Monologues of the War. How Ukrainians Share Their Wartime Experience across the World
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is easy to google. But the first page of the search contains mostly news reports. Sure, they are essential but nothing can replace the first-hand accounts of Ukrainians who faced this war as civilians and military. That’s why Ukrainian journalists launched a project called Monologues of the War. Here’s an article on what you can read there.
The founders of the project describe it as an attempt to create an online archive and to educate Ukrainian and foreign audiences on this war: “Our project is like a written and visual archive of war. Our goal is to help readers with solving a puzzle of what really happens during these times of war in different places of Ukraine”. It contains many stories that can be divided into five groups: military men; civilians who survived on a battleground; civilians who fled from occupied territories; volunteers who support the Ukrainian army; and civilians who fled abroad when the war started. Every person is unique and their story is outstanding as well. Let us try to delve into some of them.
On a Battleground
These are stories of military men who defended Ukraine since the first day of the full-scale war. Some of them joined the Ukrainian army even earlier. For example, Oleksandr Stepanov joined the Zoloti Vorota battalion in the May of 2014 and later moved to the famous Azov regiment. “The most interesting thing is that I left it only on January 31, 2022, three weeks before the full-scale war started. Unfortunately, I did not have time to get from Western Ukraine to Mariupol when it all started. I reached only Kyiv, where I joined the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade (hereinafter — SMB)”, he says.
In all the years he took part in the anti-terrorist operation in the Ukrainian east Oleksandr had never been wounded. But the spring of 2022 was different. In just half a mount Stepanov got a serious injury during the Battle of Moshchun near Kyiv. He calls it the “Ukrainian Verden”: “All night and all day we were beaten by artillery and I’ve never seen a shelling like that. Everything burned — from horizon to horizon. Literally, every building was caught in fire”. Fortunately, Oleksandr managed to survive: his group reached him and delivered him to the hospital after the shelling stopped. He got injured legs and a hand, various concussions, cerebral concussion, and traumatic brain injury but emerged from that battle as a winner because the Russians lost one column with personnel.
Another warrior, Vasyl Blyzniuk, joined the territorial defense of Makariv in Kyiv oblast. He and other territorial defense fighters defended the city in the first days of the full-scale war until the 95th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine came to the rescue. It was a hard time. Russians ruined everything with massive shelling. On March 18, they hit a building where territorial defense fighters gathered. Then six people were killed, and three were seriously wounded. As Vasyl says, some fighters were born in a shirt: “My friend Sasha was sitting under the wall when a shell hit just one and a half meters from him. One and a half meters from where the shell hit! I do not know by what miracle he survived”.
Moreover, Makariv witnessed the Russian atrocities that are etched in Vasyl’s memory:
An elderly couple was traveling in a column. Russians shot them to death. They had laid there for one week and a half as it was hard to get there.
The godfather of my child was riding a bicycle from where the Aerotekhnika enterprise was located when he was shot with a machine gun and that was it. His body was also lying for a week. It was impossible to take it as Russians were shooting all the time… Russians have done a lot of things. My friend’s acquaintance was raped and then killed…
Life under Fire
Civilians are telling their stories as well. For example, Anastasia Tykha told the Monologues of the War about how she evacuated her dogs from Irpin when the city became a battleground. Before the war, she was running a temporary animal shelter with medical care and dog training. When she and her husband were crossing the bridge with the animals, the journalists noticed them and her photo with a group of dogs went viral. Anastasia said that it wasn’t a last-minute decision: “We spent several days planning who would go with whom and where. It was not a last-minute decision. However, when it became clear that we needed to flee urgently, we gathered quickly. But before that everything was planned, we prepared medicines, sedatives, and backpacks. Found a place to go”. A couple returned, again and again, to save as many animals as possible until it become too dangerous.
A pensioner Liubov Kroshchenko also lived in the war zone — in a country village near Kozarovychi, Vyshhorod district, Kyiv oblast. She had a large population of animals — chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, and more than a dozen cats, and dogs that wandered from war-torn households. A Russian shell completely destroyed her house but she managed to survive, thanks to a dog:
On the afternoon of March 6, rockets flew very hard. It became quiet in the evening. I was in the house. There was no more electricity or gas, I slept dressed, in a tanned sheepskin coat, because it was cold. I had never taken a dog home to spend the night before, but that day I did. Then I thought, “I’ll go outside and see what’s there.”
It was 23:15. I was just at the door, and Bim rushed to my feet. Apparently, he was scared that I was leaving. I tripped over him and fell. At that moment, I heard how a shell flew overhead.
Now Kyiv oblast is liberated from Russian occupiers and its residents are trying to rebuild their dwellings and live a normal life (to the extent it is possible). But there are Ukrainian territories that are still occupied or have been liberated just recently. The next group of stories tells us what has been experienced by those who faced the Russian occupation.
Occupied
“On February 23, my husband said: “Tanya, go withdraw money from the cards because there will be a war.” I answered him, “What war? It’s the 21st century now!” He worried a lot, but as for me, on February 23, I was still calmly doing my business” 33-year-old Tetyana Danyliak from Kherson tells. The very next day it turned out that her husband Vadym was right. The war has begun.
Russians entered Kherson on March 1, after fierce fighting for the Antonivskii bridge that connected two banks of the Dnipro river. After getting the list of addresses where activists, former military men, and personnel of SSU (Security Service of Ukraine) lived they started kidnapping people. “Every day there were reports about home invasions or abductions in the news and telegram channels”, Tetyana says. She was afraid of going outside her neighborhood and sometimes even didn’t take a phone with her as Russians checked the gadgets, seeking people with a pro-Ukrainian stance.
In late April, they decided to leave. “The thing that affected us the most was the announcement about the mobilization to the ranks of orcs in the Kherson region. I understand now that this could have been fake information, but anyway, I did not want my husband to give his life for Russia”, she says. But evacuation turned out a hard task.
The first attempt failed. They didn’t manage to get to Mykolaiv because Russians created queues deliberately and did not want to let their column out. Then the couple decided to leave via occupied Crimea and Russia to get to Latvia. This time their attempt was successful. They drove 3000 km across Russia, passed the border control, and got to Riga.
Another Kherson resident, Tetiana Chykalova, managed to pass the Russian checkpoint and get to the Ukrainian territory in early April. “I was determined to leave because it was impossible to carry on living in Kherson. There was constant shelling, and in addition, rashists broke into apartments and searched for ATO participants and activists. There was a terrible crisis with medicines, there were no vitally necessary medicines for me”, she says.
The Russian checkpoint became a nightmare for her:
There were a lot of drunks, who said something like: “Well, we don’t want to check you, but you can see for yourself, our boss is standing right there.” Sometimes four people ran up to the car at once and opened all the doors and the trunk. I was afraid that they might grab the child.
Fortunately, she and her daughter managed to get to Mykolaiv and then enter Moldova. But at the time of writing many Ukrainians are still trying hard to leave the occupied territories. It may be even harder to do after fake referendums Russians organized there to annex this part of Ukraine.
To Learn More…
It’s only a part of the stories you can read. Ukrainians do have what to tell about this war. They have experienced it in different ways — as ordinary civilians and military men on a battleground; as victims of the Russian occupation; as refugees who moved to other countries to save themselves and their loved ones; and as volunteers who continue to support their army as much as possible.
