Young Voices from Ukraine
By David K. Shipler
Warfare confines its victims in the present. The moments of risk and survival overpower memory and prediction, leaving the past and the future to hover like wraiths, outside the crisis. Therefore, it was notable, at an online discussion last week by six young adults in Ukraine, to witness their power to reach beyond their personal immediacy into a larger time and place.
The session, attended by young people from at least twenty-six countries, was organized by a broad array of international youth organizations and moderated by Saji Prelis of Search for Common Ground, which manages conflict-resolution projects around the globe. (Full disclosure: My son Michael Shipler is a vice president of Search.)
If you have an hour, it’s worth spending it watching the discussion here, because you can hear and see what you cannot read: the chords of sorrow and resolve in their voices, the grieving beauty in their eyes. And by the end, which will not be an end for them, of course, you will be torn by inspiration, which they throw up against the tragedy.
At Saji’s wise request, not knowing what oppression that elusive future will bring, I am using only their first names, even though they gave consent for their full names to appear on the screen during the live stream. Neither they nor we can calculate the dangers going forward.
Most appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are fluent in English. They have the innocence of idealism. They are not children, but they are young enough still to imagine and to strive. They are not yet jaded or calloused or — as far as we can see — wounded. But they understand the wounds of others and are trying to heal them, in part by seeing their struggle as being not only for themselves.
Yulia is trapped with her two small children in besieged Sumy, near the Russian frontier, having missed the brief opportunity to escape in the first days of the war. The town is under heavy Russian bombardment. Anna, a medical doctor, crossed into Romania, where she is treating evacuees. Alina recorded a gentle but defiant message as she fled to the Kyiv train station. Yuliana, a psychologist in Lviv, is trying to help with trauma. Roman, also in Lviv, is assisting refugees flooding into the city’s train station.
“I managed to escape from Kharkiv on the second day of the war,” said Denys, on camera with a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag covering the wall behind him. “But not just to save myself. I am near the capital, Kyiv, where I can do more.” He sees this as a noble battle larger than Ukraine. “Of course we are fighting for stopping the war. But it’s now more. It’s more about freedom, it’s more about values, its more about protecting Europe from Putin’s regime.” Later, he warned that “the Russian regime will be hunting all of us who are fighting against him. He will not stop.”
And, yes, about the future, which is why the young are “probably the most active part of Ukrainian society,” said Roman from Lviv near the Polish border, a city swollen with fleeing families. “Those are the people that are contributing the most because they know that they are to live in this country in the future. They want to live in a peaceful and beautiful country. They want to help as many people as possible, and they are acting. They are not just sitting and waiting.” And acting not only with weapons, he said, but “going out on the streets, distributing food, helping refugees find shelter, helping them across the border.”
“I would probably start calling them the generation of winners,” Denys declared. “This might be one of the most powerful, one of the most strong generations you will ever see in history. I probably lost my flat an hour ago. I don’t know if my friends are alive. . . . Of course we will have our psychological trauma, that is for sure. . . . We are losing everything we have. . . . Coming from this hell will make us the people who will be able to solve not only problems in our country but believe our experience will be more than useful to every one of you. . . . Whenever there is a new conflict, whenever there is someone who wants to take democracy, Ukrainians will come and help people.” He said Ukrainians should then be paid for their expertise. He did not seem to be joking.
Yuliana, the psychologist, countered this way: “I have to confess that I have been ignorant many times to the pain of other nations, to the pain of other people. . . . This experience taught me that I will never be ignorant again. I don’t think anyone will have to pay me to help you and share my experience with you. I will be there for you like you have been here for us. And I’m very grateful for this.”
They seem uplifted by their own intense gratitude. “We are so much thankful,” said Yulia from her besieged city, “because so many people from outside Ukraine, our international partners [have helped] to transport people, to provide shelter, to provide financial support for different activities to support local citizens as well as to support the army. This is a huge solidarity action from the outside of Ukraine from all countries around us and we do so much appreciate it.”
The help is arriving in unexpected forms. “When all of this started, we weren’t prepared,” said Yuliana. “The first two days everyone was shocked. Psychologists, psychotherapists. Life doesn’t prepare you for this.” She allowed herself a wan smile. “And we didn’t have many crisis intervention specialists. We didn’t have many psychologists who work in this sphere of traumatic stress disorder.” International professionals “have sent us information about crisis management, all the different techniques [and] have provided free supervision sessions, free teaching sessions. And that has been a huge support for us here in Ukraine.”
What tools do you use to protect yourself mentally? Saji asked her. Grounding techniques, she answered. “We talk with people. We say what is your name — because they’re just in shock — what is your name? Do you know where you are? What can you see? Tell me what you see around. Because people are so disoriented, they don’t see the colors, they don’t hear the sounds. And you have to ground them. You have to tell them, you are alive. Tell me what you see. That’s what we can do for now, because there are so many refugees, so many people arriving. What we can do now is help them grasp the reality, help them get grounded, relieve the stress, then they are either going abroad as refugees or staying here, and then they are getting longer therapy.”
For children, she continued, “my colleagues, they are organizing different groups online and in person. They are doing art sessions, music sessions.” They get kids doing something with their hands “to help them calm their nervousness down.” They record fairy tales. “When children are hiding in the shelters, the bomb shelters, they can turn on these fairy tales and listen to them. It’s comforting them.”
Funds are also needed. “I feel the pain of people with mental disorders,” Yuliana said. “Now they are just left alone, their relatives just went abroad, nobody cares about them. There are a lot of homeless people staying at the hospital. I work at a mental institution, and we don’t have any money. And the doctors, the psychiatrists are spending their own money to buy the medicine for the people. I will leave this conversation and I will go to work and we will cook food together. And we will cook it with our own money, because nobody cares. Nobody cares about people with mental disorders at this moment, and we can understand it. But at the same time, it’s not being talked about. I thought maybe there would be a way to organize help, financial help, to support these institutions. I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t have any experience in donations or fundings . . . Maybe I will post about it and somebody will help me organize it.”
For Anna, the doctor working across the border in Romania, hope sounds too false a word to be spoken. “In hospital, people are so scared,” she said. “They don’t know if they will have a place where to go back. Their house is destroyed. So honestly it’s horrifying to look in their eyes. I even can’t say I hope you go soon home.” And yet, she added, “They all have hope. They all hope that they will come back. And they are ready to work and bring back Ukraine to the highest level.” She gave a real, fleeting, rare smile into her phone as she walked to the hospital.
She added: “It’s maybe strange but I feel guilt, because I’m in Romania where it’s safety, and all my friends are in Ukraine, and I feel like I’m guilty ’cause I’m not with them. Every day I’m thinking how to do much more for my people.”
Then the lurking future crept into Anna’s spoken thoughts. “I’m talking with my people in Transcarpathia where I’m from, and I don’t think they will ever forgive this, to even [the] Russian people. So I don’t know if you will find a peaceful way to, I don’t know, to make us, we will never be bro — .” She broke off her sentence. “I don’t know how you make a peaceful way to resolve it. I don’t know.”
That enmity toward Russians, being embedded now in Ukraine, emerged as a pledge and a worry and a sadness as some projected Ukraine’s struggle onto a large screen of a broader fight for democratic freedom. In her recording as she raced to the train station, Alina — born in Kyiv 26 years ago and a Ukrainian youth delegate to the United Nations — said this:
“The first two nights after the Russian attack I didn’t sleep at all. Part of the night I spent in the shelter. The third night I slept for about two hours with breaks, and only on the fourth night due to the nerves, tension, and fatigue I slept for around five hours without hearing alarms. I always stay and fall asleep in warm clothes, jeans, and a sweater. There is a bag with essentials and documents near the door so that in case of an alarm, I don’t waste time getting ready. All this is certainly scary, but it’s not what I want to tell the world.
“What I really wish to say is that Russia is a war criminal. Russian invasion is an attack on the whole democratic world. . . . The important thing now is the support of the international community . . . I also hope that Russia will be held accountable for its crime by the International Court of Justice. Ukrainians are standing for the whole democratic world, and Ukraine will win. Stand with Ukraine.”
The whole democratic world. A war criminal. There is a spectrum during and after war between compassion and revenge, between reconciliation and retribution. Where you stand is a measure of suffering, and your place on the continuum can move. Denys and Yuliana stood at different places, it seemed.
“This war will not end,” Denys declared, “until everyone who is now destroying my lovely Kharkiv, other cities, and who are killing Ukrainian people will be punished for this. . . . until all the Russian troopers and Russian regime is punished for this, and it won’t be enough until Ukraine is finally free, with all the centimeters of our territory.” He continued: “I do know there are ordinary people in Russia who are also suffering. But they are also responsible for this.” Then came a litany of history: the war in eastern Ukraine for eight years. “Thousands of years of our occupation by the Soviet Union, by the Russian empire This is what you need to understand.”
War is not a time of empathy. But listen to Yuliana, toward the conclusion of the discussion. “It’s important to share this,” she said, her voice light and clear. “There is a lot of pain. Ukrainians are losing their children, women, men, elderly people. There is a lot of pain, and that’s why there’s a lot of hate. But overall we have — we don’t want Russian people to suffer. We also know that they have been misinformed and we have a lot of compassion, and when I watch the videos of men talking to their wives and telling them, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, I’m scared. We have been told to do terrible things,’ I cry. And I feel a lot of pain for them too.
“I just wanted to share this perspective, that when you hear hate, when you hear a lot of strong words, it’s because of the pain. It’s not because we want evil. We are just suffering.”
