Driven by revenge for a strike against his expensive Crimean bridge, Putin unleashed a barrage of attacks on Ukraine this week. Many of the people I love were caught up in it. The first words I heard from my cousin that morning was, “We’re alive, but…”
Let’s be absolutely clear on one thing: Putin is engaging in state terrorism. He is not hitting military targets. He just wants Ukrainians to be brought as low as possible.
Every time Putin terrorizes people, his simpering little enablers pipe up to explain how he’s justified in doing it and Ukraine should really “sue for peace” and give in to Putin’s agenda. Of course, these enablers either a) don’t want to understand that the agenda is the destruction of Ukraine as a free and democratic state or b) do understand this and just don’t care.
I don’t want to argue with nihilists. I do that a lot online, and while it offers some temporary relief, it’s also exhausting.
I do want to tell you about the playground that one of Putin’s missiles fell next to, less than half a block away from my grandfather’s old apartment.
I’ve known that playground in Park Shevchenko for my entire life. This was my old neighborhood, and I’ve stayed there, on and off, many times since my family moved to the United States.
I remember when the playground equipment wasn’t nearly as nice as it is today, and how we still managed to have fun there as kids. I remember, in vivid detail, braving my fear of the big slide when I was around four years old — and the exhilaration I felt when I first slid down, wind whooshing in my ears and the fear leaving me.
I remember taking my son to that playground for the first time, many years later, when it was already renovated, and kids could take pony rides nearby. I remember that feeling of connection, in the old heart of the city of my birth, between my childhood and that of my son, a sparkling current running between us.
The trees in that park are tall, and old men play checkers and chess not far from where the kids yell and trip over each other, their little bodies bursting with energy. The statue of the poet Taras Shevchenko stands in the center of the park — I found it mystical when I was little, and I find it mystical today. It’s in the way that Shevchenko stands, like he is so deep in thought that he’s there and not really there at the same time.
“Fight, and you will win,” Shevchenko once wrote. “God helps you in your fight.”
This was also the same poet who cautioned Ukrainian women to not fall in love with Russians, and considering just how badly my own marriage to a Russian went, I can’t help but chuckle at it today.
Shevchenko has always been with us, for all of these years, because poets are immortal. And he was right about a lot of things, but especially about the need to fight.
It is worth it, to fight for playgrounds where kids run wild. To fight for old men moving pawns across chess boards with looks of concentration. To fight for looming statues and Kyiv’s softly falling leaves. For life as we know it.
This war has never been only about Ukraine, though Ukrainians bear the brunt of it. It’s a war of imperial revanchism and murderous cynicism. The war is a test. Do you flinch and look away? Do you let the monster eat you and spit out your bones, because to fight is to hope, and hope can be terrifying?
I feel the weariness in my own bones as I write this. I feel grief pulsing through my broken little heart. And I know that I won’t give up, that none of us will ever give up. We cannot disappoint immortal poets and our living children.
Image: Children’s Playground After Russian missile attack Oct 10 2022 by Му Міхаїл and Taras Shevchenko Park in Kiev by Qypchak
