An Interview With Masi Nayyem: A Kabul-born Ukrainian Lawyer Defending Ukraine
Masi was born in the midst of the Soviet-Afghan war. Now, he is fighting to keep Ukraine free.
While a Ukrainian spring is in full bloom behind him, Masi Nayyem chats with me on Zoom. He smiles and seems calm.
The Nayyem family is known throughout Ukraine. Masi’s older brother Mustafa is a Ukrainian politician and journalist, Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Infrustructure. The younger sister is Mariam Nayyem, a well-known artist and culturist. Masi himself is a lawyer, founder of the law firm Miller.
Masi Nayyem lived in wartime since the first day of his existence. He was born in Kabul during the Soviet-Afghan war. When he was six, he left his homeland with his father and brother and moved to Kyiv. Masi is in the ranks of the Ukrainian Army for the second time — first in Donbas, now in defense of Ukraine as a whole.
We talked about what it means to be a child of war, how his father’s life changed after moving from Afghanistan, and how war changes you forever.
You and Mustafa are children of war. You were born in Kabul during the Soviet invasion. What are your memories of Kabul?
It depends on how you look at this story. From the point of view of “abnormalities”, there were many of them, although they were absolutely normal for us.
For example, I loved sweetened water because there were times when we didn’t have food. When there was a siege, we bought rusks from rich people and soaked them in sweet tea. We made ice cream by mixing snow with sugar and it seemed wonderful.
Also, I remember the darkness, this dim light of war. During hostilities, there is little light. And the power lines, or the electricity supply itself, are constantly interrupted.
I remember how I ran away from my grandmother’s house to walk around Kabul with other kids. When we saw a white dot in the sky, we knew we had to find a hiding place. It was a missile, either shot down by anti-aircraft guns or headed for an impact somewhere. Today, most Ukrainians know that if an air defense shot down a rocket, you hear it more than when a missile hits somewhere. The noise of the torn rocket was so unpleasant that I hated it; it was uncomfortable. When you were told to go to school in the morning, you felt uncomfortable. That’s how it used to be for us — no panic, just discomfort.
You can’t go back to where your ancestors were. Do you have any connection with Afghanistan now?
Have you watched the movie “Beautiful Life”? About a Jewish father during Holocaust.
For me, Afghanistan is my dad. It’s been a year since he died, and I realize that my father loved us so much that, for me, my homeland is where my father is. All the beauty in my childhood circled the fact that my dad was alive. When I don’t have him, I don’t have Afghanistan.
Parents in Ukraine have an enormous task now: ensuring that their children don’t feel the war. As soon as they become children of war, their minds undergo drastic changes; these changes are difficult to turn off.
I’m proud to have been born in Afghanistan and consider it my home country. However, because of what my dad gave us, we grew up in a civilized reality without the chaos of war, which allowed us to adapt to this world.
I feel a lot of sympathy for people from Donetsk and Luhansk, now from Mariupol — those who lost their homes and their small homeland. It’s worse than death. Because death is a fact, it happened, and you can never get it back.
Meanwhile, Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol are alive. It’s like a bleeding wound that you constantly pull on. Afghanistan is not such a wound for me because my father is not there. Kyiv — this is my second homeland; I grew up and live here, and I can’t imagine they can take it away from me.
If you don’t mind talking about it, I’d like to ask about your dad. He was a Deputy Minister in Afghanistan. When you moved, his life changed. Why did he move to the USSR, and how did your father’s life turn out later?
It’s easy for me to talk about my father now because Ukrainians understand me. It used to be very hard to explain.
My father was the Deputy Minister of Education in Afghanistan. When the Soviets invaded, a new government took power and persecuted everyone who was in the previous administration. It made sense for my dad to leave the country. He went on a student exchange to Moscow, where he studied psychology to understand his children better.
My mother died ten days after my birth, so my father played both roles — he was both mom and dad.
He was studied without knowing the Russian language. But he worked hard and learned the language to defend his dissertation perfectly. His hard work made him so stressed that he even lost his sight for a few days.
At university, he met my stepmother, Valentyna Volodymyrivna, from Kyiv. They fell in love, got married, and in 1990 they moved us to Kyiv. It was impossible to earn money as a psychologist in Ukraine, so he engaged in reselling some goods. This business fed us and paid for our education. Later we quarreled with him all the time, we thought her should quit this business. But he said no, this was his stability and existence. When this kiosk was taken away from him, he died literally the next day.
Imagine how awful life would be if we didn’t defend Ukraine and had to move somewhere else. The fatigue from what is happening now could force another Ukrainian, or me, to live wherever, earn a pittance just to be left alone. Just for the kids not to be under shelling. Just fuck off, leave us alone.
I never understood this crack in my dad’s character. Why did he need to work that hard? Why sacrifice? Didn’t he want something greater? Now we understand this better. We’re getting simpler and need less. We can easily exchange any material dreams for peace in Kyiv. We just need them to stop shooting.
We see certain patterns in Russia-occupied lands: forced Russification, the ban on freedom of speech, and pressure. Are there any patterns that you notice in common between Afghanistan, Donbas, and what is happening in Ukraine now?
We barely managed to leave Afghanistan; we waited at the airport for a long time. But what happens now in Mariupol is that people can’t leave at all, they are simply taken to Russia. It makes me scream internally: “What are they doing?”
How do they imagine this to end? They are imprisoning people. Russia is a prison, just a huge total prison. Everything they have destroyed can be rebuilt. But deprivation of freedom of choice, a psychological breakdown, is a massive blow to the nation that we saw in Afghanistan as well.
You were born in such a symbolic year — 1984. I just thought that this Big Brother watched you from one place to another. How would you respond to the idea that it’s “not all Russians” and that we don’t need to be Russophobic?
As a person of color, I have every right to say that there is no Nazism in Ukraine. Nationalism, on the other hand, is a natural reaction to the attack on the sovereign state. If Ukraine wants to identify itself, it has every right to do so. This is the right of any nation.
I want to ask Russians a question: did they hear anything about Nazism or Russophobia in Ukraine before 2014? If not (and I know they did not), they should ask themselves: Why did this Russophobia appear? Have they ever heard about Russophobic sentiments in 2012–13? No.
Russian land has never been invaded, and the world doesn’t need anything from them. They haven’t created a thing that would bring value to the world. If we take their “Russian world” (“Russkiy mir”), what does it equal? What value do they bring?
Meanwhile, the Russian people enjoy most of what the world brings them — while still considering it their enemy. We, Ukrainians, don’t need anything from Russia. We want them to leave us alone.
Unfortunately, some energy systems cannot be free of Russian energy. But this is not Russian gas. It is natural. Russia did not create gas or oil. They even privatized the victory over fascism, only to become fascists later.
The whole world is in danger as long as Russians have things that can’t be changed by force — it’s about their conscience and how they perceive information. While they read their news and support the propaganda, they have no chance for the future.
I have friends who lost their homes in Syria, Donbas, and Kyiv. They said very little about the war in Syria. Now children in Ukraine see the war, and children in Donbas have seen it for eight years. What do you think the war brought up in you when you were a child?
Our brains are designed to ensure our survival. Even if there is no war, we will experience anxiety in any case.
I’d say that the war started a “war mode” in me, which I was able to turn off through complicated work. “War mode” is when you are aggressive, nervous, and instinctive like a beast that wants to survive. You lose people you love, have difficulties with your personal life. It took me many years of meditation and analyzing myself to get rid of it.
War is the opposite of life.
If you build something, war demolishes it; the way war affects people suggests that they will destroy everything. They view everything around them as hostile. This war mode doesn’t allow you to sit down and relax, think, observe life and enjoy it.
There is another side to this coin; you become very adaptable. When the full-scale invasion began, I reassured my sister and was as calm as possible. It doesn’t mean that it didn’t hurt, but I perceived this war as something completely normal. This adaptability was developed by war. However, this isn’t something we should accept blindly; we need to explain to children that they have experienced the worst. So now they have nothing to fear. The only thing left is to make sure there’s never another war.
