Narva and the Other Side
About the author: Catarina Buchatskiy ’24 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with the International Centre for Defence and Security. She is studying International Relations at Stanford University.
It was a warm August night and my roommates and I were sitting by a riverbank in silence, staring out intently to the other side. I was crying quiet tears. None of them turned to look at me. Across the river, less than half a kilometer away, two girls that seemed about our age sat on the riverbank as well, but they were laughing. A few men and boys had set up folding chairs and fishing poles. We watched them too.
The sun was setting. The sky turned a gentle shade of pink, and the sun slowly disappeared behind a looming castle on the other side. Above the castle, a flag was flapping in the breeze. Striped red, white, and blue. The flag that for the last almost two years, I had only seen in my nightmares. In visions of my hometown reduced to a burning rubble, as men from the other side carried over that flag and planted it proudly in the smoldering debris, claiming my home as their own.
Sitting across the Narva River in eastern Estonia, we were staring directly into Russia.
I knew what I had been getting myself into. It was my idea, after all, to push for a trip to Narva. There’s a lot of reasons why I think I wanted to go see it. Not all of them I fully understand, nor can I fully articulate.
For almost two years, the men from the other side have been mercilessly destroying my home country of Ukraine, razing our cities to the ground, attacking us every day with their faceless missiles flying cutting through our peaceful skies. I’ve never looked a Russian soldier in the eyes, seen the faces of the people that I’ve spent countless hours hiding in bomb shelters from. They exist to me in the sound of piercing air raid alerts or the distant booms or the knots in my stomach. I wanted to go to the Narva River and see the other side for myself. To see that flag that haunts my nightmares.
An overwhelming majority of the residents of Narva are ethnic Russians, with most of them holding Russian citizenship rather than Estonian. A history teacher that used to teach in Narva told me that the students, even young students, supported Russia in the war. Surely a product of their parents’ propaganda. He would find the infamous “Z”, the symbol of the Russian Army and a sign of support in the invasion, scrawled across the classroom blackboards when he came back from lunch breaks.
Perhaps part of the motivation behind my trip also stemmed from wanting to have my own small act of defiance. In my handbag, I carried a folded up Ukrainian flag. I couldn’t pull it out, for people have been attacked in Narva for doing so. But I had it with me nonetheless. I watched the other side of the river intently, watching the soldiers and guards patrolling. The soldiers that might one day be sent over to destroy my country, or perhaps have just returned from doing so. “I’m right here,” I thought to myself. “And there’s nothing they can do about it. They can’t get me.”
