A war always comes by surprise. We know it is possible, we prepare for it… But until the last moment, we hope it will be avoided. And when she finally arrives, a whole world is destroyed in an instant.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
On the evening of February 23, I was checking my Facebook news feed – posts from my virtual friends from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Odessa, Lviv… Worry was already in the air, but people did everything to dissipate it.
“When the Germans bombed London, Londoners purposely lived as usual, went to restaurants and the theater,” writes a journalist from Kyiv. It was to demonstrate that the enemy would not have them. »
” I just watched Death on the Nile, writes a professor from Kharkiv. I recommend it, it’s distracting [des peurs d’une invasion]. »
A mother of two from Irpin (near Kyiv) posts her photos from a trip to southern Ukraine from last summer – the sea, dunes, wildflowers and wheat fields.
A historian from Kyiv has just posted a funny video of his daughter, where a 2-year-old says seriously: “I’m reading a document! “Where did she learn the word document ? wonders the guy who spends most of his time studying declassified archives from the Soviet era.
An environmentalist from Sumy is very proud of her first book – a collection of short stories published six months ago.
A quiet life, a happy life. Not much different from life in Quebec. But in an hour it will be crushed. Brutally crushed by Russian planes, missiles and tanks.
Among those I read on the evening of February 23, many have become refugees, others are under bombardment, still others are fighting for their country. They’re all alive (at least for now), but many are at their wit’s end.
In books and films about World War II, there is often an implicit and rarely verbalized motive: a certain sense of nostalgia for the seemingly ideal pre-war life. It’s funny is not it ? Since “normal” life, that of peacetime, is anything but ideal: it is full of problems, fatigue, small conflicts and great disappointments. Then a catastrophe happens and we suddenly realize that we were living in paradise.
Before February 24, Ukraine was not a “poor” country. The country was not extra-rich either, but was growing fast. Between 2000 and the pandemic, the quality of life increased enormously. Then there was a real cultural boom: we made excellent films, published tons of books. Even though Russia had been waging war since 2014, it was low-intensity, localized in the two partially occupied border regions. The rest of the country lived in peace.
While emigration remained high, most people felt reasonably happy at home. People ask me why the Ukrainians weren’t leaving en masse in mid-February, or even during the first days of the invasion. This is because everyone hoped that the tragedy would be narrowly avoided or that the war “would not go as far as [leur] town “. Then Russia started bombing residential areas…
How peaceful the evening of February 23 was.