It’s terrible to lie in chains, to rote in dungeon deep,
but it’s still worse, when you are free,
to sleep, and sleep, and sleep.
~Taras Shevchenko
It’s been a short 3 months since I was last in Kyiv. Even though the reason for my visit was my dad’s heart attack, I was able to see my friends after many years and walk the streets of the beautiful city I was born in and love so much.
This is the same city that, as we speak, Russian invaders want to put under siege following the deceptive and despicable invasion of Ukraine that shook the world just 4 short days ago. Well, they have also been 4 of the longest days in my life.
Big boys with nukes are saying “international law is not allowing us to protect you”. Are you out of your f**ing minds? You allowed an aggressor’s representative as president on the UN security council, spreading lies about the invasion and using his veto power to block action on Ukraine. You were there when it all started 8 years ago. You knew everything this lunatic was going to do. You watch idly as a peaceful nation is being attacked on an enormous scale in front of your very eyes, conveniently televised by CNN. The second-largest country in Europe. The country that chose to give up its nuclear power as you promised to protect its borders and independence in exchange. One f**ing protector. Oh, wait, the three of you! Russia, the US and the UK all claimed that Ukraine would be guaranteed safety and security. Now one is the very country that started this war.
You keep making an excuse that Ukraine is not part of NATO, so you can’t do anything. How pathetic your super-power is if, with supposedly the whole world behind you, you can’t even change your useless law and would rather watch thousands of innocent people die than do the right thing.
I can tell you this: my people’s blood is on your hands, the hands of the useless bystanders, just the same as it’s on Putin’s hands. You are the reason history repeats itself. You don’t have the guts to stand up to a mad psychopath who so obviously hates Ukraine that you can see the poison spitting from his mouth. And all this because “he has a nuclear power”. You have nuclear power too. Do you know how pathetic and fake all your sanctions that claim to “strangle Russia’s economy” someday look from a bomb shelter or through the window broken by the blast? Do you think people give a shit about your excuses when they have to decide whether to stay in their homeland and get themselves and their children killed or leave, risking getting caught in the crossfire? Or when you wait for the tanks to start coming up your street with one Kalashnikov magazine and a bottle of the Molotov cocktail made for you by your next-door neighbour?
I don’t know the reason for all this and perhaps don’t understand your “deep strategic thinking” behind what you do, but I’m sure that, by allowing this to happen, you allow and aid the evil to spread, the moral norms to fall and push the world towards disaster faster than a nuclear standoff would. And a world where political ambition is more important than a life of a child is not a world I would like to live in. I, just like you and everyone in this world, want to live in a world of love, peace and beauty. I don’t want to get angry, but you’re making me angrier by day. I didn’t ask for it, but it didn’t matter since you didn’t give me or Ukraine that choice.
There is something so very deeply broken here that I don’t have words to express. On your watch you allowed darkness to question the human spirit, the divine belief in the greater good, and humanity itself. Who are you? Look at yourself in the mirror and finally DO SOMETHING!
