The Russian Invasion of Ukraine, One Year In
This special edition of the Dinner Table Digest highlights some media - writing, images, and videos - at the one year mark of the Russian genocidal invasion of Ukraine.
This special edition of the Dinner Table Digest highlights some media - writing, images, and videos - at the one year mark of the Russian genocidal invasion of Ukraine. I’ve picked pieces that are intended to make us think about the cost and consequences of war more generally, along with stories that offer a small glimpse of the needless suffering of Ukrainians at the hands of the Russian military apparatus.
Sections: Images that Cannot Be Forgotten / Ukrainian Hatred for Russia / NFSW Video Footage of Trench Warfare / Trench Warfare in Ukraine / Hunting Russian Collaborators
Our Photographers in Ukraine on the Images They Can’t Forget - New York Times
Bakhmut, in the eastern Donbas region, began last year as the home of about 70,000 people. Over the year of war, I’ve watched the fighting chew this city apart, as both sides have thrown masses of troops and weaponry into desperate attempts to control it.
In the earlier months, it was always tense, but there were still civilians on the streets; Ukrainians, particularly in the east, have learned to live in the shadow of war. On this visit, it had reached a clear turning point in its militarization.
This armored vehicle passed me as I was leaving a military hospital, and the faces of the soldiers seemed to represent what has taken shape in the city’s shell: a relentless determination to fight.
— Tyler Hicks
How Do Ukrainians Think About Russians Now? - Jon Lee Anderson - The New Yorker
This New Yorker piece is poignant in how it shows a marked shift from the ambivalence of a people group living on a land infused with imperialistic Russian language and culture for several hundred years to a nation that now defines itself in opposition to the Russian way of life. In particular, the piece shows how feelings of hatred towards a genocidal aggressor can easily arise, leading to the dehumanization of the other. Usually dehumanization is talked about in the context of an aggressor dehumanizing the people they are attacking (which is definitely happening in this conflict, yes), but it is not so readily explored from the context of the oppressed. The author describes going to the Lviv BookForum, a conference for writers and thinkers from around Ukraine and across the world. Anderson writes,
… the messages made for some jarring moments for some of those present, featuring as they often did ultra-patriotic and sometimes militaristic declarations. Many of the Ukrainian writers at the forum also expressed similar sentiments. In a panel I moderated, the Ukrainian historian and author Olena Stiazhkina began her remarks by expressing her gratitude to the Ukrainian armed forces for their defense of the homeland. “We’re all living on credit given to us by the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said. “Not just us but all of Europe is living on this credit.” She added, “I want to mark my position as someone lacking objectivity. I cannot have a broad outlook now, because the prevailing emotion, including the intellectual emotion, is rage.” In another panel, “Art in Times of Conflict,” moderated by Emma Graham-Harrison, Diana Berg (who was internally displaced twice over, first from Donetsk and, more recently, from Mariupol) agreed about the national sense of rage, explaining that Ukrainians, as a means of countering Russia’s attempts to overwhelm their country, were reclaiming their culture through “de-Russification” measures. …
[Guardian journalist Emma] Graham-Harrison acknowledged the harsh reality of the war that led to such sentiments, but worried about “a collective dislike of any group.” She said, “I totally understand why Ukrainians are angry that there are not more voices inside Russia, more protests,” but added that “this war, to a degree, comes from a hatred of Ukrainians and their right to exist.” This exchange led to a discussion about terms such as neliudy, “non-humans,” which some Ukrainians now use when referring to Russians. The essayist and translator Ostap Slyvynsky said that he would never use that word to describe Russians, but added that he’d realized that, since the brutal occupation of Bucha, last year, which had seen dozens of civilians raped, tortured, and murdered by Russian troops, he had nothing more to say to them. By their actions, the Russians had “placed themselves outside of humanity,” he said. “That’s why Ukraine, on different levels, now refuses any talks.” He added, “It’s impossible to communicate with them, with the representatives of their élites, of their power, of their regime. What to talk about with them?”
The whole piece is worth your time, and, I would suggest, some extended reflection.
(NSFW) ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE: 9 Minutes of Close Quarters Trench Warfare - Funker350
This footage contains head camera footage of trench warfare in Ukraine. Just over a minute into the video a Russian soldier is killed by machine gun fire originating from the Ukrainian soldier with the camera. This video shows the reality of war. Viewer Discretion is Advised.
Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine - Luke Mogelson - The New Yorker
This piece describes some of the experiences of foreign fighters who are battling alongside Ukrainian citizens. Unlike the Ukrainians, everything they do is voluntary - they can choose to come and go when they wish, and they can even choose to turn down an assigned task or mission.
Many of the professional soldiers in the 72nd had been killed or injured in Bakhmut. Conscripts had replenished the ranks. Some had attended a three-week basic infantry course in the U.K., with instructors from across Europe, but most had received only minimal training before being given Kalashnikovs and dispatched to the front. I had watched Turtle and the team train several dozen Ukrainians in close-quarters battle, or C.Q.B., a foundational doctrine among Western militaries for urban combat: how to enter rooms, move as a squad, shoot from windows. The Ukrainians were unaccustomed to handling rifles or wearing body armor, and, when Turtle asked if any of them were familiar with C.Q.B., only one raised his hand.
At the same time, the team had learned from the Ukrainians, especially when it came to the historical anachronism of trench warfare. Once, while the foreigners were visiting a trench that came under heavy bombardment, they had scrambled into a foxhole that was eight feet deep, in an L shape, with stairs and a roof of felled timber. For the next five hours, as Russian tank rounds and mortars burst around them, they had shared the shelter with an older infantryman who had been fighting in the Donbas since 2014. T.Q., the German who’d served in the French Foreign Legion, told me, “If he hadn’t had the experience and taken the time to dig out that position—with enough space not only for himself but also for other people—we would have had casualties.”
Staying alive in a Ukrainian trench requires a daunting combination of stamina, vigilance, and luck. The daily misery induces a mental fatigue that dulls alertness and subverts morale. But even the most disciplined soldier, with the most elaborate foxhole, can fall victim to a well-aimed munition, and the menace of sudden death plagues every Ukrainian infantryman charged with the imperative, terrible job of holding the line.
The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine - Joshua Yaffa - The New Yorker
People have all kinds of reasons why they might want to - or at least feel forced to - collaborate with Russian occupiers. In some cases, it’s simply for self-preservation reasons. In other cases, there is real sympathy with the Russian cause.
Residents agreed to collaborate for a number of often overlapping reasons: fear, pro-Russian sympathies, opportunism, the hope of doing something productive for the city. Power dynamics were fluid and hard to parse. Russian forces acted as if the takeover of Izyum was permanent and immutable, announcing preparations to distribute Russian passports and to hold a referendum on the occupied territories joining Russia. The Ukrainian government warned that anyone who worked with the occupation administration would face consequences. “I want to address those officials who did not hold their noses at entering into a dialogue with the occupiers,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a national address delivered in March. “If any of you are tempted by their offer, you are signing your own sentence.”
One morning in April, Pavel Golub, the owner of a mobile-phone-accessory shop in town, walked to the pedestrian bridge and joined a large crowd of people waiting for some kind of official announcement. A rumor had spread that able-bodied men might be offered additional food in exchange for volunteer work. Golub was thirty, with close-cropped hair, deep-set eyes, and thick, muscular arms; before the war, weight lifting had been his passion. He lived with his wife, Iryna, and her twelve-year-old son, Danil, in a white brick house on a side street lined with cherry trees. The local economy had stopped functioning, leaving Golub with a storeroom full of product and no customers. His family had to rely on Russian aid, which tended to be sporadic and insufficient. Residents often stood in line for hours only to leave hungry and disappointed.
At the bridge, Sokolov asked for volunteers to dig out bodies from the rubble of a ruined building. Golub and a dozen others stepped forward. The site was a five-story apartment block on Pervomaiska Street that had been hit by an air strike in the early days of the war. The middle section of the building had collapsed and crashed through to the cellar, where residents had taken shelter. Forty-four people were killed. Golub knew many of them, including a childhood friend named Elena, whom he identified among the ruins by a tattoo of a feather below her collar-bone and a silver ring on her finger. Nearby, Golub and the others found her husband and their two daughters, the older of whom had gone to the same school as his stepson, Danil. As the men worked, Sokolov suggested that they form a brigade to collect bodies across the city in exchange for food rations. One of his deputies added, “This is for those who don’t shy away from the dead.” (emphasis added)
In the end, burying bodies in exchange for food wasn’t a good enough reason for Golub to go unpunished
Official details on how many people from Izyum and the surrounding area were questioned or detained on suspicion of collaboration are tightly guarded, but the number is almost certainly in the hundreds. Golub was among them. Two days after Izyum’s liberation, a jeep full of men in camouflage, carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing the telltale blue armbands of Ukrainian forces, pulled up to his house. They forced their way inside and searched the rooms, turning over beds and drawers, asking Golub’s wife, Iryna, where her husband was. He wasn’t at home, she told them—he had gone to drop off a package of food for the parents of a friend. Two hours later, Golub returned. One of the armed men asked him whether he’d held a job during the occupation. Golub told them about the burials. “Then come with us,” the soldier said. They put him in a car and drove off. “Gone, just like that,” Iryna told me. “It’s the last we saw him.”
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