Sometimes a line of poetry shocks you out of your complacency. A Ukrainian friend, with family living still in the war zone, recently gave me a book by the poet Oksana Maksymchuk.
Still City: Diary of an Invasion was begun while war still threatened. Maksymchuk then charts the course of the war, and its impact on people who once believed they would be spared the horrors that marked the lives of previous generations.
Ukraine was and is contested territory – a strategically important prize in eastern Europe. Such is Ukrainians’ awareness of their vulnerability, that anticipation of war is part of their DNA.
Maksymchuk gives voice to that in her poem A Museum of Rescued Objects. “In the months preceding the unspeakable I hoarded / food and supplies from across the country / following the script I’d inherited from my grandmother / and her grandmother before her / so immediately felt – it seemed instinctual.”
She goes on to list the objects and the places they come from, places that have become all-too familiar throughout the course of the war: Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson, Irpin.
Those of us who lived through the Troubles will feel an affinity with that: the refugees forced from their homes, those who waited in fear of their doors being kicked in, innocent people interned or prosecuted for crimes they did not commit. Like many, my parents had a stockpile of food and an evacuation plan should the worst come to pass.
Ukrainians have had to endure greater enormities. More than 11,000 civilians have died since the war began in 2022, with over twice that number wounded.
The human cost of that was driven home when I read the opening sentence of Rocket in the Room: “What the rocket has in common / with the roomful of children / is its current location.”
Take that in. The brutality of the scene is underscored by Maksymchuk’s understatement.
We have become weary of repeated reports of ‘rockets in the room’, not just in Ukraine but in Gaza and the wider Middle East, in Sudan, in Myanmar, and in the countless other conflicts across the globe. But we must guard against apathy. Such weariness inevitably plays into the hands of the aggressor.
The people of Ukraine have been fortunate in having Volodymyr Zelensky as their president. He has drawn on his remarkable communication skills to keep his people’s plight in the minds of politicians and opinion-formers. But even Zelensky has found it difficult at times to get his message through – particularly in the US where support for Ukraine has become a political football between Democrats (supportive) and MAGA Republicans (hostile).
The ears of the west must not become deaf to Zelensky’s appeals for help. There is no question about it: Putin’s long-term aim is to expand Russia’s control over states which once formed part of the USSR.
Crucially, Zelensky has been adept on the battlefield as well as in the corridors of power, as Ukraine’s incursion in the Kursk region of Russia demonstrates. The audacious move has caught Russia’s ponderous military machine off guard and undermined Vladimir Putin’s credibility in the eyes of his people.
If Ukraine can hold onto the gains it has made within Russia’s borders, exploit the disarray within Putin’s conscript army, and continue to undermine people’s confidence in his leadership, the Kursk campaign may be the key to the resolution of this conflict.
It gives Zelensky a crucial bargaining chip in any negotiations to end the war.
But it is still early days, and he cannot fully rely on the US and Nato. Both are anxious to ensure they are not seen as combatants, and President Biden has set limits on how and when Ukraine can use weapons supplied for its defence.
And we do not yet know how Putin will respond. Is his threat to use “all available means” to protect Russia’s integrity posturing? Or is he willing to step over the line and deploy his nuclear arsenal? Kremlinology is an inexact science.
It is clear, however, that long-term peace with justice for Ukraine demands that it takes its place at the negotiating table from a position of power. Zelensky is doing all he can to strengthen his country’s hand. His allies must not let him down for fear of the paranoid incumbent in the Kremlin.
Maksymchuk’s poem Genesis starts in despair. “Hear it said: there’ll never / be light again.” But it ends with the image of a butterfly emerging from “its tomb of / a second skin”… “a formula / once it’s all over – for / how to begin / again.”
That must be our hope for Ukraine: the emergence of a butterfly from the tomb of this appalling and unnecessary war.
