A Swedish-Russian woman, Eugenia Karlsson, became the internet’s latest target for public shaming after she was captured unleashing a horrific tirade on a Ukrainian in Stockholm:
1/ In Sweden, a Russian teacher Eugenia Karlsson verbally attacked a ukrainian girl. Helga Kadya filmed everything. pic.twitter.com/VgrYik1mCe
— Oriannalyla 🇺🇦 (@Lyla_lilas) April 26, 2022
I don’t believe that public shaming works to change people for the better. In the case of someone like Karlsson, seething with hate and likely disturbed, the international outrage has probably made her worse.
However, I did feel a sickening sense of recognition as I watched the video.
The horrific invasion has exposed anti-Ukrainian sentiment — a prejudice like any other, but one that’s often gone unnoticed, especially in Europe and the United States.
Russians are white, Ukrainians are white, our names are similar — sometimes, they’re even the same. For example: even though I’m from Ukraine, my last name sounds stereotypically Russian. And due to years of mass repressions in both Russia and Ukraine, I can’t even be sure as to my paternal grandfather’s history.
Our languages are also similar — I’ve always thought of Ukrainian as the softer and prettier language, even though my Russian is better — we share a lot of history, and cultural figures. For example, did you know that great writers who are considered Russian, such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov, actually came from Ukraine?
This is why from the outside looking in, many people have been confused about our great rift, and the struggle against a history of Russian imperialism in Ukraine. This confusion has been exploited by Russian propagandists, their assets and fellow travelers, and unfortunates like Eugenia Karlsson, who undoubtedly tells her Swedish friends about how Ukrainians are ugly and barbaric. In fact, she is likely to cast herself as the victim in this scenario.
When I was a child, I remember how Russian relatives on my mother’s side of the family would click their tongues and say they felt sorry for me because I looked so much like my Ukrainian dad. It contributed to my teenage insecurity and self-loathing. I was surprised the first time a guy asked me out on a date, or when an artist first said she’d like to paint me — after all, I was a hideous monster with “peasant genes,” nothing like my gorgeous mom.
Today, I’m no longer resentful of those Russian relatives of mine. I feel sorry for them the way I’d feel sorry for any close-minded fool.
Yet I know that this is the prejudice that is fueling the rapes and murders and tortures of Ukrainians today. Hatred sent those missiles flying. It inspires a Russian soldier to put his hands on a Ukrainian child. Hatred is in the spring rain pattering on body bags near exhumed mass graves. It’s a Russian Leviathan, a hyperobject dense as darkness, cropping up here and there in monstrous forms.
I don’t hate the Russians back, if only because millions of them want me to. But I do feel fury and revulsion.
I don’t hate the Russians back, if only because millions of them want me to. Why should I give these sad, angry people what they want? But I do feel fury and revulsion. I want the destruction of the Russian economy. I want a complete and utter military defeat of Russia. I want justice — though I don’t know if justice can ever be enough.
Since the war has begun, I have felt like a teenager — profoundly uncomfortable in my own body. Since a good friend, Oksana Baulina, was killed, the discomfort has brought me close to disassociation. What felt fun before now causes guilt to rise inside me like bile. A man will kiss me and I will feel precisely nothing, as if he’s doing it to someone else.
But it’s not self-loathing that drives these feelings now, it’s the chill of grief. I am among the millions of the grieving. We wander into each other’s dreams, bound by an invisible thread that tugs us along into the future.
I don’t know what happens next, but I do know that the shards of ice in a human heart thaw out eventually. I know that, cliché or not, the hour before dawn is the darkest. I know that Ukrainians are amazing people whom Russians — and the world — should learn from.
I know that hatred loses in the end, if only because it disrupts and exhausts, like a hungry black hole.
I know that there will be a reckoning.
And if you’re reading this, I hope you will be a part of that reckoning too. Nobody can go at it alone, nor should they.
Image: Denis Bondariev