The Long War #12
KYIV—I had these past few weeks the chance to talk with several Ukrainian teenagers who have stayed in the country these past nine months. It’s been eye-opening. Children and elderly people tend to get the most media coverage for the very understandable reason that they are the most vulnerable part of the population, but I feel like teenagers are very much an overlooked age group in the chaos of this war.
They’re old enough to understand, but not old enough to be involved. They’re a generation shaped by the confrontation with Russia, barely out of kindergarten when the Maidan revolution happened. Anilika, a bright, 15 years-old teenage girl I met in Kyiv, was just 7 years old when Russia-backed separatists seized her native city of Donetsk, where she remained for the following eight years until she was able to flee with her father in June, a terrifying journey that took her through Russia and the Baltic countries before she was able to go back to Ukraine.
Most of these kids have been displaced, either temporarily at the beginning of the war or permanently. Last month, 15 years-old Maria guided me through the devastated village she fled in March with her family, still smiling as she walked through the ruins of the school she used to go to (Russian military rations still littering the place) and later reached her home and half-blown-up bedroom where a Russian officer slept for several weeks.
These kids stayed in Ukraine, which means they also had to deal with the pain of seeing their friends leave abroad and, in many cases, of realizing that these friends would not come back. Not just friends, either: when I met Maya in Odesa, she was preparing to see her grandmother off to Lviv, as the family house where she lived in Mykolaiv was razed in early November by a Russian missile strike (the grandmother already found a job operating a crane at a tank repair plant in Lviv).
They’ve been powerless and scared, but not without responsibilities: two separate teenagers told me how they felt they had to take care of their mother, who tended to be a lot more scared of air raid alarms than them. Their routine has involved either studying online (which, one 11 years-old boy told me, “is basically vacations”), something they’ve been doing for three years now because of Covid, or going to school to lessons often interrupted by air raid alarms. These past weeks, they had to endure the sometimes hours-long wait in bomb shelters in pitch-black rooms, as the threat of Russian missile attacks mixed with power outages (caused by those same missile attacks).
There isn’t really a take or a deep insight here, except maybe that a lot more attention should be paid to those kids who will play a crucial role in Ukraine’s near future. Also, this will almost certainly be the last issue of this newsletter for the year, as I prepare to go back to France for the first time since August. Happy holidays to all of you, and here’s to a better 2023.
Something to read
Detektor Media (in Ukrainian) / “Let’s go back to what we were doing before February 24:” a Ukrainian NGO thinks it’s time to start investigating again (it was striking to see how, following the Russian invasion, so many Ukrainian journalists and activists who specialized in tracking and denouncing corruption switched to investigating Russian war crimes. While a completely understandable change, this left a severe blind spot that was only amplified by wartime emergency measures allowing the state to classify tenders. “Our Money” is a fantastic Ukrainian NGO specializing in investigating tenders and corrupt deals it’s generally, and it is interesting to see them arguing in this piece that the time has come to go back to their stated mission. It’s good news I think, as Ukraine needs those investigations more than ever, but it’s also yet another indication of a society now contending with the prospect of a long war, with the idea that it can’t just be a parenthesis but simply the way they’re going to live now.)
Graty (in Ukrainian/Russian) / “People really believed that a peaceful protest would make the orcs leave”. Testimony from Serhiy Pavlyuk, a theater director arrested in occupied Kherson (a long, fascinating first-hand account of living in Russian-occupied Kherson, organizing pro-Ukrainian protests and dealing with Russian interrogators)
The Bulwark / The Torn Loyalties of Russian Liberals (it’s not exactly a debate that most Ukrainians are interested in, but Russian opposition TV channel Dozhd’s ban from Latvia has certainly been agitating Twitter, and it does raise some important questions about the relationship between CEE countries and Russia beyond Putin. This piece is probably the best thing I’ve read on the topic)
Something to watch
Harrowing, emotional report from a military hospital in the battered city of Bakhmut, put together by incredible Ukrainian journalist Nastya Stanko and the Hromadske team. English-language subtitles are included.