but somehow it is not and I don't know what's worse. The guy who told me that story was stressed out and he kept talking about it in a way people talk about routine things they went through that day. I happened to be sitting nearby.
One evening I was unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of some kind of support group hanging out in the coffee shop on the road home. These were displaced persons from the occupied territories. They were talking through their experience of sexual violence. That’s not something a hug can fix.
Right now, as I write these final words, it’s a little over midnight, and we got yet another rocket strike alarm. The monitor message says twenty drones are coming our way. I guess we'll be watching Monday Night Raw tonight.