I started writing this piece in an underground garage turned bomb shelter in the western Ukraine city of Lviv. Situated about 80km from the Polish border, it has not yet been shelled by the Russian military. While the air-aid sirens were going off every day during the first week of the full-scale invasion of my country, Tuesday night was the first time I bothered to take cover. I was trying to score responsibility points with my parents: they were about to go over the border to Poland and needed to see that their daughter, bent on remaining in Ukraine, was not putting herself in harm’s way.
Yet the harm is all over my country. Vladimir Putin, better known in Ukraine as khuilo (“dickhead” – my people have never been known for their deference), planned to conquer this land in two days. His delusion has been exposed by a pre-written article, Offensive of Russia and the New World, which was mistakenly published by one of the main Russian news outlets on 26 February. Having failed to crush the armed forces of Ukraine with his murderous blitzkrieg, Putin is terrorising its civilian population.
Thousands of civilians arrive here in Lviv every day from the east as well as the capital. They sleep on the floors in theatres and research institutions. Local businesses are transforming their operations to support the war effort. Instead of beer, a trendy brewery is filling bottles with molotov cocktails. A metallurgical plant specialising in copper cable is producing anti-tank obstacles. Teenagers are fortifying checkpoints with sandbags instead of going to school. Hundreds and hundreds of volunteers are queueing at military registration offices to sign up and join the army. And while the most vulnerable are fleeing westwards, more than 80,000 Ukrainian economic migrants, mostly men, have come back home to fight. I can relate to their sentiment, having come here from London at the beginning of February in anticipation of the big war to come, looking for a way to be of help.
Whereas Lviv has been spared the artillery fire so far, my home region of Zaporizhzhia, in the east of the country, is the scene of active fighting. The Russians have been shelling the nuclear power plant there – the largest in Europe, and the source of a fifth of Ukraine’s power. Before the shelling began, peaceful residents gathered at the entrance to Enerhodar, the small town where the plant is based, to meet the invaders – a few handfuls of civilians trying to shield the world from a nuclear catastrophe with their bodies. An initial fire caused by the shelling has now been extinguished, but the Russians have seized the plant and the danger is far from over.
Ukraine’s military and civil society should not be facing the Kremlin’s madman and his troops alone. It is bad enough that the international community has been looking in the other direction for eight years, since the start of the Russian war against Ukraine. It is bad enough that the world has failed to protect Ukraine as it promised when, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances. At this point, the world is facing the choice of either standing in front of the Russian tanks or behind them. This is the choice that Ukrainians have been deprived of by the western appeasement strategies and inaction. Further and ever more painful sanctions, enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine to protect civilians, halting all business with Russian companies, stopping trading in oil and gas and ramping up the military support of Ukraine will force the aggressor to negotiate a ceasefire instead of turning up to negotiations with grotesque ultimatums.
I said goodbye to my parents on the seventh day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They have now crossed the border into Poland, and are about to join my husband in Germany. I am staying in Lviv to help coordinate displaced people coming from the east and reporters coming from the west. I promised to meet my family under the peaceful sky and raise a glass to Ukraine’s victory. They know that I am obsessive about keeping my promises. However, I will require an unprecedented global effort to help me with this one.
Sasha Dovzhyk is special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London. She is currently based in Lviv
