At six o'clock in the morning, distant cannon began. Within a few tens of kilometers, the Ukrainian military is holding back the enemy, who wants to take my home and even my life. In a literal sense. Anyone who justifies the invasion thereby denies my right to exist. My and 40 million people.
Yesterday, the Ukrainians liberated the city of Trostyanets. Still, they can win! As much as I admire them, every time they surprise me again. Now the occupiers won’t get anything in the north of Ukraine, and all forces will be transferred to the east. That means that now the outcome of the war will be decided on the Donbas Arc, where for three weeks we have been restraining the enemy. There are going to be even hotter days, and the danger of encirclement remains.
Today I went back to the church «Good News». The route takes four kilometers, so you can see the city. Although it is cooler today, there were as many people as yesterday. The siren suddenly rang, but no one paid any attention. This time however there were no missile strikes.
In the church I talked with Yuri Korotich. He still serves on the Internet. He said that Maryinka continues to be stormed, the city is destroyed, people live in basements and there is no hope of evacuation. It will be possible to help them not before the liberation of Donetsk. North of Maryinka - Krasnogorovka. There we have students and there is a lyceum at our university. The city is bombed, but at least not stormed. It is clear that they are all trapped there.
I met Gennady Lysenko, a famous volunteer who had been captured during the occupation of Slavyansk. He had just brought the humanitarian aid and was feelingly explaining to Yuri’s wife that the evacuation of children mustn’t be delayed, as the occupiers from the south were striving to break in to Ugledar and from the north-west to Lozovaya: «In no case should you put the sign "Children on board". This is a target! All buses from Severodonetsk with white flags or these signs were shot on the way. You continue to tell people they shouldn’t put up signs, and they still don’t get it! – "We’re civilians, how can they shoot at us?"»
Honestly, when the war began, I also thought that the Russian army would block Ukrainian units, besiege cities and solve political issues. Only on the third day, it began to dawn on me that this is a war of destruction being waged against all the inhabitants of Ukraine without distinction. I wasn’t the only one so naive. My colleague Yulia Fil from the Oriental Institute decided to go to the village for three days from Kiev, until things calm down, and she got into the zone of fighting for Makarov.
At first she wasn’t afraid, she didn’t even hide in the basement, thinking the military was fighting amongst themselves. They’re not gonna intentionally shoot at houses! Then it became clear there was no difference between the civilians and the military for the occupiers, and when she was leaving the combat zone, she experienced the primitive fear.
It is clear why the evacuation buses are being shot. To accuse the Ukrainians themselves. Therefore I think anyone who believes that the Ukrainians spent eight years shelling Donetsk, oppressing the Russians and other absurd things, are as accomplices in the killing of children as those who shoot. When someone zombified from the Russian propaganda starts trolling here in the network, it is very difficult to restrain yourself. Difficult but necessary. The fact is that the war against Ukraine is being waged not only at the military and information level, but also at the emotional level.
By manipulating information, the aggressor is trying to disseminate among people such a demonic picture of the world, within which they are surrounded by a hostile world on all sides, and it must be demolished. Along with Ukraine, of course. The bearers of this flawed picture of the world are also becoming flawed or degrading, so they need constant emotional nourishment from outside, including at the expense of our hatred, pain and suffering. This phenomenon is called psychic vampirism.
The fact is that people are able to feel emotional involvement, so there is a common emotional interconnection among people. War is like an atomic explosion in this shared emotional space. Emotions overwhelm people, wreak havoc on the inner world and burn people from within. In these circumstances, the enemy is doing everything to increase the chaos in the souls and to suppress people’s ability to act in an orderly and rational way. Internet trolls are the foot soldiers of the enemy army on the emotional front. They try neither to hear others, nor to understand anything, only to peremptorily declare any absurdity, to which it is not even clear how to respond rationally, getting a surge of negative emotions to feed on. We need the same resistance on an emotional level as at the military and information ones. To do this, it is necessary to turn the chaotic emotions burning from the inside into a cold resolve, which is determined only by the inner free self-determination of the will and does not depend on either circumstances or mental state. This resolve manifests itself as a conscious, purposeful force, through which a person ceases to feel himself a victim of circumstances, and in each moment begins to understand how to do the right thing here and now, rather than waiting passively for something to happen. This is how we will be able to mobilize our inner psychic forces that the enemy does not and cannot have.
