Contemplating victory and defeat in Ukraine

Japan Times

31-03-2025

At one point in her unfinished, posthumously published memoir, the Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina reflects on how she'd take a break from writing. She usually worked in an internal corridor of her Kyiv apartment, the safest place in her home during the war. "Sometimes when an air raid alarm sounds I go to the balcony and watch air defense rockets rise into black sky over the skyline,' she wrote. "I just don't fear death anymore.'
The book — "Looking at Women Looking at War" — is about bravery but also unforeseen and perhaps unwelcome transformations wrought on individual human beings by the forces of history. It begins with Amelina buying her first gun in the tense days before the Russian assault on Feb. 24, 2022. She stared at the weapon "black and hazardous, on the bed, among all my swimming suits and summer dresses,' which she'd laid out for a vacation.
"I've heard that everyone is capable of killing, and those who say they aren't just haven't met the right person.' She added, "An armed stranger entering my country might just be the 'right person.'' Toward the end of the volume, the former organizer of literary festivals weeps for the war dead and those who mourn them. However, she says, "I don't cry and I don't even feel sad' when shown an instructional video on how to attach a grenade to a drone.
Colombian writer Hector Abad Faciolince holds a photo in honor of Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, on Sept. 13, 2023. Amelina died in early July 2023 from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike in the city of Kramatorsk. |
REUTERS
Amelina becomes a war crimes researcher and the book is about the women who document with painful precision the ugliness of the conflict. In a poignant preface, Margaret Atwood compares them to the Recording Angel: "the spirit whose job it is to write down the good and bad deeds of humans.' Amelina's literary and investigative lives intersect when she helps recover and publish the buried diary of a disabled poet murdered by Russians. But she becomes a victim herself. On June 27, 2023, she was badly injured when Russian ballistic missiles hit a cafe where she was playing host to visitors from Colombia. She died four days later.
There is enough heartbreak in her memoir. It is also inadvertently and achingly anachronistic. Her manuscript — with many finished sections but others in notes, fragments of ideas — was edited during the few months when Ukraine could still be upbeat about its war effort, with a publication not scheduled until February 2025. The mood has shifted to pessimism as Donald Trump betrays Kyiv with kisses for Vladimir Putin on an almost daily basis.
Ukrainians and their friends still cling to hope — some are idealistic, others just fueled by anger. The Norman Foster Foundation — set up by the famous British architect — has awarded prizes to young designers from around the world in a competition to conceive new housing for the beleaguered city of Kharkiv. At local shops in Kyiv, patriots can buy inexpensive paintings of rousing moments from the war, including the famous sinking of a Russian naval vessel and the incursion Ukrainian troops made into enemy territory. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has versions of those in his small private bedroom next to his office. He also has another, an imaginary one of the Kremlin in flames. "Each one's about victory,' he recently told Time magazine's Simon Shuster, "That's where I live.'
That sentiment is important for the leader of a country beset by enemies. Others, however, must contemplate the terrible possibility of defeat. Amelina was realistic. "Despite all our efforts, we might still lose,' she wrote to Oleksandra Matviichuk, the human rights activist whose Kyiv-based Centre for Civil Liberties was co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. "If we lose, I want to at least tell the story of our pursuit of justice.' Will Moscow, if it is indeed victorious, allow those stories to be told? I can imagine Putin looking at the records she and her truth-seekers have gathered and declaring, "The wind can sweep away your words.'
That line has been uttered before. Almost 2,500 years ago in Euripides' "The Trojan Women," a messenger from the conquering Greeks uses them to belittle the prophecies of Cassandra, Trojan princess turned prisoner of war. Her vision is of evil days ahead for the victors. The herald snorts in derision. But the audience knows of her myth and its power: No one believes Cassandra, but her predictions always come true.
Amelina sensed the foreboding as she sifted through ruin of her country. She recalled being moved by the words "city of stone and steel' — from a song by the Ukrainian rock musician Serhiy Zhadan — written on a wall in the fallen city of Mariupol. Here are more of its lyrics:
"Tell us, why did they burn our city down? Tell us they did not mean to do it. Tell us the guilty will be punished, Chaplain. Tell us anything that's not on the news.'
"Well, I can only tell you about the losses. Surely a final reckoning awaits the guilty. But it awaits the innocent as well and even those who had nothing to do with this.'
The war will leave both winners and losers transformed, likely for the worse, despite all the heroism, despite the sacrifice. From her balcony, as Amelina looked at Ukrainian rockets go after Russian attackers, she thought about raising her son and perhaps joining the military herself if things got worse. She'd described the decision of another friend to tend a garden near Kharkiv to make sure it flourished. "It's a very Ukrainian stubbornness,' Amelina wrote, "growing gardens near the border with Russia is like building a beautiful Pompeii near a volcano.' She then imagined her own funeral — and how it would be a rare time for the women "fighting for justice' to take a break and gather together. Indeed, they would.
A ceasefire may come. But there will be no peace. To paraphrase Euripides and Cassandra, the victors may take the land but they will be bringing home the Furies.
Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business.