Describing What Never Should Have Happened: A British Researcher’s View of the De-Occupied Cities

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The thousand-year-old stone idols of Izyum, which have seen more than one war, were cut by shells. Librarians who still guard their libraries under fire, who would rather never see war. Children who still want to read books – despite the fact that they see and hear war every day. In the last days of April, the Ukrainian PEN went on a volunteer trip to eastern Ukraine. A group of Ukrainian writers and their foreign colleagues visited Kharkiv, Izyum, Lyman, Sviatohirsk, Slovyansk, Kramatorsk. Communicating with local library workers, soldiers and children, delivering humanitarian aid and books, they also document the consequences of the Russian invasion. At the request of UP.Zhyttia, Sasha Dovzhik, a researcher of Ukrainian literature who lives and works in Great Britain, shares her impressions of meeting people and cities from this trip. In my free time from documenting Russian war crimes, I teach Ukrainian literature at the University of London, but I first saw Kharkiv, the capital of Ukrainian modernism and the Zhadan myth, only in April 2023. The city center I saw was the dark silhouettes of recognizable buildings against the background of the Milky Way. Light masking is still in effect in Kharkiv. If it weren’t for a brisk walk to the hotel 15 minutes before the curfew, I wouldn’t have seen the city center at all, because the attention of the trip was focused on the neighborhoods that were most affected by Russian aggression. Read also: “Destroyed library” on tour: how Ukraine promotes its literature abroad ‘I wish you were not here’ – an inscription on a garage in Northern Saltivka. Before the full-scale invasion, about 300,000 Kharkiv residents lived in this area, located less than 30 kilometers from the Russian border. In April 2023, living tulips abound here under dead houses. The multi-apartment beehives burned by Russian missiles and crushed by aerial bombs are empty. A trident is drawn with construction foam on the burnt wall, and this yellow on black reminds of the symbol of another genocide – the yellow Star of David on a black dress. We wish we weren’t here. We wish we didn’t see how the blinding rain paints a rainbow over the guts of a high-rise building split in half by a missile. We would like to cover the notebooks and pills, blankets, plastic bottles and bedclothes that have been thrown out into the street – all that should be hidden from prying eyes in the privacy of the home, but now lies on the road, mixed with concrete slabs and the rusting spine of the building. But instead, we look carefully and remember. Everything seen must be used to achieve justice. Kharkiv Northern Saltivka district was heavily damaged during Russian attacks. Photo: Sasha Dovzhik From the raisin mountain of Kremenets Slobozhanshchyna is like the palm of your hand – green, with gentle curves of valleys, hills and chalk-strewn “Torsky roads”. With the arson of artillery attacks, with destroyed tourist bases and with the liberated city of Izyum, in which almost no intact buildings remained. Read also: “In Europe, our war stories are consumed between social reception and dinner.” Director Maksym Nakonechny on “Butterfly Vision” and masculinity in Ukrainian cinema Of the nine Polovtsian women who watched the battles from the dominant height of Kremenets, eight stood. The extreme sculpture was broken by a direct hit of the projectile, and the rest was cut by fragments. While we are circling the stone women, looking at their old necklaces and fresh scars, an explosion sounds somewhere nearby. War is near. Polovtsian women suffered from the attacks of the terrorist country Russia. Photo: Maksym Sytnikov As in the previous day in Kharkiv, Izyum librarians show us the saved funds. In the rooms with windows filled with plywood, there are columns of Ukrainian books bound, and in some places arranged on the shelves. While we are flipping through a collection of documents about one of the previous extermination attempts – the artificial famine of 1921-23 – regular readers enter the library and are embarrassed by the crowd of non-locals. We go outside to see the remains of the destroyed school under the cheerful beat of Radio Promin, which breaks the silence of the empty city from the loudspeakers. Read UP.Kultura in Telegram. Pupils of this school could be among the 54 who died under the rubble of the five-story building on Pershotravneva street. In the room on the third floor, which lacks an outer wall, you can still see the school desk and lockers, painted yellow and blue, with neat shirts and jackets on hangers. The photo shows saved library collections. Photo: Maksym Sytnikov Gliding your eyes over a building bombed by a Russian airstrike, it is important not to forget to look below your feet. First, you can accidentally step on the remains of someone’s life: school certificates for sports achievements, toys and melted photo albums. And secondly, you can step on the “petal” anti-personnel mine. This is the name of the anti-personnel high-explosive mines prohibited by the Ottawa Convention, which were generously sprinkled by the riders of the Russian army over the occupied regions of Ukraine. Read also: Golden dust of memory. The literary annals of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, killed by the Russians, from the villages of Kharkiv region and Donetsk region – from Yatskivka to Drobyshev, Bogorodichny, Krasnopill and Dolyna – are distinguished by the fact that they no longer exist. Evacuees and military vehicles speed along roads cut by machinery. Stray dogs look after them. Here and there, crushed houses are covered with blue film: this means that their owners are thinking about returning. They also tell about a brave man who went out to work on his plot and lost both legs to a mine. This year, the lands of Kharkiv region and Donetsk region are sown with “petals” and burnt military equipment. Signs with the inscription “mines” abound above the uncultivated black soil fields. This flower of the Russian soul left its seeds in the Ukrainian land for more than one decade. And the pine forests, which are found along the roads, will be beautiful for a long time with otherworldly, untouched beauty, which can only be mourned from the side, sitting on a disinfected piece of asphalt. The city of Izyum suffered significant destruction. Photo: Maksym Sytnikov “Sauna. Dinners. Delivery” is a tempting sign on the outskirts of Sviatohirsk. “Mines” – the already familiar sign under it warns. My ideas about the steppe and industrial landscapes of Donetsk region dissolve in the waters of the Siverskyi Donets as soon as we arrive at the pontoon crossing. White rocks, hundred-year-old pines and oaks, torn tree roots, damaged during the battles for the city of Sviatohirskaya Lavra are reflected in the river. It smells faintly of the forest and strongly of burning iron. Sviatohorsk was under occupation for three months. During this time, some townspeople lost 15-20 kilograms of weight. As a legacy, the Russians left burnt tanks in the yards from where the battles were fought, five-story buildings destroyed by airstrikes, a half-bombed city council, a school shot at close range by a tank, and the bust of Taras Shevchenko, perforated with bullet holes. Again and again the word “why?” rolls over our group. Because centuries of unpunished imperialism have cultivated a sense of impunity in Russians. It is this impunity that Ukraine will have to bury in the eastern steppes, flowered with “petals” and pine forests, covered with the nameless graves of its citizens. Life is slowly returning to Sviatohirsk – with a public laundry and 500 hot lunches a day; a shelf for book crossing and dog feeders; a concentration of attentive people in uniform, who became a wall between them and death. PEN expedition to the East of Ukraine, the city of Svyatogrysk, Shevchenko’s bosom. Photo: Maksym Sytnikov A few days later I am already in Lviv, which is reveling in a ghostly and peaceful carnival. Some grains of sand on the smartphone screen enhance the quasi-resort feeling. And blowing them off the glass, I remember where they are from. The sand of the burial grounds under Rysyum got stuck under the nails, in the backpack and socks, it grinds on the teeth, rolls under the skin, grows into the bones. He is forever with each of us. The simple-as-air understanding that Russians – living, dead and unborn – will be responsible for the genocide of the Ukrainian people for generations has not yet taken root abroad. Perhaps for this you need to wake up from explosions at a recreation center somewhere near Siverskyi Donets, or study the black insides of Kharkiv beehives, or peer into the bullet hole on the bronze neck of the national poet in Sviatohirsk. We will have to find a way to spread this simple understanding beyond the borders of our country and take the whole world with us on a journey to the Ukrainian east. I had to write a report about culture. Culture is the military at the gas station near Izyum, who accept Ukrainian books as a gift and expertly fix the tourniquet on your shoulder bag. Culture is a coffee shop, where they will make you a flat white with lactose-free milk to the deafening roar from the front. Culture is the Sloviansk library, from which books were evacuated and in which evacuees from the front are helped. Culture is a post office and public baths in de-occupied Sviatohirsk. Culture is listening to news broadcasts in German, French, and English from the ruins of a Ukrainian city and searching for words to describe something that should never have happened. Culture is to put inside yourself every bumpy road of Donetsk and learn to speak from it to the world in an understandable world language.

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