Abandonment
I have been struggling to write this one — struggling to write in a more general sense, in fact. Some of those reasons are mine alone, but in truth it has simply been difficult to put my thoughts into words in recent months. But after a couple of people asked if I could publish more formally a Twitter thread I wrote the other day, I decided to incorporate that into a longer piece that has been gestating for a while.
In August, 2023, I posted a dispatch here, written while I was on a train from Kyiv to Lviv, that captured the pathos and guilt I was experiencing as I was leaving Ukraine — and the war — behind, temporarily.
Going “home” felt like an abdication and a retreat, and it was.
Don’t go.
I’m so sorry.
I have been back in Ukraine, now, for about three and a half months, and, truth be told, I have sought in vain to locate within myself the purpose and meaning that moved me when I was last here. Perhaps it is not too surprising: the days have been shorter (though finally getting longer); the fundraising has been slow (though not in vain); and various responsibilities have kept me occupied and, often, isolated. My old fire, I feel, has in some ways been reduced to embers, at least for now, and, speaking for myself personally, even the loosest of the structures in my life have felt as if they are in decomposition.
Through all of these feelings of uselessness and inertia, however, I have nevertheless been told more than once by Ukrainians that they are glad I’m here, that I didn’t abandon Ukraine.
That I came back, even if it feels like what I can contribute is hopelessly small. And there’s some comfort in that, I suppose, in some solitary way. Some sort of solidarity.
At the same time, however, there can be no mistaking that, beyond the solipsism of my own personal dramas, the mood in Kyiv is not what it was in the summer of 2023. Weariness, sometimes verging on the brink of pessimism, gnaws at the edge of many conversations. Discussions are often shot through with bitterness that the people of Ukraine are increasingly left to their own devices by a wealthy and well-armed West that piously intones that it is “with Ukraine for as long as it takes” while it manifestly is not.
In the wake of the news that the United States and Great Britain helped to intercept dozens of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles fired at Israel on April 14, one Ukrainian, Stas Olenchenko wrote on Twitter
This night Ukrainians got a clear view of what we truly mean for the US.
We’re not allies, never have been.
We’re an inconvenience. An aberration in their view of geopolitics. A problem that just won’t solve itself.
We’ll keep resisting no matter what, but this really hurt.
Indeed, one should not, however, mistake the mood here for defeatism — not by any means. But I think that there is a growing sense among many people that Ukraine is being quietly abandoned.
Abandonment is a process and a state that many of us fear. Abandonment, as the old saying goes, often happens slowly and then all at once. As individuals, we confront abandonment at that moment when we finally recognize that those we trusted or loved or depended upon have, perhaps for a long time, grown weary of us, or at least grown apart, and are no longer there for us; no longer to be trusted; no longer interested nor invested in our trust or our intimacy or our relationship. We find ourselves left behind; alone; neglected; discarded. We find within ourselves a void within the contours of which someone whose shape has evolved and altered and suddenly no longer fits.
And so it is, I think, in some imperfect way (and I hope you’ll forgive me if I am perhaps stretching this metaphor a bit too far), with international relations and the solidarities between peoples, as impersonal as those things may in truth be.
What I mean to say is that, from the vantage point of Kyiv, to say nothing of Odesa or Kharkiv or the zero line, it is hard not to detect a sense of having been abandoned by erstwhile allies, for whom Ukraine is, increasingly, a bleeding ulcer, or at least an exhausting distraction from new crises, new concerns, new political and personal preoccupations. Ukraine is and remains a difficult problem and it is an election year and there is no end in sight and… and… and…
And can’t they all just die a bit more quietly?
Ukraine, in many respects, has become something of an abstraction within the constellation American public consciousness. Nearly two years removed from the shock of televised catastrophe in 2022, the war has inexorably fallen prey to the vagaries of the attention economy and the “war weariness” (ahem) of an American public (I speak here largely of the American public simply because I am American and have more direct knowledge of American attitudes) whose exposure to it has largely atrophied to brief “check-in” reports from reporters living in posh Kyiv hotels, if that. Such things are to be expected, I suppose.
There are, of course, still many Americans who remain fiercely devoted to Ukraine — many of them are here in Ukraine volunteering right now, and many others are donating and pressuring their members of Congress, etc. — and their efforts should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, it is not 2022 anymore and it is hard to escape the reality that continuing to energize the public at large has become an increasingly desperate bid — for many, images of ruined cities and incinerated families in Ukraine simply do not carry the same emotional impact as they once did. The whole affair has become rather too familiar, for many, if not entirely mundane: something tragic, perhaps, but distant and latent.
Shortly after returning from Ukraine last August, for example, I happened to be sitting at a bar when a song played that began with the sound of an air raid siren (“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath, for the curious). And purely out of habit I checked Telegram to see what the alert was about (MiG? Ballistics?) before realizing my error — I was under safe skies, after all. In any case, I must have had some sort of look on my face, because the bartender asked if I was alright. When I explained, she just said “so sad” and went back to her job.
Her response, I think, neatly encapsulates what a lot of Americans are thinking and feeling about Ukraine circa 2024.
So sad. Anyways, life goes on.
There is another sort of abandonment at work as well, I think, one that is more profound, wholly distinct, and altogether more political.
On April 11, 2024, Russia destroyed the Trypilska Thermal Power Plant (TPP), which had been the largest supplier of energy to the city of Kyiv and its surrounding oblast, as well as the neighboring Zhytomyr and Cherkasy oblasts. The murder of Trypilska was consistent with the Kremlin’s strategy of escalating attacks on power generation and petroleum storage facilities across Ukraine and shockingly emblematic of Russia’s absolutely indifference — if not utter hostility — towards Ukrainian life.
Simultaneously, Russia has long engaged in what Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk has called a “war on the environment.” Some aspects of this war — the ecocidal destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam, for example — have been deliberate and premeditated, while other elements have simply been the indirect results of the invasion itself: the poisoning of air and soil and water; the burning of entire forests; the threat of nuclear catastrophe; the turning of vast swathes of the country into deadly minefields that will take decades to clear.
The war on the environment and the systematic destruction of infrastructure are not meant to achieve military objectives, but to render entire lifeways defunct. The intent, in the wake of Russia’s manifest failure over the past year to capture more than a handful of ruined villages and cities at staggering cost, is to render Ukraine essentially uninhabitable, to precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe, and, ultimately to create what Putin himself has called a “sanitary zone” in the country.
As Dovzhyk writes, “Human and natural catastrophes mirror each other.”
Ukraine has been fighting desperately for over two years to stave off this catastrophe. But, despite the rapid development of its own domestic arms industry and a handful of recent bilateral defense agreements with various European states, Ukraine remains heavily dependent on Western — and especially American — military aid for its survival.
And that aid has been halted, with predictable consequences.
Although, through the efforts of the Czech government, it may be (partially) alleviated (for now, at least), “shell hunger” at the front has allowed Russia to make limited, but real, territorial gains. Meanwhile, dwindling supplies of air defense missiles — to say nothing of the apparent unwillingness of Western governments to supply further air defense systems in general (with the notable and recent exception of Germany’s decision to send a further Patriot battery) — have exposed cities like Odesa and Kharkiv to relentless and devastating missile attacks and left Ukraine’s critical infrastructure painfully exposed.
Indeed, without air defense it is probably only a matter of time before the whole country will be plunged into blackout conditions. What will transpire here, especially if Russia is allowed to make further territorial advances while systematically destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, will be ghastly.
It already is.
And yet, as I have already noted, the attention economy is a fast-changing market and people in the West have found many other reasons to not care, or at least to pay less attention.
Make no mistake, though: what is happening in Ukraine right now is an openly declared genocide, and good people, soldiers and civilians, are suffering and dying every day to stave off this horror. Without help, though, the fight will be more difficult; more heartbreaking; and more sickening than anyone but Ukrainians can imagine (Ukrainians do not need to imagine it, after all).
And yet, the “free world” stands by, dithering and paralyzed and somehow still promising to be there “for as long as it takes,” whatever that might mean in 2024.
But much of the world beyond Ukraine’s borders simply has no idea what the wages of its inaction will be; no idea what it would look like if Kyiv were occupied or razed; no idea of the countless names that will go unwritten and un-commemorated as the bodies of those who bore them are dumped into ever-expanding mass graves or simply plowed under the ruins of their former homes to make way for new “development” for Russian settlers.
Many will not care that Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, is already facing blackouts and daily missile and drone strikes intended to render the city uninhabitable. Many only dimly understand what it means that Mariupol, a city that once was home to nearly a half-million people, is a decaying husk with a Russian colony being constructed on the stinking corpses of countless people whose bodies may never be found.
But as I sit here in Kyiv, watching thousands of beautiful and flawed and ordinary and wonderful and vital and innocent people walk past me every day, people who want only to have something resembling the kinds of lives that that those of us in and from the privileged West, where our skies are safe and air raid sirens are something we’ve only ever heard in songs like “War Pigs,” enjoy as a matter of course, I see skeletons; refugees; slaves; rape victims. I hear it in every air raid siren. Because this is the promise of the “Russian world” and the sirens are its heralds.
And I cannot bear it.
Brothers; fathers; mothers; and sisters are living in trenches, being maimed and murdered so that their relatives and millions of people they will never know can have a quotidian life. But Ukraine is not a wealthy country, nor is it a military superpower. It needs help from the so-called “free world.”
But the “free world” is not merely letting Ukraine down.
It is actively abandoning it.
This is our shame, as the sons and daughters of peace, prosperity, and privilege.
When Ukraine goes dark after the next infrastructure attack, or the one after that, or the one after that, it won’t be due to Ukraine’s failure to do whatever it is able to keep its citizens safe. It will be on the shoulders of wealthy, comfortable people in Europe and North America who decided that helping Ukraine defend itself; its people; its sovereignty; and the whole international system (flawed though it is — and it is deeply flawed) that supposedly vouchsafed that sovereignty were not, in the end, really worth it, because of… well, reasons.
This abandonment will ultimately be Ukraine’s tragedy because it is Ukrainians and their kin who will suffer and die and rot in the dark, hidden away beneath the ground as Russian families, enticed by subsidies and cheap apartments, take their homes and their lives, in both senses of the word.
And, in this way, genocide will play out while people will mouth the words “how sad,” “how could this happen” and “never again” and then go back to their lives, caring little that the injustices of the world are on their shoulders too.
Life will go on. Except when it won’t. Except for those who’ll never open their eyes to another sunrise because they are already fucking dead.
So sad.
We ordinary people have only limited capacity to affect the course of this war. We can donate our money (and if you’ll permit me the indulgence, I’d like to urge you to donate to my friends at Misha’s Angels, who are directly supporting units and individuals fighting for Ukraine at the front).
We can contact our representatives in Congress and demand more aggressive measures and more support. We can make their ears bleed (figuratively speaking, of course!).
We can volunteer.
Some of us can come to Ukraine to do whatever we can.
NAFO might not be able to supply Patriot systems or F-16s to Ukraine (if only!), but NAFO and countless other donors and volunteers can and do make a difference for individual units and soldiers. This might be, sadly, the first “crowdsourced war,” but everyone can do their part.
This war is not over and it is getting worse.
Ukraine needs us. Ukraine needs you.
The lives of too many people I care about personally and the lives of too many people I’ll never meet or even know about hang in the balance. So please, help.
Don’t abandon Ukraine.
Don’t abandon Ukrainians.
I’m so tired of watching skeletons walk past me.
