Here is the exercise I’ve met in one of the Telegram groups on psychological practices:
- Write a letter to your future self about the feelings and experiences you have today;
- Hide it in the pocket of your winter jacket or any other place you’ll find it once a year;
- When rereading the letter and recalling the events of that time, note the changes, thus emphasizing your role in them.
I wrote the letter and decided to publish it here.
Below is Part 2. You’re welcome to check Part 1 first, telling about the March and April I had in Kyiv after the active phase of the war started.
________________________________________________________________
May has come.
Finally, you start sensing something that looks like spring in the air. It’s warm outside; it’s time to pick summer clothes out of your wardrobe’s rat hole. Having been frozen since February 2022, your brain wakes up with bad grace, trying to accept that life goes on.
After their pathetic katabasis from the Kyiv region and the north, Russian troops throw all their efforts to the east — Donetsk and Luhansk regions — and the south of Ukraine.
Mariupol and Azovstal remain their pain in the ass:
#SaveMariupol, #SaveAzovstal
Our military remains there, many civilians use the plant as a shelter, and there is no way the occupiers can break through and capture everyone permanently. The shelling does not stop, and our people are trapped inside without ammunition, food, or water. There are many wounded and no one to provide them with necessary medical assistance…
The occupiers do not allow the evacuation of civilians and the wounded; they constantly disrupt agreements. We ask the whole world to help and act as a third party to get out people from bombings, but everyone just shrugs their shoulders.
Everyone just keeps watching. There are tons of reasons for such a reaction, but average Ukrainians feel helpless and betrayed. You feel discouraged; you can’t understand how it becomes possible in 2022: The whole civilized world can’t stop one mad terrorist whose zombified creatures bring the European nation to naught.
…Finally, civilians leave Azovstal. So does the military later. Aggressors don’t allow taking them to Ukrainian-controlled territory:
They force people to go through screening and filtration camps — how is it even possible in the 21st century?! — and send them to Russia’s hick-ass towns. Hundreds of the Azov regiment’s representatives are taken captive.
Mariupol gets occupied, and there’s almost nothing left of the city: ruins, hundreds of corpses in the streets and under the rubble of buildings, environmental disaster, lack of food for the remaining residents… Russian TV creates a beautiful false picture of a “finally liberated city.”
And we are all waiting for it and all our heroes to return.
No one sees or knows what they have to endure as prisoners of Russian beasts. Inquisitions and tortures are the least we can expect, and we can only wait and hope…
UPD (2023): Some are back, but 700+ remain POV’s tortured by russian terrorists.
The core military operations move to the east of the country. Our army drives the enemy away from Kharkiv, and people are slowly beginning to return to the city despite the remaining threat of shelling and bombing. The Russian borders are super close to Kharkiv, and they are constantly launching missiles. It’s just unrealistically infuriating that no one can do anything about it:
The sky is open.
#Kharkiv, Ukraine
Your sister and her family return to Kharkiv though the situation remains unstable. Their apartment is unliveable at the moment: windows are absent, shell splinters are in the rooms, and the neighborhood itself is still under attack.
They take belongings from the apartment and move to relatives living on the city’s other side.
Do you remember her stories about the city’s dire state, don’t you?
Holes in the walls, buildings blackened by fire, piles of stones on the roads — it’s all painful to observe. And for those who have never seen it with their own eyes, it’s hard to imagine.
We keep screaming about the war. The world shouldn’t forget that it’s not just a conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
“The world has finally understood that it’s not just about Ukraine. It’s about the entire democratic community of nations.”
(Ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya, permanent representative of Ukraine in the UN, at @TheDailyShow)
Speaking of sentiment in Europe and the world, by the way:
Is Ukraine Guilty of Its Fight for Independence?
We see that not only does the world forget about the war in Ukraine, — which stands to reason: life goes on, and everyone has their own problems — but it starts looking for someone to blame for rising fuel prices, grain shortages, the threat of famine for many African countries, and so on.
And the most surprising thing is that, according to the logic of some Europeans, Ukraine is to blame!
Yes, Ukraine is to blame for being attacked, destroyed, seized, and grabbed.
Millions of Ukrainians are to blame for being forced to abandon their homes and flee the bombings.
Yes, millions of Ukrainians are to blame for being deported to the territory of the aggressor country, passed through filtration camps, losing their documents, and now having no idea where they are and no idea how they will (if at all) return home.
Hundreds of killed and thousands of orphaned Ukrainian children are to blame for someone not getting grain and having to pay a few more cents for gasoline.
Ukraine turned out to be guilty of not giving up and fighting for its independence. And yes, I almost forgot:
It turned out that “Russia must not be humiliated in Ukraine.” I’m sorry, what? Should we condone a terrorist attacking, killing, robbing, and raping a neighboring sovereign state, invading its territory, and committing genocide against its population?
It seems like the Ukrainian agenda for the rest of 2022 looks as follows:
- Win the war, but don’t engage other countries in it
- Lose the war so the terrorists wouldn’t be angry
- Solve the grain shortage problem, but don’t use guns
- Save someone’s face and ass
- Provide some countries with oil
- Prove that you have genocide
- Not to defend ourselves with weapons, to save the climate
Well, okay, let’s continue this victim-blaming. Tolerance, democracy, justice, new values — all this is bulls**t. It all ends where the money comes.
Sure thing, we feel great support from certain countries, and we are sincerely grateful for their help: Poland, Great Britain, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia…
In May, you had two trips to Warsaw to visit the Canadian embassy and get a visa, and you saw how people supported Ukraine and how open-minded and ready to help they were.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
People continue to flee from the war. The east is on fire: Fierce fighting takes place in Luhansk and Donetsk regions. The enemy has thrown all forces there and continues to bring its “russian peace,” i.e., destruction and invasive imposition of its orders.
Your parents have been under the occupiers’ control since mid-March. The Russians cut off all mobile communications and the Internet immediately, so people couldn’t get any information from the outside. Currency, documents, school curricula — everything has changed within a couple of weeks.
Now, these Ukrainian lands are part of a so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, and invaders hurry up to make it a part of Russia so they could later, when our army counterattacks, yell that we are invading the territory of another state.
The same happens in the south: Kherson, Melitopol, Berdiansk… All these territories are now under the control of rushists, willing to announce them a part of Russia (as happened to Crimea in 2014) and prevent their de-occupation.
And the longer this war continues, the more challenging it will be for us to regain our lands and people.
But we believe in our army, and we don’t get tired of telling people that no one forgets them: Our warriors are getting ready to bring them back home.
#Kyiv, Ukraine
June begins with the return of enemy shelling in Kyiv. Before that, May was relatively quiet: Yes, we heard air alerts almost every day, and missiles were flying, but our air defense shot them down.
The city is back to life:
Many people returned to Kyiv. Cafes, pharmacies, stores, and some shopping malls are open. People go to work, walk in the parks… If you don’t notice the shortage of gasoline and some products in the stores, as well as the increase in prices and the presence of the military in the streets, you would think there is no war in the country.
Many people from other regions of Ukraine even begin to accuse Kyiv residents of “forgetting about the war.” But it’s not so.
Nowhere is safe now: constant air alerts, curfew, donations for defense and demining, medical aid, and rebuilding — it’s our new reality for years.
The morning of June 5 starts with a new attack: Five missiles come to Kyiv’s left coast and hit the cargo wagon repair facility. Apart from the hell in the east and south of Ukraine, that’s another disaster Russians are trying to do now all over the country:
They want to destroy everything related to our railway infrastructure and railroads because it’s our lifeline now. Trains evacuate people, deliver humanitarian aid, bring cargo, help global leaders willing to visit Ukrainian cities…
Now, the railway is the main transport archery of our country, which makes it the #1 target for Russian missiles.
Moreover, they are trying to destroy all the railway bridges to block arms supplies from our Western partners.
No matter what, people are trying to make some plans for the future. They trust our army, believe in our imminent victory, and are ready to do everything they can to make it happen.
You are back to sports, look for an auto school to get a driving license, and start writing again. Doesn’t it look like a step-by-step recovery from the shock that shackled you back in February?
We will win, I promise.
June 2022
I first published this on my website — WritingBreeze.com back in 2022. But now I see Medium as a better place for it: While my website is more about my professional endeavors, Medium looks like a journal where I can trust my thoughts and worries.
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