Kyiv Diary
A few days ago, I got my first Isolarii subscription book. Isolarii is a publisher of very tiny books; I reviewed their edition of Street Cop a few weeks ago. The first book in my subscription is In The Face of War, written by Yevgenia Belorusets. It is part of an exhibit at the Venice Biennale this year called This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom. The book has small sections of visual art at the beginning and the end: nice, but the format of Isolarri books is so small that the art cannot be reproduced very satisfyingly. Certainly a reader doesn’t get a good idea of the physical presence of the art when it is reproduced on pages smaller than one’s palm. The two main artists are Nikita Kadan and Lesia Khomenko, but it is the war diary of Belorusets that is the main part of the book. This diary was initially published in Der Spiegel. (A commercial edition of the book apparently will be published by New Directions.) She started her diary on February 24 of this year—the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Toward the end of the book, she says she expected to stop writing after a few days. It was impossible at the time to imagine that this war would continue as long as it has. She kept writing that daily diary until April 5, by which time she had just arrived in Warsaw, a refugee. The book contains her daily observations of life in Kyiv (it is spelled that way in the book. The reason we use “Kyiv” instead of “Kiev” is because Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked that media in the West use “Kyiv” which is derived from the Ukrainian word for their capital instead of “Kiev” which is derived from Russian). Even though she stayed in Kyiv just a little over a month before becoming a refugee, her diary is a affecting account of what life during war is like. A few days ago, I asked what producing art in such dire circumstances was good for. Somehow I left out one of the most important motivations, one which Belorusets’ diary certainly embodies: to bear witness.
She writes about Nikita Kadan, an artist friend who is part of the exhibit This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom, who was living in an art gallery. The gallery is in a basement; it served both as a gallery and a bomb shelter for various artists in the city. The sheltering artists put on an impromptu exhibit which Belorusets visits. But she writes, “What can art do?” Not much, but in this case it gave temporary pleasure to someone who was freaking out.
Kyiv was being targeted by Russian rockets. Ordinary life stopped, but it wasn’t continual destruction. One could still walk the streets, but air-raid sirens could go off at any time. And people changed. Belorusets meets a man named Kirill on the street in front of her building. He was involved in cooking food for refugees and soldiers. He had been a part of the Kyiv nightclub scene, which Belorusets says had developed rapidly in recent years. “When time permits, he concerns himself with art, music, and shamanism.”
“People are acting better than they typically do right now, and our country…” His thought trailed off. Then he said, “Everything is changing, even internationally.” His good humor mixed with my bitterness. I began to laugh.
At one point, she gets a utility bill for her apartment. Then on Telegram (a messaging app used extensively by Ukrainians to get war news), the utility company writes her: “We are writing you with a request. If your financial means allow under the circumstances, please pay the utilities. Many Kyiv utility workers joined the Ukrainian army and are now fighting for our freedom. However, it is still important to pay the bills.”
She has to be careful what she photographs and is frequently challenged by soldiers. She describes a shelling that was the result of a TikTok video that showed some Ukrainian tanks. The tanks had been seen briefly in the video, and were long gone when the shelling occurred. But because the Russians could identify the location of the video, it was shelled. In trying to destroy these tanks, the Russians “reduced a huge apartment building and a large shopping mall to burnt, black skeletons.”
On March 23rd, she writes about destruction inside Kyiv, but then talks about a phone conversation with Elena, an employee of a zoo outside Kharkiv. Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine and was the target of a savage Russian battle in February. She and her co-workers had been trying to feed the animals, but were fired on by Russians. Elena told Belorusets that the animals remained in their pens. That some animals had been shot at and killed, and some escaped through a damaged fence. She and her coworkers arrived by bus and carried feed to the pens as shelling began. They distributed as much food as possible, but when they got back to the bus, the driver was dead. Elena said that only she and one other colleague survived that trip.
She writes about going to the trains station (she bought tickets several times to leave, but always decided to stay in Kyiv and gave her tickets away—until she left for real) and meeting two soldiers sitting in front of a grocery store drinking coffee. They show her a photo of a 14-year-old boy. They were going to a military position to retrieve him. He had gone there following his father, also a soldier. The boy wanted to fight side by side with his father, but was too young. “We understand, of course, but we cannot allow it,” one of the soldiers says. Reading this makes you proud of the kid, but it reminds me of the 1990 story “More Women, More Children, More Quickly” by Joe Sacco, illustrating the memories of his mother Carmen M. Sacco, who was a child on Malta when it was bombed by the Axis in World War II. In one panel, a family has just heard that Mussolini had declared war on the British, who were the colonial masters of Malta. A young boy is drawn saying excitedly, “Soldiers on horses! Now I’ll see soldiers on horse!!” while an adult woman says, “Son, if you only knew what was coming.” In the Face of War is unsentimental. Belorusets does not view war the war a teenage boy might. Her somewhat dispassionate voice has the effect of making the things she describes feel even more shocking.
On February 27 and 28, Russia attacked the towns of Bucha and Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv. In early March, Russian troops move in and start looting. The Ukrainian army briefly retakes Bucha and starts to evacuate to civilians still hiding there. By March 7, the Russians prevent evacuations, trapping civilians in Bucha. During the rest of March, the Russians massacre civilians in Bucha, leaving their corpses in the street. At the end of March and beginning of April, the cities are liberated by Ukrainian forces, and the massive war crime is seen by the world. “I ask my readers, I ask all those who are keeping in their thoughts, to commit to memory the names of those unknown places in Ukraine,” wrote Belorusets on April 2. “All that has not yet been attacked must be saved.”
The United States has supplied Ukraine with a small number of HIMARS, the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which is a long range weapon that can outshoot Russian howitzers, which Russia is currently successfully using in a war of attrition against Ukraine (since their lightning war at the beginning was a failure). We should send Ukraine as many HIMARS as they need. We can afford it, and a post-Soviet democracy could be saved. No more Buchas and Irpins.
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