The Somme tout / Le Devoir editions are publishing these days Letters from Ukraine. Intimate stories from a country at war, a collection of texts from Ukrainian citizens collected by journalist Magdaline Boutros. Excerpt from the introduction.
The unimaginable sometimes becomes the everyday. As it hurtles down the field of reality, it takes with it all certainty, then makes its nest by redefining what is possible. It becomes the true, dictates the conceivable and transforms lives, forever.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, when the Russian army militarily invaded Ukraine, 43 million Ukrainians saw their lives, as they knew them, shattered. “The unimaginable has happened,” Kostyantyn Batozsky, a resident of Kyiv, whispered to me on the phone, a few hours after the assault began. “We are living a nightmare,” he continued.
A terrifying – even Dantesque – scenario that very few Ukrainians believed possible. And yet, in the space of a fraction of a second, when Russian troops violated the Ukrainian border, turned the course of their lives upside down and left their mark on the history of their people.
A few days earlier, while I was reporting in Ukraine for the daily The duty, a climate of disbelief – certainly surprising, but very real – reigned across the country.
While the whole world held its breath and tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were massed along the Ukrainian border, in Russian and Belarusian territory, the majority of Ukrainians still believed the attack impossible.
In a jazz bar located near Maidan Square, in the center of Kyiv, young women made me understand — with a touch of humor — that they were far from giving in to panic. “What if I’m afraid? But no,” one of them said to me under the candlelight. “I haven’t stocked up on food, but maybe I should stock up on gin and tonic,” another young Ukrainian woman said to me with a laugh, in the middle of the literally crowded bar.
A little later in the evening, a young musician summed up in a few words the state of mind of many of his compatriots. “I can’t believe a foreign country could attack us,” he told me. A skepticism that we now know is draped in a striking naivety.
But on this day of February 14, 2022, the war between Russia and Ukraine does not yet exist. It does not yet belong to reality. But the construction of this reality has already begun in the heights of a presidential palace overlooking the millions of lives that were going to be shattered.
In the last moments before everything changed, Oksana Osmachko, an English teacher who lives in the suburbs of Kyiv, explained to me that she was trying as best she could to avoid this fate. Probably like many other Ukrainians who were clinging to hope, the mother had refused to prepare emergency luggage for herself and her son. “I told myself that if I did it, I would be one step closer to this reality, and I didn’t want that. » Far from her, a leader with imperialist aims had already decided that his future was going to decline.
An idea come true
When the lightning attack is launched – by air, by sea and by land – shortly before dawn on February 24, 2022, nothing else exists. Than war. By its brutality, it imposes itself in all discussions, in all minds.
War is suddenly everywhere. In the queues at gas stations, in the hastily packed luggage, in the hugs that become more intense, in the weapons that are distributed massively by the government. The invasion is total. Barely triggered, this murderous madness is already piercing dreams, tearing apart futures and redefining the present.
The lives of 43 million Ukrainians therefore become hostages to a fad, that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who wants Ukrainians and Russians to form one people. An idea that is imposed on them by force. A heist of history which de facto forges new realities, by redefining roles and modifying temporality.
The intensity of the moment almost instantly revealed the leadership and valor of the man who would henceforth symbolize Ukrainian resistance in the eyes of the entire world. In the disorder of the first days and despite the advice of his Western allies, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, decided to stay in Kyiv. In a moving speech to his people, he spoke on February 25: “I address our defenders, men and women on all fronts: tonight, the enemy will use all its forces to break our defenses of the in the most vile, harsh and inhuman way. Tonight, they will try to seize the capital.
By the tens of thousands, Ukrainians are taking to the road to flee their now besieged territory, leaving behind a life they did not choose to leave. Others stay — out of obligation or conviction — to defend their homeland.