The War As Reality

Waiting enemy fire in the long sleepless nights provoke long reflections and the adrenaline rush of the first day of the war sets their theme and direction.

Today, the Ukrainian military is restoring historical justice, giving a worthy resistance to our primordial enemy. The Moscow horde, the Bolshevik invaders, the new Russian fascists – call them whatever you want. There is the only thing that remains the same: they come to us from the North, East and South and have one goal: to destroy the Ukrainians as a nation.

History repeats itself in a spiral, and every few decades we are forced to repel the onslaught of well-armed lumpens who have only one desire: to kill. However, each new round leads us to new levels of resistance and gets us closer to the final victory.

After 1654, we gradually lost our statehood. In the early 20th century, we gained independence for a short time. During World War II we fought on two fronts with the world's strongest armies: the Soviet and the Fascist ones, and then resisted for more than ten years.

In 2014, we learned a bitter lesson that if people do not want to feed their own army, they will feed the occupier's one. The lesson has been learned, now we are successfully defending in all directions, destroying everything hostile that walks and moves, and stern men from territorial defense as well as conscripts from the National Guard break the enemy's plans for a blitzkrieg, defeating elite units of Russian special forces.

Ukrainians stand in the united front and we will not give up. Our nation is finally beginning to learn this lesson of history.

Why is it so important to rethink today's events in retrospect? Because until we do that, the occupier will still open his declaration of war speeches with half-hour excursions into the "history of Ukraine", which he invented himself, and present to the world pictures of our territory in the form of "gifts of Russian tsars".

Everyone who asked us why we create mostly "irrelevant" historical content now has the answer.

The answer is also given to those who, gestured aggressively and reproached us why we are filming and talking about war. Do you remember all this: "we’re tired of your war", "we’re bored with this war and these radicals, who are at war everywhere", "let's make peace, stop the war…"

The war cannot be stopped; it can be either won or lost. Now all of you know this, sitting in basements and shelters and praying for the Ukrainian military, who a week ago you called "inadequate". Don't forget to apologize when it's over.

It is also important to realize that one cannot flee the war for long; those who found refuge in Ukraine after the conflicts in Georgia, Armenia and Transnistria could well explain it to you. The war will haunt you until you face it and fight back, despite all your fears.

And when you look into the enemy’s eyes (not obsequiously, but proudly and contemptuously), when the victims of his actions are your loved ones, the realization comes immediately that hiding your head in the sand according to the sayings "it's not the people – it's politicians", "not all Muscovites are like that", is not an "attitude" – it is an open indulgence of the aggressor.

While we have a war (and I recall that it began in 2014) and until the complete surrender of the enemy and the payment of reparations, we must all adhere to the "quarantine" of the Russians and everything Russian. Well, maybe over there on that side there is something good and someone decent, but it is not our business to seek something good in that tub of shit. It is a pity that for the last years the authorities have not helped Ukrainians to realize this. They protected people affected by pro-Russian propaganda narratives from the stresses of changing beliefs. However, we see now that the bloodiest battles are being fought in areas where the population is more tolerant towards Russia, and talks of reaching an understanding through tolerance and some cultural contacts look like a delusion when we see bombed-out homes and killed children in Mariupol, a city where not even teachers of Ukrainian language speak Ukrainian.

These are some of the thoughts. We do not think that any of us wanted to live in such turbulent times, but we must turn around and repel the enemy, because if we retreat, surrender, agree, run away, a new war will catch up with our children and grandchildren in a while.