Nikolai Karpitsky. June 15, 2022. Ukraine. One hundred and twelfth day of war

I spoke to a student who was evacuated from Liman. Like Slavyansk, Liman was also hit with rockets, but they began to fire from cannon artillery only on April 26, when the invaders finally entrenched themselves in Zarechny. At that time they were about the same distance from Lyman, as now from the eastern outskirts of Slavyansk. First they shot the hospital, the House of Culture, and then regular artillery duels began and all the life support of the city ceased. As a rule, the shelling was continuous from four to ten in the morning, a lull in the afternoon until six in the evening, and then it continued again until one o'clock in the morning. And that was going on every day. Thanks to some Western howitzers being transferred to us, the situation is a little better now. We just have to hold out until large deliveries of weapons.

The electricity was cut off yesterday morning. I drove around the city. In our central park "Shovkovichny" it is beautiful and well-groomed, but there is not a soul. On the outskirts of the park there is a sports ground where young people exercise. Girls passed by. Why don't they evacuate? I think that Slavyansk won’t be taken, but war is unpredictable, and if Russian soldiers come, they will not be spared.

About a quarter of the inhabitants remained in the city, I am sure they also should evacuate. I get offered this all the time. I'm constantly being asked to do so myself. One of the reasons I stay here is the need to understand war from my own experience. The point is that all people, in order to navigate the world, need to be able to distinguish what is possible and what is impossible. We do this either on the basis of our picture of the world, or on the basis of the experience of life itself, when one is a direct participant in events. In the latter case, a special vital intuition of understanding events wakes up, for the sake of which I am here.

I'll show you a specific example. The other day, someone shelled the center of Donetsk, and Russian propaganda launched a fake, as if the armed forces of Ukraine had done this in order to provoke the Russians to retaliate shelling of Kyiv and Kharkov and ask the West for weapons for this. In fact, Donetsk was shelled by the Russians, but those who believe in Russian propaganda will not believe me. Similarly, they did not believe me that the FSB blew up houses with residents in the fall of 1999, although then there was already cast iron proof of this.

In their picture of the world, it was impossible for the authorities to blow up their own residents in their homes. I proceeded from my own life experience. When I lived in a wooden house in the center of Tomsk, the same wooden houses around me were set on fire from time to time to clear space for construction. Sometimes people were burned in the fires. Now I am in Slavyansk, and a rocket can hit my house at any moment, but the probability of this is exactly the same as the probability of burning to death in Tomsk in a night fire. I'm just used to this level of danger.

If they burn homes along with the inhabitants even for a piece of land, would they be ashamed to blow up a few houses for the sake of the presidency? And if in Russia they blew up their own houses along with the inhabitants, would they really not dare to shell the center of Donetsk?

An objective analyst, even without such life experience, will also come to the conclusion that Donetsk was shelled by Russians. After all, Russian troops have a tenfold (and somewhere more) superiority in artillery. The Ukrainians are throwing all their efforts into containing them, and have no resources to shoot at residential buildings. Of course, during artillery duels residential buildings are hit from both sides, but the shelling of Donetsk is clearly not the case. In addition, if Russian artillery shells the entire area, regardless of what is there, the Ukrainian shoots not at the areas, but at specific military objects, which reduces the risk of hitting residential buildings. In addition, while Russian artillerymen fire on an entire square regardless of what is there, Ukrainian artillerymen do not fire on squares, but on specific military objects, which reduces the risk of hitting residential buildings. In addition, if Russian artillerymen fire at the entire square, regardless of what is located there, then the Ukrainians fire not at the squares, but at specific military facilities, which reduces the risk of hitting residential buildings. Thanks to this tactic, Ukrainian artillerymen manage to fight on equal footing with the superior forces of the Russians.

However, this will not convince a believer in Russian propaganda, since in his or her picture of the world, vicious Ukrainians are ready to shoot at civilians in defiance of common sense. The argument becomes insoluble because two different pictures of the world collide. And here the decisive vote belongs to those who assert the truth based on life experience rather than on the picture of the world. For when knowledge becomes part of life experience, a special historical intuition for the perception of events awakens, which a scholar who perceives events from an academic distance does not have. 

I will not enter into an insoluble dispute, but simply testify to the obvious. After all, for the sake of this I am here in Slavyansk. Let’s distinguish what believers in Russian propaganda do not want to understand and what they simply cannot understand.

I. What they could understand, but don't want to.

1. For Ukrainians, Donetsk is their native Ukrainian city. 

2. The Russian occupiers are shelling residential areas without any reason, just as Russia attacked Ukraine without the slightest reason. The Russians are still constantly shelling residential areas where there are no troops. They don't need a reason at all.

3.  The supply of weapons from the West is extremely slow, but the intensity of Russian shelling has no influence on this. If the leaders of the countries of old Europe were not even affected by the shelling of Kyiv, when the UN Secretary General was there on a visit, nor by the burial of the executed civilians being discovered right now, it is naive to think that they will be affected by additional shelling of Kyiv. 

II. What can be understood only in Ukraine.

1. In Russia, the army is perceived as something cut off from the people, sometimes opposing the people. Now in Russia contracts with the army are signed by lumpens who go to Ukraine to rob, rape and kill. And the Russians, transferring this image to Ukraine, begin to judge Ukraine by analogy with the situation in their own country. However, in the minds of Ukrainians there is no army separate from the people. The army is exactly the same Ukrainians, the same people, the same relatives and friends. For example, for me the Ukrainian army is my students, my colleagues, philosophers, religious scholars. That is why such an army, in principle, cannot shoot at peaceful cities. It would be like shooting at yourself.

2. Russians think that we refuse to believe Russian propaganda because we are affected by the opposite propaganda from the Ukrainian authorities. Here again, they judge by themselves and cannot imagine that public opinion can be formed in a fundamentally different way. There is a very high level of civil communication in Ukraine, it is enough to turn to acquaintances and you can find eyewitnesses of any events. Therefore, the main source of information is horizontal connections between people. Television and the official media are of secondary importance here, which is why it is impossible to conduct state propaganda as effectively as in Russia. If the Armed Forces of Ukraine fired at civilians, as the Russians do, it would immediately become known through horizontal connections, and no propaganda would help.

This is the fundamental advantage of Ukrainian society, which is so self-evident for me that I did not even think about it until I began to analyze the fake. However, this needs to be discussed, because not only in Russia, but also in the rest of the world, they do not understand what Ukraine's strength lies in.

Nikolai Karpitsky. June 3, 2022. Ukraine. Hundredth Day of War

I spent the first summer days in Slavyansk without electricity and the Internet. On June 1 at five in the morning I was awakened by a powerful explosion - it flew in somewhere very close, then the cannonade began. I slept for a couple more hours, then poured boiling water on the oatmeal, and then the electricity went out again. Never had a chance to find out if anyone was hurt by the hit. The most unpleasant is the unknown, when there is no Internet and no way to assess the real danger to the city.

The previous morning, when the missile hit the residential sector of Slavyansk, three people were killed, six were wounded. Before that, the news reported that Russian troops were already fighting in Severodonetsk, and we were being attacked from the direction of Liman. Seversky Donets is on their way, but the enemy only needs to reach the coast and deploy cannon artillery there to begin methodically destroying Slavyansk. For now, Ukrainian troops hold the village of Old Caravan and do not let the orcs reach the shore. But no one knows how long ours will hold out. So the fate of Slavyansk is decided not by kilometers, but by hundreds of meters. There has been no water for a long time. Water and sanitation authority reported that this was due to an accident that de-energized the water intake in the village of Mayaki. This is in the same place, towards Liman on the bank of Seversky Donets, only from our side. So even if the water supply is restored, it will not be for long, although there is not much hope for that either.

Without electricity you have to save battery charge. The only thing left to do was to sunbathe and ride a bike around the city. Although it feels somewhat awkward when you are sunbathing, and combat aircraft are flying low right above you. Every day there are fewer people in the city, but the stores are open. Although they are closed in the center, you can buy everything you need in the central market, though at inflated prices. My house is on a mountain, and it offers a spectacular view for miles. When it starts to darken, white flashes flicker over the horizon - a battle is going on somewhere very far away, but no sounds are heard. So you can see directly that even when we have silence, desperate fighting continues throughout the Donbass arc, and people are dying there now.

The electricity came on last night, and the first thing I did was check the news. For two days, the occupiers have not advanced anywhere, and that cheers. The offensive is fizzling out, which means that Slavyansk has a chance to survive, although you should not count on it much.

When the invasion of Ukraine began, I hoped it would be an ordinary war between states. Now one makes war not to conquer other countries, but to solve political problems, for example, to impose the implementation of Minsk-2 on Ukraine, or to shift the power and create a pro-Russian government in Ukraine. The tasks are obviously unfeasible, but Putin does not know this. However, he unleashed an all-out war without explaining its purpose (he talked about some kind of denazification, but no one understood what it meant). It quickly became clear that this was a war of conquest. But what kind? If similar to the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, then there was hope that, at least to make it easier to govern, the occupiers would not deliberately set the inhabitants of conquered territories against themselves. But even these illusions were quickly dispelled when the systematic bombing of residential neighborhoods, shelling of buses with children, mass rapes, tortures and murders began. The enemy did not even try to pretend to be a "defender of Russian-speakers”. This is no longer a colonial war, but a civilizational war of annihilation. Fighting the aggressor, Ukraine is fighting for universal human values against barbarism, which comes from irrational mindsets (standpoints). They can be called "ethical Satanism”.

On an existential level, I feel it this way. A wave of orcs destroy everything in front of them, then occupy the territory plowed by artillery, and thus slowly move towards my house. Appealing to their human side is useless, and no mercy is to be expected from them. Naturally, I see the orcs as enemies and want them to be destroyed. But they also see me as an enemy and want to destroy me. What is the difference? Both sides equally see each other as enemies. However, there is an ethical gap between our positions.

Orcs perceive everyone who wants to live their own life, independent of Russia, as enemies, because they consider the whole world around them to be evil. Putin himself promised that the destruction of this world would lead them to paradise. Therefore, all of us who now live in Ukraine are automatically considered the embodiment of evil and are enemies for them. They can only allow those who submit to them to survive, and that with no guarantee.

This position stems from the Manichean worldview, in which evil is attributed to the very existence of the world. The surrounding world is perceived as hostile and subject to either subjugation or destruction. I call this picture of the world demonic, or simply put, Satanism. However, I use these terms not as a curse, but as concepts that can be used scientifically. I can argue this.

From antiquity there is an understanding of evil as incompleteness of good, and in Christianity this understanding is specified: evil is interpreted as an incorrect direction of will, denying good. In Buddhism, the world is perceived as neutral. Thus, from a universal human position, with which both believers and atheists will agree, it is unacceptable to attribute evil to the very essence of anything. Contrary to this, the Manichean worldview attributes evil precisely to the essence of the world. This is not Satanism yet, but the way to it, which still has a few steps to be taken.

First step. Evil is attributed to the very essence of the enemy. Therefore, in relation to the enemy, all ethical responsibility is abolished. 

Second step. The individual ceases to evaluate his behavior ethically, as he justifies any of his actions by the presence of an enemy. If there is no enemy, it must be found, and this becomes a universal explanatory principle.

Third step. The value system is reversed: if good is done to the enemy, it is considered evil, and if evil, it is considered good. A new system of values is being built, in which good and evil are interchanged.

Last step. A person begins to do evil, which is no longer motivated by his human interests, but by an inverted system of values. If evil has not human, but some other motivation, what do you call it? In all cultures, it is called demonic, and in Christianity it is also called satanic. Regardless of whether we recognize the existence of otherworldly spiritual entities or not, it would be more correct to call a value system based on the inhuman motivation of evil ethical demonism. Since the word "demonic" has too wide range of associations with various artistic images, the term "ethical Satanism" can be used in certain contexts.

If Putin simply wanted to conquer Ukraine, it would be pointless to bomb residential quarters and shoot refugees. Orcs, killing everyone, destroying everything in their path, have no human motivation to do so. They see all of us as enemies based on their own demonic worldview.

 

I consider them enemies, too. But unlike them, I do not treat anyone as an enemy on the basis of their essence or natural qualities. I will never consider anyone an enemy based on place of residence, nationality, race, religion, culture, citizenship or language. For me, the enemy is only one who has self-determined to evil. It is his choice, and I believe that this choice must be confronted by force, and if necessary by military force, which is what Ukraine is doing now, saving the civilized world from this evil.

Nikolai Karpitsky. May 30, 2022. Ukraine. Ninety-sixth day of the war

I began writing the post yesterday, so it begins with the events of yesterday. Since there was no electricity, I could not finish right away.

It was quiet in the morning. Alexander Reshetnik told on Facebook about his trip to the village of Bogorodichnoye. It is between us and Izyum, two kilometers from Svyatogorsk. The Russian military is constantly bombing it, they destroyed the Orthodox church there. I glued together a video from Alexander and as soon as I uploaded it to YouTube, they cut off the light and water. It turns out to be the same all over the city. I understood this when I crossed Slavyansk on a bicycle. Despite the good weather, the number of people on the streets in the middle of the day was about the same as usual at six o'clock in the morning. 

The city really began to look like a front-line one.

Someone was mowing the lawn in front of their house. Most often, the howling of sirens is now heard, in second place are the sounds of lawn mowers. The threat of the destruction of the city is quite tangible - from the Liman side, the invaders have already approached us at ten kilometers or even less. Despite this, people are trying to preserve the life of peace as much as possible.

When I returned home, there was light, but no water or Internet. Then the cannonade started again, the electricity was finally gone, and the phone stopped picking up the connection. So, it's for a long time. Then I sat down to write this post while there was a charge in the laptop battery, but I was completely cut off from the outside world. The orcs would break through, and I wouldn't know. But this is already a fantasy - yesterday their offensive slowed down, there is hope that the offensive will soon fizzle out. Although who knows... The cannonade is intense, a helicopter is circling somewhere, I don't know if it's ours or the enemy's.

The invaders are trying to demoralize us, which is why they are destroying infrastructure, especially water supplies and power lines. Without the Internet, it is impossible to assess the degree of danger. As I write, telephone connection has been restored, which is a good sign, but the cannonade has not subsided, there is no electricity. It is very difficult for people in such a situation, so I decided to outline my reflections on spiritual practice in the frontline zone, namely, the method of overcoming fear and despair. If spiritual practice isn't interesting now, you can read no further than this point.

* * *

The premise of practice is the ability to distinguish between two spheres of mental life: the external sphere of experience given to me and, in its depths, the inner sphere of my efforts of will. Emotional experiences in these spheres manifest themselves in different ways.

1. Fear.

In the external psychic realm, fear manifests itself as an experience given to me that presses on me, restrains my actions, but I can resist it just like any external force. But as soon as I let fear into my inner psychic realm, it turns into a force that acts from within my effort, replacing my will, and gives the effort its own inertia. Thus, my volitional effort ceases to be mine and is further driven only by fear. This is how a state of complete absorption in fear arises, in which I lose myself and my will. However, until I have allowed fear into my inner realm, it cannot subdue my will, remaining merely a mental event from which I can turn my back. 

In order for fear to subdue the will of a person, a special act of consent is needed for this fear to pass from the external mental sphere to the internal one. In accordance with this, the method of overcoming fear is defined, the essence of which is to separate oneself from the emotional experience, to make fear only an external phenomenon, like a traffic light indicating when it is safe to cross the road and when it is not. But since fear has its own power, tending to penetrate into the inner sphere of the psyche, constant effort of the will is required in order not to let it in.

Many people say that they cannot resist when fear takes over the body and penetrates through it. Therefore, it is necessary to control not only emotions, but also the body. For example, I immediately see a student's fear at the exam by the rhythm of breathing, smoothness or angularity of movements, and on this basis I try to support him morally. To prevent fear from penetrating inside yourself through the body, you need to change the rhythm of breathing. It is best to reproduce the rhythm that corresponds to a calm and confident state. Then you can already make sure that the movements of the body remain as natural as usual, not allowing them to get out of step under the influence of fear. This brings back the familiar natural sense of the body, which should be extended to the entire surrounding reality, as if it were an extension of one's own body.

However, if the fear has already penetrated into the inner sphere of the psyche and it is no longer useful to turn away and control the body, then it will be necessary to retreat even further inland, to pass to a new line of defense, as the Ukrainian army does, when the enemy artillery mixes the forward position with the ground. In this way, the inner sphere of effort of the will, which is seized by fear, becomes external in relation to the new inner position from which one can look at one's fear again detachedly, like a spectator of a horror movie who suddenly realizes that the events on the screen do not affect him in any way.

Despair.

Despair is more difficult to fight, because it not only paralyzes the will, but also forms such a false perception of reality, which develops into a closed isolated world, in which a feeling of helplessness and senselessness of any efforts overflows, and there is no more strength to get out of it. Here, too, one has to retreat within oneself, for it is no longer useful to cling to everything that is dear, to old attachments, hopes, habits.

When despair completely deprives you of all your strength, the only thing left to do is to move inward to an inner position and abandon your usual life, however, not to remain a bystander, but to find the strength within yourself to rebuild a new reality. At first, it will be difficult, for in the state of detachment from everything, it becomes empty inside. It is impossible to immediately fill this empty space with the whole world. The world will be built anew gradually as the new sense of life is revealed in actions. Let it be very small things at first, like mowing the lawn, when it seems it makes no sense of doing anything at all, but then, when the new power of life is awakened, you can become a real creator of your own destiny.

3. Loss of will to live.

Despair is followed by the most dangerous temptation - loss of will to live, when it seems that there is no point in living and you want to die sooner in order to free yourself from the need for pointless efforts. I could give many reasons as to why this position is false, but I will not do so, for this issue is not polemical but spiritual, and is linked to self-determination. Either we assume that nothing makes sense, or that existence in itself is good, despite the fact that life is difficult. But if so, even in the face of imminent death one must fight for every minute of life, for every moment is self-valuable regardless of the circumstances. The only way to overcome this temptation is through this kind of value-based self-determination, and no other methodology is likely to help.

I think that the current war between Russia and Ukraine is also a war for the highest spiritual value. For the occupiers, life is not intrinsically valuable and must be sacrificed for imperial ideas. Therefore, they destroy the civilian population and do not consider their own losses. Putin simply brought this imperial ideology to its logical end - to necrophilic imperialism. For its adherents, the meaning of heroism is heroic death, so they do not understand that for Ukrainians a hero must survive, because life is the highest value. Recently, a Russian fascist who fancies himself a philosopher reproached the Azov people for not wanting to die heroically. Even the heroism of the Russian fascists must necessarily be necrophilic. They can’t understand that Ukrainians fight not for the symbols of heroism, but for the sake of life, so the heroes must live, and Ukraine will do anything for this. 

Nikolai Karpitsky. May 23, 2022. Ukraine. Eighty-ninth day of war

The past week has been hot. I thought that by May 9 the enemy will have exhausted all reserves, but it seems he has the opportunity to replenish the troops. Ours are also replenished and saturated with new weapons, as evidenced by the intensity of the cannonade. In the middle of the week, the occupiers broke through the defenses around Popasnaya and advanced in all directions at once. In the north, they seek to encircle Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, and in the west they want to capture Bakhmut, from which they can attack any city in the Donbass. Several days have passed, and so far Ukrainian troops are holding them back on the new line of defense. Fighting was fierce on Friday and Saturday. They were shooting very close to us. It looks like everything was involved - aviation, howitzers, hailstones and other rocket launchers. The planes are flying very low above us, I think they’re ours, otherwise they’d be shot at by stingers. Today again, disturbing news comes from Liman and Mironovsky. The enemy is advancing, and it is not yet clear at what lines it can be stopped.

Yesterday I rode my bike to Good News Church. Most of its members have already evacuated. I thought there would be no one, but there were a lot of people, more than two hundred. It's already new ones coming in. At least a fifth of those present were at the meeting for the first time. The city is alive, but people and cars are three times less than usual. I think that only a third of the inhabitants remained in the city. In stores, the range of goods has been greatly reduced, prices are twice as high as before the war.

The adherents of the rashism are upset that there was no blitzkrieg, nevertheless they rejoice at the advancement of their troops, albeit slow. They are indifferent about losses, they believe that they have unlimited reserves of old equipment and conscripts, which means that sooner or later they will squeeze. First they will surround the Donbass group, then they will finish off the remaining military units. We see the situation differently. The invaders are being held back even with the forces that were initially available. And while the enemy is expending his last forces in an attempt to break through our defenses, we are preparing new reserves, equipped with Western weapons.

This is how it looks in a broad panorama, but here in the Donbas everything is perceived differently, more concretely. In the first weeks of the war, the enemy attacked in five directions at once, and the Ukrainian army withstood the onslaught on the limit of its possibilities. Now the enemy has concentrated half of all his forces in just one area from Izyum to Popasnaya, and is pressing with all this power. He destroyed Mariupol, Volnovakha, Popasnaya, and Rubezhnoye to the ground, and now he is destroying Liman. Ukrainians fight desperately, professionally and creatively. But it is impossible to fight without mistakes, and any mistake can be fatal. However, there is no choice but to hold back the enemy's advance while our reserves are slowly being saturated with Western weapons. 

This morning I saw a video that Alexander Reshetnik posted on his Facebook. I met him back in 2015, during a trip to the frontline zone. This is a real hero of Donbass, a volunteer of the Good News Church. Since 2014, he has been taking people out of the shelling zone, he was captured. This morning he went to Liman. The murderous naivety of ordinary people is astounding: they posted information about the place and time of evacuation. Did they seriously think that the rashists would not shoot at the refugees? Of course, the evacuation point was bombed and then they tried to hit Alexander's car as he drove back. In this connection, I collected all short videos about his trips to Liman, combined them and named "Liman under siege - May 2022. Alexander Reshetnik" posted on my YouTube channel.

The refugees should return, and their homes must be rebuilt. But this is only possible through the complete defeat of the invading army. Neither through negotiations, nor through a peace agreement, nor through a gradual military displacement beyond the state borders, namely, the defeat of the enemy with encirclements and his mass surrenders. No peace agreements with the ruling regime in Russia are possible.

As a schoolboy, back in Soviet times, on the instructions of a teacher, I read a book in which it was argued that once Hitler occupied Austria, he thereby abolished Germany's right to exist. Whoever agrees with this will have to agree with the fact that Putin has abolished Russia’s right to exist. At least formally, since in fact he destroyed the state long ago, replacing it with a mafia-Chekist anti-state hierarchy. But here is a question: don't the inhabitants of Russia have the right to their own state? I am not disputing the right itself, but I will respond with this analogy. Suppose the tenants, through negligence, let criminals into their house who keep them in fear, the house was torn to the ground, and then the neighbors were attacked. But the neighbors turned out to be stronger, and the criminals were dealt with. Do tenants have a right to their home? Of course they do. Only this house does not exist. And there is no power to rebuild it. But the bandits can come back to terrorize the tenants again. You can't do without outside help, but there;s no one who is obliged to help. And if help comes, then not the tenants themselves, but others will decide what and how to rebuild. This is exactly what happened with Nazi Germany, in the footsteps of which Putin's Russia is following.