I have just returned FROM WAR
No one gave me a license to frighten you with war, so I never did.
I wrote in such a way that it would be clear: I have seen war, I was in it. IT IS REAL AND TRUE, even if most of us behave as though it were happening on another planet, light-years away from us.
IT IS REAL AND TRUE.
Today it has moved so close to us that I began to hear the clanking of tank tracks and smell its smell. A smell that has embedded itself in me and become part of me. An inseparable part of me. Like darkness. Like mud. Like the burned, torn bodies of my men.
This time after returning I still haven't fully recovered and already a week has passed. This time it is very hard for me. Physically. Emotionally. While in Donbas, I used to long for it like a five-star sanatorium compared to where I was then. Where I was this time, it is not hell. Because hell only quietly weeps in the corner by comparison with what is happening there, in the Kursk direction.
No one gave me a license to frighten you with war. So, I won't frighten you. I ask only one thing: open your eyes. The terrible reality is already at our door. Today.
"You know, everything is very simple," one of my soldiers begins a conversation about the course of the war without any superfluous phrases, "look, when war begins, everyone is frightened; fear drives some people to do something, to take action. Yes, some flee, but there is a certain part of people, an active core, those who volunteer - it is they who go and defend: they mobilize, they self-organize; voluntary battalions are organized. After some time, the battle line acquires some contours; the actions stabilize. And people live in such a state for about a year: of internal mobilization, fear, horror, uncertainty about what to do. And then? After a year, when all of it has somehow 'normalized,” my regiment's soldier emphasizes that he is talking specifically about Ukrainians and adds that he truly doesn't know how it would be in the Lithuanian case. "So, after a year, I mean it, after a year, they are already “tired” of war; suddenly they, civilians, already feel exhausted.
That fatigue must be stopped. Because if we begin to listen to them, we will simply lose everything, we will simply be defeated. Then it turns out that everything was done in vain - those people who were the first to run into the fire, who stopped the aggressor with their lives - all in vain, because suddenly, gradually, from civilians come such reasoning as: “…well, it's not all so clear-cut here”, “we are tired”, “there needs to be dialogue, a diplomatic solution needs to be found” the man is blunt in his criticism of civilians, repeatedly emphasizing that phrase civilians repeat, that they are supposedly “very tired of the war”. “And you know, that happened after a year”, he repeats it for the second or third time.
I thank the Media Support Fund for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”