Today marks the second anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In response to the tragedy of this ongoing war, Pushkin House has undergone a fundamental transformation over the last two years. As an institution that bears the name of the nineteenth-century poet whose name and likeness, for many, have become a symbol of Russian imperialism, fundamentally rethinking our identity, heritage and responsibility is not only a necessary but also an urgent task.
We strive to remain a safe space for people to debate, reflect and find community support in the surrounding context of multidimensional aggression, confusion and distress. Last year, on the first anniversary of the invasion, we asked our collaborators – artists, curators, academics, writers and activists – to share their reflections on Russia’s war in Ukraine. We have done the same again this year.
Since our founding, right now, and into the future Pushkin House will be a safe space that champions freedom of speech. We have been and will continue to serve as a platform for multiple voices including those who have been silenced within Russia and have since fled – and those who continue to speak out at enormous personal risk. Our hearts go out to the family of Alexei Navalny, the most recognisable leader of Russia’s political opposition, who died last week in an Arctic prison colony.
Alexei Navalny’s message to the world was “Don’t Give Up!” – and as an organisation, and as individuals we take this to heart in carrying out our mission.
Elena Sudakova, Director of Pushkin House
In March, we will be releasing a documentary film about an extraordinary – and, apparently, fake – collection of Russian avant garde art.
My colleagues and I have been following this story for over three years now. But when Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, another story took over our private and professional lives. It was Russia’s war, and the atrocities and suffering it brought.
But over time, talking with the experts advising our film, we started grasping how timely it might actually be. After all, fake is the word that comes to mind when one sees an allegedly Christian society endorsing a brutal war of aggression, or a supposedly free and fair election with a bunch of hand-picked candidates performing the role of opposition. Why should cultural life be any different?
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Russian art has become a favourite subject of all sorts of forgers, con artists and imposters, and that leading Russian cultural institutions, instead of protecting the nation’s heritage, ignore this issue altogether.
There are, however, brave art historians and simply art lovers still in the country who helped with our project. Their determination was one of the reasons we had no choice but to finish it.
I’ve been living in London for almost 15 years and two years ago I wanted to do a surprise for my mother (she lives in Ukraine) to come unexpectedly to Ukraine for her birthday in March. Everything was settled for the surprise trip to Ukraine. A few weeks before my trip, I received a text message from my best friend in Ukraine, on 24 February in the early morning: “The war has started…” I couldn’t believe my eyes, my ears, and it was a feeling like it’s just a nightmare… but, unfortunately, it was a reality – the full scale invasion and war by Russia against Ukraine. It’s indescribable pain… I still haven’t got answers for the following questions: “What is the purpose of all these deaths??”, “Why killing children???”, “Why did so many Ukrainians sacrifice their lives???” It’s incredibly hard when I see my Ukraine destroyed! It’s destroyed but not dead! Despite this pain we, Ukrainians, didn’t break and we are still standing and fighting for our freedom, for our people and children, for the victory and peace. May the Lord our God rest in peace all Ukrainian heroes, brothers and sisters who died during this terrible war and may the Mother of God protect Ukraine and bring peace for all of us. To finish, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who has been supporting Ukraine and stands with us against the Kremlin regime.
On this second anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after so much death and devastation, I find myself asking how much darker things can get and fearing the answer. Some people I know who were involved in various drives and programs supporting Ukraine during the war’s first year, have dropped out and stopped watching the news altogether, as war fatigue inevitably set in. It is the poets and the artists who continue to scream about the war in their work, forcing us all to tune in and pay attention. The Kopilka collection of war poems written by poets around the world keeps growing (the second bilingual anthology is forthcoming shortly from Slavica Press), and it is when reading these very diverse poems that we realise that no matter how dark things get, the poets will continue to shine a light right into the darkness for all of us.
24 February 2022. The date is synonymous with the violence and lies on which Mr Putin’s regime is built. Two years on, I am thinking of the price paid and still being paid by Ukrainians. And of their dignity, their resourcefulness and their unfathomable courage. I am thinking also of those courageous and principled Russians who say “no” to the regime’s lies and violence and who are prepared to stand up for a different Russia, at peace with its neighbours and itself. Thank you Pushkin House for what you do to help us understand the past, to make sense of the present, and to imagine a more positive future.
Two years on and it feels like it’s been going on forever.
The awful news about Navalny, a bitter ‘gift’ that the Russian regime has given itself just before the sham elections that will soon reelect Putin. But it will be a trojan horse, for I like to think the dead leave gifts, and a man of such power and integrity as Navalny will definitely leave his mark – his words of courage echo on. Grief contains anger, especially this grief, and it will chip away at the brutal, self-interested regime presently keeping Russia hostage.
I am tired of this war, but the longer it drags on, the more effort we have to make to:
- Keep supporting Ukraine
- Keep supporting Russians who are against the regime to ensure they don’t feel they are alone
- Keep engaging with Russia in a way that doesn’t support the regime but which means there are threads of connection for when this terrible regime does finally fall
Pushkin House has such an important role in the midst of this. A place where all the above can take place. I salute the organisation for carrying on with their work and being a place of light in the darkness.
A war cannot be fought without brutality, but it should be fought without unnecessary brutality. Like Vasily Grossman, Boris Slutsky was a Russophone Ukrainian Jew. Like Grossman, he wrote about World War Two with unusual truthfulness and wisdom. I especially treasure these bleak but unforgettable lines:
Sooner or later, every post-war period
becomes a pre-war period. The outcome of the Sixth World War
will depend on how we have treated
the prisoners-of-war from the Fifth.
It is equally crucial to show decency and tolerance towards potential allies. To win a war, one needs all the allies one can get.
What matters is not someone’s birthplace, citizenship or mother tongue; what matters is their attitude towards Putin and the war. Andrey Kurkov is one of Ukraine’s bravest and most powerful voices in the Western media. I am appalled that he has been criticised for appearing on a panel alongside the Russian journalist Masha Gessen. Gessen has been one of Putin’s fiercest and most consistent critics for many years.
Ukrainian artists, writers and journalists need our whole-hearted support. So do such courageous Russian writers as Boris Akunin, Dmitry Bykov, Masha Gessen, Linor Goralik, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Shishkin, Vladimir Sorokin, Ludmila Ulitskaya and many others. No one should be “cancelled” merely for being who they are.
My thanks to Pushkin House for providing an open and tolerant space in these intolerant times.
As a Belarusian, who grew up in a culture soaked with the prayer ‘anything but war’ and who never met her Ukrainian grandfather because he, an unarmed civilian, had been shot during the Nazi occupation of Khar’kiv, I despair at how quickly a nation forgets. Teaching this problem as a professional historian is one thing; watching its horrific consequences unfold is quite another. But if Russia chooses to forget, we have twice the duty to remember. Two long years on, those at a safe personal and geographical distance might struggle to do so: after all, we sleep through the night without being wrenched out of bed by air-raid sirens. No such ‘luxury’ for millions of Ukrainians. But this is our war, too: its outcome will determine how we, the rest of Europe and the world, shall live. We cannot afford to avert our eyes, to forget the men and women fighting Russia’s despicable aggression or forget those silenced in Russian and Belarusian prisons for opposing it.
The second anniversary of the Russian invasion in Ukraine marks a series of insoluble issues. One of them is the hesitation and scepticism among the Western alliances for the support of Ukraine. The rhetoric of the EU discloses the main drawback of representative democracy: the interfaces manifest the diplomatic statements as if they were a reality, whereas the real politics relies on more crude interests and backroom solutions. For example, the promise to make Ukraine and Georgia NATO or EU members is a public status quo, but behind the ‘stage’ this possibility causes scepticism or even irony among social, cultural and political figures of the collective West. The second impasse subsists in the fact that a very considerable number of critical leftist activists worldwide do not feel enthusiastic to support Ukraine because of its aspirations to enter the so called civilised “West”, as well as due to the Western representative democracy being the central subject of real political decisions; the decisions that the left have no power or agency to make.
The main impasse, meanwhile, is the obsessive determination of the Kremlin to persevere in its imperialist policy, reluctance and inability to become a mere nation state – the condition which is a symptom of a failed transition from authoritarian socialism to democratic capitalism and which entailed the tensions of civil war in the Russian society.
I’m entering the third year of a full-scale war unleashed by Russia in Ukraine, the third year of an ongoing string of deaths, destruction, broken plans and lives, homelessness, orphanhood and grief, with an old awareness of my involuntary but poisonous involvement in the evil given to me by my citizenship, with the habitual feeling of a heavy black stone on the heart, which can only be removed by the victory of Ukraine and democracy. I feel almost hopeless darkness, almost complete loss of faith that good triumphs over evil, that the principles of justice and humanism really work the same for everyone, that political prisoners of Russia and other authoritarian regimes will find freedom, and not death and oblivion (and the sudden end of Alexei Navalny, the simultaneous growth of repressions and the economy in terror-wreaking Russia only strengthens my pessimism). But still somewhere deep inside I know that this madness can’t last forever. And sometimes I believe that I won’t be too old to see the destruction of the rotten system that brings so many calamities to millions.
Just over a decade ago, I taught English to Misha, a boy from Moscow. An oversized pair of Sony headphones were constantly clamped over his ears. His hands were always busy tapping away on the smartphone his father, a wealthy businessman, had given him. Misha travelled abroad, spoke English, and had the best of everything. In the moments when I could tear him away from the siren call of social media and video games, Misha was desperate to hear about my life in Canada. He peppered me with questions about everything from hockey to hamburgers.
In 2022, I glanced at Misha's VK profile. The boy I know had gone. His feed was flooded with news from the Ukrainian war: gruesome war porn depicting bombs dropping on Ukrainian towns and troops, inflammatory conspiracy theories from extremist groups, and viral clips of Vladimir Solovyev's latest televisual tantrum. Peeking out from this avalanche of hateful content were the bright eyes of a new life: those of Misha's own baby son, Sasha.
Sasha will grow up in a changed world. A world where Russian children do not meet foreign language teachers. Where the outside and outsiders are the enemy. Where war is the norm.
Vladimir Putin and his enablers in the Kremlin and around the country have not just launched a genocidal war against an innocent neighbour. They have seized their chance to wage war against curiosity, against life, and against hope. They may have failed to capture Kyiv, but they are succeeding in their pursuit of destruction at home. Sasha and his generation are fated to grow up in a living cemetery, far from the abundance of opportunity that defined Misha's childhood.
The Putinists have not just killed tens of thousands of Ukrainians. They have killed Sasha's future. They have killed Russia.
The two-year anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine also marks the anniversary of his decision to sever the Russian economy from the West and his effort to radically transform the international economic order. On that front, Putin is losing – Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov himself belatedly admitted just last week that the idea of a BRICS currency was not realistic. Yet Putin has managed to sustain Russia’s economy by dedicating one-third of state funds to the military and because Russia’s hydrocarbon exports remain crucial to the World – a failing for the West as it has not managed to convince Saudi Arabia and other major players to counter his wanton war. Yet the West is recovering from the inflation shocks Putin induced but has failed to acknowledge this as the victory it is, and support is waning at the time when it is most dangerous for Ukrainians – by far the greatest victims of Putin’s aggression. However, Alexei Navalny’s murder is a tragic reminder that Putin’s war victimises Russians too. We must accept that this is a war for both nations’ freedom – and that it will be a very long one. Support and hope for victory cannot be allowed to fade.
I live in a country where you can only see one opinion on TV and others are banned. Independent politicians are not allowed to participate in elections because the current government is unable to withstand real competition.
I live in a country where, over the past two years, almost all independent journalism has been destroyed and hundreds of decent people and important organisations have been declared foreign agents.
I live in a country where innocent people are in prison on trumped-up charges, and my acquaintances and friends are in forced emigration.
I live in a country where the constitution is being rewritten and people's rights are not respected. Here I wanted to first write that the rights of those who are against the government are not respected, but I changed my mind, because the regime doesn’t care whether you support it or not, when it is beneficial to squeeze someone’s rights, they will do it, regardless of your position. "If one is not equal, no one is equal." Therefore, when the rights of LGBT people are limited, this is an alarming sign for those who are not one of them.
I live in a country where I lost all projects because of my position. In which I must constantly worry about my safety, because I am not silent. In which all my achievements were made in spite of, not thanks to.
I live in a country where I am judged “according to all the rules of the law” and given a fine of 35 thousand rubles for daring to take a photo in a black coat with a white rose in my hands.
I live in a country in which people are fired from work for their position, in which theatres and galleries are closed, artists, directors, actors, singers, musicians are cancelled. In which all inconvenient people are removed.
I live in a country where Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov and Anna Politkovskaya were killed. In which the artist Sasha Skochilenko is in prison for no reason and thousands of other political prisoners are with her.
I live in a country
In which they torture
In which they break
In which there is essentially no place for people like me.
I live in a country where those in power are trying to convince the people that there is no alternative. But it exists as long as people like Ekaterina Duntsova, like Boris Nadezhdin, like Ilya Yashin, like Elena Agafonova, like all those who are not afraid to be against, like all those who preserve a person within themselves, live here.
Russia will be free, Russia will be happy. And as Alexei Navalny said: “All that is needed for the triumph of evil is the inaction of good people. Therefore, we should not remain idle.”
Reflecting on two years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the continuing violence and humanitarian crisis deeply disturb us. The war's toll on human lives, communities and cultural heritage starkly reminds us of armed conflict's devastating effects.
In response, our commitment has only strengthened. We've intensified our efforts to support those affected by the war, aiming to alleviate the suffering of displaced individuals and families with initiatives that provide immediate and long-term aid.
We stand with Ukraine, advocating for peace, justice, and the restoration of rights and territories. Our actions reflect our belief in the possibility of healing and recovery, even amid profound adversity. Let's unite in action, respecting all dignity and humanity. In this spirit, we renew our pledge to witness and actively contribute to the global effort for reconciliation and rebuilding. We hope for peace and trust in our resilience to achieve a just resolution.
This war should not have started. It was unbelievable that we marked its anniversary a year ago with it still going on. Now that it has been going on for two years, you can hear people talking of maybe another year – or three – or five – before it is over, with more and more people getting killed, injured, displaced; more and more Ukrainian cities, towns and villages razed to the ground. And one feels more and more furious with those who could have stopped it earlier, who could have given Ukraine more powerful weapons, who would have not been afraid of Russia.
True, the West has done more than anybody could expect. After twenty years of passively watching Russia sliding back into totalitarianism, with its inevitable combination of “aggression outside, repression inside”, it started getting its act together. And still, it has done so much less than was needed.
Why was that? It seems that the main reason for all the indecisiveness and delays was the fear of getting into uncharted waters: what if Ukraine wins? What if Russia is defeated or – God forbid! – disintegrates! In exactly the same way that President Bush senior found it necessary to go to Ukraine to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union, the present world leaders would do anything to continue dealing with one country and one person in charge, even if he is as terrifying as Putin.
For many Russians it is not so. The tragic – most likely violent – death of Alexei Navalny in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle brought home to them that they are stuck with Putin – if his plans are allowed to come true – for another twelve years. And Putin means repression – hundreds of people all over the country were imprisoned for up to two weeks or fined simply for bringing flowers to the improvised memorials to Navalny. And he means the eternal war. The defeat – like it was with Nazi Germany – might help to liberate a Russia gripped by his regime. Paradoxically, apart from bringing independence and well-being to Ukraine, Ukraine’s victory can start long-overdue changes in Russia, which would be beneficial for the whole world. The sooner this is realised by Western supporters of Ukraine, the better. This war should end with Ukraine's victory. Otherwise, it will never end.
The war unleashed by the Russian Federation against Ukraine has been ongoing for ten years. For eight of those, the Western political elites tried to ignore it. Two years ago this became impossible. War spreads like a virus – and a virus is opportunistic; it infects a place which has more or less optimal conditions. A virus transforms the spaces it enters. The Ukraine that existed before the war, and the Ukraine that exists today, are already different countries. The same processes, to one degree or another depending on their proximity to the frontline, are occuring in every country in Europe. Russia is no exception. To avoid the spread of war and stop an infection, you must investigate the causes of the outbreak, its nature, and the specificities of those spaces where the infection is the most virulent. The current war is connected with previous world wars and upheavals that have affected human societies, and which created conditions for the formation of societies built on systemic violence. Ukraine and other European countries have faced the aggression of such a society. It would be good to understand that as far as aggression is concerned, the borders between countries are conditional and there is no such thing as what is commonly referred to as “our business”. As we can see, the growing terror within one society crosses borders, and becomes the “business” of others’. The expectation that everything will sort itself out is hardly going to save us now. I sincerely hope I am mistaken, and that we are not at the beginning of inexorably approaching events and the inevitable transformation that will follow.
It’s two years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but Russia invaded Ukraine nearly ten years ago. I was shocked when Russia snuck into Crimea so easily. I felt dread and fear when the Russian army pushed into Donetsk and Luhansk. I spoke to a friend in eastern Ukraine, and heard the shelling, and she asked me to wait as she moved away from the window. We stayed on the line, as if by speaking on the phone, or even just holding the silence, normal life could be coaxed back into her world. Somehow it was, almost, though the war continued. And then the news was no longer so new, and the so-called stalemate was pushed aside by other atrocities.
This anniversary is agonising. This pointless, cruel, stupid, despicable war should be over, should be won by now. The Russian army should be beaten and Ukraine free again. And Russia too would then have a chance to dismantle the infrastructure of tyranny, paranoia and destruction.
I feel sad for Ukrainians and for Ukraine, for my Ukrainian friends, for every Ukrainian I’ve ever met, and all those I haven’t. Sometimes I feel panicked and short of breath at the horror of the wars going on right now. I am angry at Putin, although that is too mild a word for someone who inflicts death, destruction and trauma across Ukraine, Russia and beyond.
I am furious at the US Republican Congressmen who cravenly do Trump’s bidding and refuse to deliver the ammunition the Ukrainian army needs. I have no idea how to end this war, but I believe Ukraine must win for there to be peace of any kind: not just for Ukraine but for Russia too.
Ukrainians are doing what they need to do – eloquently, ferociously, resignedly – whether it is fighting, governing, organising, rebuilding, doctoring, sowing and reaping, cooking, making art, writing, however much they are suffering. Sitting here, safe, I can’t do anything much except listen, and hold my friends in my heart, and hope that our friendship, love and belief in Ukraine and Ukrainians, in humanity, means something. And hope? Hope is fickle, but I have faith in the people bringing flowers to pay tribute to Alexei Navalny and all those who perform big or small acts of resistance, care and dignity every day, all over Russia.
Two years ago, Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine because he assumed that he would win – and win quickly. He was wrong. Instead, his regime decisively slid into a violent madness and irrationality distinctively different from the hybrid authoritarianism that preceded it. The understandings that had underpinned Putinism for nearly twenty years – that the Kremlin would deliver stability and a measure of justice to its friends, in exchange for complete political loyalty – splintered into something more unpredictable and dangerous. Up to a million Russians, most of them educated and among them the cream of the artistic intelligentsia, found themselves in exile. For many of them that exile is quickly hardening from a temporary state into permanence. Millions more Russians who remained, including most of the business elite, have found themselves hostages of a tiny clique of old KGB men apparently determined to reverse time and return to the isolationism and social control of their own Soviet youth. But unlike the USSR they offer no coherent ideology except resentful and hysterical nationalism. And they offer no practical future plan for the young, entrepreneurial, creative or ambitious. The second anniversary of the war has also been marked by another grim milestone – the death in prison of Alexei Navalny and fresh rounds of arrests. In a reality where all true political opposition has already long been razed, this reflexive brutality looks like paranoid, brutal delusion. On the one hand, Putin has proved adept at circumventing sanctions, transforming Russia’s economy onto a war footing, suppressing discontent among his people, persecuting and expelling all who disagree and, most tragically, dividing the world and even the West. But on the other he has turned Russia into a dead end, cut off from its natural trading and cultural partners in the West and forced into an autarchy sustained only by delusion. The final episode of late-stage Putinism promises to be brutal and increasingly irrational. But it’s also unsustainable – morally, intellectually and (eventually) financially bankrupt. The night is always darkest before the dawn.
Two years of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I don’t know what I can say. What can my statement be? But it’s very simple – I demand a ceasefire. I demand full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory. I demand the payment of full reparations and the trial of war criminals.
As for my daily life during these last two years, I would split that time into two periods. The first was when I was constantly moving between different European countries and couldn’t stop weeping. The second one was when I reached London and finally felt it was my new home for good.
I moved to London 1 year ago, and my new life is finally starting to take over. I want to live, to love and to be loved. It’s been a moment I don’t cry when I think of seeing my family. My grandma lives in Ukraine, we can only call each other. We have agreed to meet with my parents in the autumn of 2024.
Here in England, I am confined on an island, in total isolation from my Moscow friends of ten years, from my traumas that were so present when I left Russia… It’s so quiet and peaceful here, that I sometimes feel an urge to disappear in this quietness. Perhaps this calm and inner peace is what I need now, more than anything else.
Through the theatrical work on the play Vanya Is Alive that I am doing in London with the director Ivanka Polchenko, I want to find connections between my experience and the new culture that is to become mine. I need to find the strength to talk about my feelings, and about my fears, it has become very important to me now. I believe that our play reaches people’s hearts and makes the question of personal responsibility very present for everyone.
A year ago, p****** House asked me to provide a statement for the first anniversary of russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Back then, I wrote that, if it wants to serve as a venue for some form of critical, alternative russian culture that rejects the blood-soaked living nightmare of russkiy mir, p****** House has to change its name.
It has now been two years since the full-scale invasion, and a decade since russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine. An endless quantity of people, animals and priceless objects have been laid to waste by russia's fascist war machine, which metes out its slaughter in the name of "russian culture". In the name of p******. And yet, there is no name change in sight.
Is the reluctance to change the name driven by some sort of hope that the tempest of war will blow over, that the blood stains will dry and flake away? That p****** will again be remembered as a poet and not as a posterboy of conquest draped over the ruins of the Mariupol drama theatre?
Given that the stakes of this horrific war are existential for Ukraine, central to European security, and fundamental for the future international order, it is more important than ever that Western states base their policies on more sophisticated, nuanced and accurate understandings of Russian society, elite interests and Kremlin priorities. This was difficult before 2022. Today accessibility to Russia is far more difficult and getting harder every week. From my day-to-day experience on the frontlines of educational exchange and engagement among Russians, Americans, Europeans/Ukrainians, I see how moral repugnance, ideology, bias, and propaganda badly skew analysis of the other. In the west, heated campaigns to decolonise Eurasian studies and de-centre Russia within them (notwithstanding the urgent need to study Russia’s East European and Eurasian neighbours as subjects, not objects) can lead to HIGHLY emotional, ideological, and simplistic understandings of the region. All these factors increase risks of misunderstanding, miscalculation and ineffective, often counterproductive policy. It is thus more vital than ever to analyse Russia with greater equanimity, curiosity, persistence and open-mindedness. The moral repugnance of Putin’s regime makes this difficult, but the enormity of the stakes makes it imperative.
Vladimir Putin’s murderous personalist autocracy continues to bring death and destruction – in Ukraine, Russia, and beyond. Putin’s latest high-profile victim in Russia now dominates the headlines. Alexei Navalny spent his life exposing the true nature of the political system constructed by Putin. Through investigations into elite corruption, organising protests, and trying to be a ‘normal’ politician in a system that wouldn’t allow it, he exposed the corrupt brutality of a system that eventually killed him in a desolate prison colony within the Arctic Circle. How should we respond? In a moment like this that can lead to hopelessness, we should remember Navalny’s own words: “don’t give up”. A clear response would be to renew commitments to support Ukraine – and show Putin that the resolve to defy his aggression is more than simply rhetoric. Within this geopolitical context, Pushkin House continues to be a vital space – a venue for defiance, creativity, and self-reflection.
It has been two years of an endless, unbearable and meaningless nightmare.
What have these two years taught me? For me personally, it has been a big lesson about how important it is to know about the existence of the invisible other. The other is easily demonised and devalued when their life is not in our experience. It is easy to replace it with a semantic construction and simply exclude it as something unworthy of attention. This is how war works, propaganda too. But the worst thing is that this is the way the human psyche acts: people feel sympathy only for those they consider “their own”.
It is really hard for people to realise that they can be accomplices to heinous crimes. They will do anything to believe that they are on the right side. Therefore, it is easier to believe any theory of a world conspiracy and combat mosquitoes than to believe in their own involvement in the crime.
I really want to find an antidote in education and in art.
Words are meant to provoke change, transform, and heal; they can even save us from catastrophic events in some rare instances. However, for the past two years – and indeed, much longer, as it did not begin with the onset of the war – words have been failing us. The failure is deep and unquestionable. The misery and despair that remain when words are exhausted lack any colour, as if we are all sinking into grey, shapeless substances that consume our souls and desires. Amidst this agony, we hear Navalny's voice declaring that we are a very unhappy country, ensnared in a vicious cycle of violence, misery, and misfortune (neschast'ya). Yet, “Russia will be happy”, he asserts. What will it take to break this vicious circle? What is necessary to find this happiness? These days, my answer, shrouded in a veil of pessimism, is that it will take an eternity. My children may not witness it. Amidst the bleakness of our thoughts, it's crucial to cherish Navalny's promise that tyranny will eventually fall, just as Shelley's "Ozymandias" foretells the inevitable demise of even the mightiest rulers, leaving nothing but vast, empty sands behind – a poignant reminder that from the remnants of old dominions, new beauty will someday spring forth.
Ukraine is still standing two years after Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion. In the eyes of hundreds of millions worldwide it stands taller today than ever. Ukrainians are more visible and more appreciated now, too.
Yet, we are constantly forced to confront the fact that long wars have their own logic. New resources must always be found to continue the fight. New pain must be borne. Until the aggressor is vanquished, all must be staked in the fight.
I am amazed at how many in Europe, the USA and around the world still see themselves as bystanders in this conflict. Russia’s closer ties with Iran and North Korea were to be expected. But the desire of some politicians and voters in other countries to view the war as not their problem or something to steer clear of shocks me.
Ethically, geopolitically, historically, there is no good outcome that accepts Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The unhinged pragmatists in the Kremlin must be defeated so that they trim back the scope of their dark ambitions.
We will not know for years the true scale of silent opposition to this war inside Russia. But from 2022 until today the silence from within the country continues to be deafening.
My heart breaks remembering our Moscow team of Ukrainian and Russian artists – working closely together in the 1990s to create Ulitsa Sezam’ – a popular children’s TV show bringing laughter, learning and understanding to tens of millions of children in Ukraine, Russia and across the former USSR. I thank Pushkin House for its nomination of Muppets in Moscow for the 2023 Book Prize. This past year, many Ukrainians (and also Russians who fled their country after speaking out against Putin’s war) have shared their warm memories of growing up on Ulitsa Sezam – with its adored Slavic-Style Muppets. We all hoped our show would contribute to a new reality of tolerance, hope and openness for their generation throughout the former USSR – first on the small screen and then in real life. Let peace and the Muppets reign again.
Two years on, Putin’s full-scale invasion has brought with it a tragic loss of life and devastation. Although nothing compared to the human toll, truth, culture and history also fall victim to the destruction. Universities struggle to endure, and students are pulled from classrooms. Historians are caught in the tumult of the now and torn from chronicling the past even as archives, museums, artefacts and materials are obliterated. History becomes its own weapon. Even before he attempted to destroy Ukraine in the present, Vladimir Putin blanketed himself with a twisted imperial vision that denied Ukraine’s history. To aid his campaign Putin silences people and organisations that speak critically of that past and blocks access to records and sources. Although historians might aspire to objectivity, this war reminds us that history is always political and historians can never remain neutral.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 was a catastrophe that few people had predicted, but had been in the making for many years. The greed and hypocrisy that sustained Putin’s regime, and the compromises made by so many in the name of “stability”, eventually cleared the way for this grotesque explosion of state violence. The titanic efforts of brave individuals like Alexei Navalny, who tried to present a picture of a different future, one of freedom and civic dignity rather than self-serving conformity, have been defeated. After two years of death and devastation, the war against Ukraine – which has no purpose and no redeeming narrative – goes on with no end in sight, while many in the intellectual class in Russia are just hoping that a miracle will happen, and pre-war life will return. Either Putin will be killed in some internal coup; the Ukrainians will give in and accept the loss of territories; or Trump will be elected and sort it all out for everyone. The two years that have passed since the start of the war have brought depressing insights into the power of collective conformity, and the capacity of “good” and “reasonable” people to accept the unacceptable.
To be honest, I have hesitated a few times before agreeing to contribute. What can I say!? I hoped that there would not be the need to write another text, to witness another anniversary of the war. Yet, here we are. Another year has passed, and we are still plunged in the abysmal horror that is the Russian war in Ukraine. For many Ukrainians there is a different way to measure the passing of time: the year began on 24.02.2022 and it will end when Ukraine wins the war! I am living on this timeline too. And when this year seems unbearably long I remind myself that all wars do come to an end, all dictators perish eventually. While undertaking various initiatives to support Ukraine, my main and often most challenging gesture of activism remains my ability to preserve hope and faith in Ukraine’s victory. And I very much hope that this is something that people around the world are able to hold on to, as losing faith or interest in Ukraine would be playing into Putin’s hand. With Trump looming on the horizon, I find myself paralysed with fear thinking what would happen to Ukraine if he were to win. I urge everyone to not forget about this phenomenally strong, brave and defiant country! And to see its victory as a fundamental part of world peace and prosperity. We are all Ukraine!
Four weeks after the invasion, a friend and I discussed the enormity of what was happening in Ukraine in a rental villa in Portugal. “I’m really struggling with the war,” my friend, a junkie of the Westminster Bubble with no personal connection to the conflict, said to me. Shocked by their lack of self-awareness, all I could muster was “maybe it’s not about you,” at which they took preternatural umbrage. Twenty four blood-soaked months later and the scramble to turn the war into a grand narrative has taken on parallel life from the horrors at the front. What induced existential questions in that sunny villa now furthers careers or nourishes self-meaning for those observers who have enlisted themselves in Ukraine's national struggle from a distance.
Sherman was right. The glory of war is all moonshine. It is a libation known only by second-hand crowds crying for vengeance. We peddle policy briefings, hock books, shout ‘liberal international order’ with a naïve self-seriousness that beggars belief. Meanwhile the reality of War rolls on. Hordes of metal and chemicals and hundreds of thousands of scared men and women are transformed to inert mass and casualties on the orders of distant figures for reasons beyond their ken. War is hell. We can only hope to do the best we can to help Ukraine.
There is little I can say without being complicit, even if in a small way, with profiteering off the devastation. For two years now, I have wondered what there was to be proud of in my own Russianness, to have inherited an umbilical attachment to a world that my mother’s family fled for a decent life. When I was young, my grandfather told me not to bother learning Russian. “It’s a dying language,” he said. The War is certainly accelerating the process.
In 1933 Osip Mandelstam wrote a poem that begins,
“It’s cold in Europe, in Italy it’s dark./ Power is repulsive as the hands of a barber./ O, if we only could throw open, without delay/ A broad window on the Adriatic Sea.”
(In Russian it reads, “В Европе холодно. В Италии темно./ Власть отвратительна, как руки брадобрея./ О, если б распахнуть, да как нельзя скорее,/ На Адриатику широкое окно.»)
Mandelstam’s lines give us a physical sensation: they convey a sensory revulsion at the exercise of absolute power, and the claustrophobia of living in Stalin’s dictatorship. I feel these lines again on my skin as I reflect on the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp and the second anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Navalny and Mandelstam were completely different personalities. But, besides the fact that both died in a prison camp at the age of 47, they had a key character trait in common.
The main weapon a dictatorship uses to endure and to threaten its people and its neighbours is fear. Intimidate the many and you overpower the few who resist. Some rare individuals – and here I put Mandelstam and Navalny together – manage to overcome their fear and just continue to speak the truth as they knew it. That’s why they are so dangerous to the dictators, even in death. Times change, people are inspired, and the few suddenly become the many.
The situation in Ukraine and Russia in early 2024 is bleak for sure. There is a temptation to submit to fear and the corrosive power of pessimism or “realism.” But let’s also remember that Europe is not as dark as it was in 1933. Despair is defeat and we must continue to honour the voices of those who tell us so.
As an American “Sovietologist” of a certain generation, I was taught that nothing of note had happened in Kyiv after the year 1240. I understood the idea of empire, at least theoretically: during the Soviet era, a friend mentioned translating The Hobbit into Ukrainian for the quixotic pleasure of the exercise, exactly as he might have talked about translating it into ancient Greek or Akkadian. For me, the first year of full-scale war was primarily about grief and horror, of course, but it was also about filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that I could better understand how we got from 1240 to today. This second year of full-scale war has sharpened my grief and horror with guilt – guilt that all my training and experience in the region can’t keep people from shrugging when I talk about Ukraine, guilt that the world at large has moved on to other crises, guilt that even among the community of people who focus on the former Soviet sphere of influence, Moscow still dominates too many conversations. Here in the US, Moscow sometimes seems to be orchestrating those conversations. I translate, donate, advocate – and quietly despair.
I am a writer, and for me one of the most abhorrent aspects of the Russian invasion is the way some prominent intellectuals in Russia as well as in the West have perceived this war. The war was initiated by a gang of vicious mobsters and their acolytes who had no other aim in mind but to regain power and domination over neighbours whom they have always regarded as their vassals and who had escaped from under their control. Then comes the army of intellectuals with their profound explanations of root causes and their philosophical interpretations of some ghastly aspects of the national character – with the help of the vocabulary of Russian ethno-mysticism and Eurasianism. These inventive historico-philosophical explanations for Russia’s aggression create an impression that such an invasion was almost an inevitable national necessity. Then follows poetry (rhymed or not), miles of confessions, full of regrets, guilt for complicity, and repentance. A collection of wartime poetry and prose is published. At bedtime, it provides Kremlin murderers with some lachrymose moments of soul-searching and sighing before they fall fast asleep.
The second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine feels like a particularly perverse version of Groundhog Day. “War” has become the first association when I think “Ukraine”: The war in Ukraine. Ukraine – that’s the European country engulfed in war. Nobody knows how to stop the war in Ukraine.
Russia needs to be stopped, but it seems we/the world have run out of ideas of how to do that. And so, we go on living with the war. And Ukrainians keep dying. No, they keep being killed. By the Russian regime.
I know it’s normal for people to become habituated to any situation after a while, however unbearable it may be. It’s a protective mechanism that allows us to carry on living. And yet.
On this cursed anniversary I want to remind myself, and all of us, that there is nothing ‘normal’ or ‘everyday’ about living with war. As long as there’s a war ongoing, normal everyday life is impossible. We’re deceiving ourselves when we think that it is.