Today I showed Slavyansk to journalists of Estonian television. The second day we get disturbing news - the enemy has bypassed Izyum and has been found in its rear. Fierce battles are going on, cannonade is constantly heard in Slavyansk. If the Russian military manages to get to Slavyansk for a cannon shot, they will begin to demolish the city. However, people are calm and walk under the siren’s wail exactly as usual. Even with children. I understand why. On the front, people react only to immediate danger, not hypothetical. In this case, they guessed that the artillery battles were far away, and the missiles were still striking unexpectedly, so that no siren would warn, and stopped fussing about it. That’s the psychology of wartime.
The Estonians and I talked to the city authorities. Of course, I was most interested in Izyum. As I understand it, there is a desperate battle going on, the Ukrainian military deters the enemy thanks to constant maneuvering. There are forests between Izyum and Slavyansk, where the defenders hide, shelling the occupiers. One can get through to Slavyansk only at the cost of huge losses. I believe they won’t get through, but we have to prepare for the bombardment.
The deputy head of the administration said that during the occupation in 2014 he stayed in Slavyansk. Only from the circle of his acquaintances, six people were arrested. People could be put in the basement even for the Ukrainian speech, but most often, they were grabbed without any reason as hostages to get a ransom for. He also noted that even now, there are pro-Russian people, but there are very few of them. The city’s residents are preparing for resistance, and even those who helped the separatists build barricades in 2014 are now helping to build fortifications to stop Russian invaders.
Before meeting with the Estonians, I recorded a conversation with Pavel Levushkin about how to preserve humanity in wartime and what spiritual practices can help. The talks with Pavel will be included in the cycle of programs «War from a position of religion», which I am going to conduct constantly. Paul asked me a very difficult question: how to deal with the commandment of love for enemies, if it’s impossible not to feel hatred for those who came to kill, shoot evacuation buses full of women and children, destroy maternity hospitals and nursing homes, raze the cities to the ground? In my opinion, one cannot simply ignore one’s hatred in such a sanctimonious way, but it must be worked out on a spiritual level. But to do this, we must first identify the reason for the irrational brutality of the Russian military in Ukraine.
The Moscow kingdom, and then the Russian Empire constantly waged wars of conquest, justifying them by an overvalued idea of land collection. It’s an idea that we’ve been given at school, and many still accept it by default. The essence of this idea is the negation of the value of independent life of people outside Russia. History has often seen empires, dictatorships, tyrannies who, like Russia, have waged wars of conquest. Of course, it is evil, but it is a social, human evil, not yet religious and metaphysical. When a military coup took place in Russia in 1999, the ideology of land collection mutated. If previously the independent life of peoples was devalued, but was not considered evil, now all the world around, which resists inclusion in the sphere of influence of Russia, is perceived as hostile and subject to destruction.
So while the occupiers for the first three days believed that Ukrainians supported Russia and hated the Ukrainian authorities, they tried to do with a little blood. When they realized that everyone was ready to resist them, they began to treat all Ukrainians without exception, whether old people or even children, as enemies. And in relation to enemies, all evil is considered good, and good is considered evil.
This mutation of imperial ideology has caused evil and good to switch places. For example, killing civilians is considered good and helping them evil. On the basis of this position, such an internally holistic view of the world is built, which becomes a personal hell of man. However, he himself does not notice that, as he projects evil within himself on the world around him, which he considers to be hell. From the point of view of Christianity, this is a demonic position with which no compromises are acceptable.
