Dear Russians,
I am Ukrainian. My people are dying from your army’s attack.
In the first day of the war, I asked my Facebook feed to speak back. I’d known that I have a dozen or two Russian friends. I wanted to hear what their information field told them about the war. There were no responses under my post. I subsequently deleted it. It felt very silent.
I spoke to my mum yesterday. She is in Ukraine now, together with my dad and my grandparents. Her friend, a yogi instructor, spoke to her Russian yogi friends. They never heard about the Russian air strikes on civilians in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Berdiansk or Kherson. She sent them videos in the chat — they saw the footage briefly before it got deleted. She kept speaking anyway. “Perhaps indeed we live in a propaganda machine”, — they conceded.
I know about the media censorship in Russia. I know about the Internet firewalls, the blocking of Twitter and Facebook, and the introducing of prison terms for sharing any information about the war in Ukraine. I know all that, and yet I do not understand how a modern European nation of 145 million people can suddenly become deaf and blind. I do not understand how 20–30 million Russians living abroad can fail to speak to their friends and relatives in Russia.
#NotAllRussians was a hashtag appearing in my feed for a day or two when the Russian invasion just started. I read a few “I am Russian, and I am ashamed” posts on LinkedIn. Yet all that felt like a drop in the ocean of human suffering in Ukraine. Bombs blasting in residential, buildings, 850 thousand refugees waiting in days-long queues on the border, children sleeping on the cement floors of bomb shelters… Can the horrors of war really stay so utterly invisible to those whose sons, brothers and husbands are given orders to kill Ukrainians?
As my mum finished telling her friend’s — the yogi instructor’s — story, dad said “You must want to hear to be able to hear.” I don’t know, I thought. I don’t know if it’s trivial or profound… in the age of information overload, to be crying out the Biblical “Whoever has ears, let them hear!”
But cry out I must. Otherwise, it feels so awfully silent.
Yours cryingly,
A Ukrainian