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.
