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How “Hetero Love” fules war in Ukraine

Other kinds of love are getting ignored in the meantime

Anton Kutselyk
EVROPA
7 min readJan 2, 2025

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One of the images from SOLO by Superhumans campaign

Wars are caused and driven by a bouquet of factors that I don’t even want to attempt to name. But one factor that has fascinated me the most throughout these three years is sex, or gender, or both. Today I want to look at this factor again, but now from a new angle.

Love.

What is love?

Love is, in essence, our guide to how one can exist in this world as a subject of someone’s, even one’s own, desire. We all want to be wanted.

But it’s not just love that matters. It’s the concepts of love, which are governed by the concepts of gender. If most men and women haven’t behaved the way they usually behave, it would be hard to imagine this war happening. It could have still happened, but it would look so different: more complex and deep, less superficial and simple.

If Ukraine had shown signs of more complex gender behaviour before the war, now that behaviour has been surprisingly primitive. Why? Because that’s how most people think they can give and receive love these days.

To be viable, war (which is a combination of state policy and social consensus) has to define exactly how to give and receive love for each sex. Unfortunately, it gives…

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EVROPA
EVROPA

Published in EVROPA

A Medium publication about everything European

Anton Kutselyk
Anton Kutselyk

Written by Anton Kutselyk

I live in Kyiv and write about local culture, life, war and signs of inevitable peace.

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