The war in Ukraine two years later

This article on the war in Ukraine is published in issue 10 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 5 March 2024.

The third year of war in Ukraine has begun. Last Saturday, the second anniversary of the Russian attack, I participated in a reading sponsored by UNESCO which was taking place simultaneously in Milan and in fourteen other cities, from Melbourne to Reykjavik, from Edinburgh to Krakow. We read works of Ukrainian writers and poets such as Isaak Babel, the author of the beautiful Tales of Odessa, killed by Stalin in 1940, and the young Viktoria Amelina, who died on July 1 last year because a Russian missile hit the pizzeria where she was having dinner, in Kramatorsk. Vika, as her friend and editor who sent us a video made with Paolo Giordano calls her, since the war broke out she had become above all an activist and a poet. We read her “non-poetry” which says that the war had eaten up her prose “as if a grenade had fallen on her tongue”. Since last summer, when the Ukrainian counteroffensive stalled, there has been more sadness in the country. But no one wants to give up, and no one trusts to negotiate with Putin. When I was in Odessa last year I met people of different ages but all sharing a great pride and courage. I spent the last afternoon of the year with an 85-year-old Odessa writer, Yevgeny Golubovsky, who lived in a house without light or heating but full of books and beautiful paintings.
There was also his daughter Anna Golubovskaja, a photographer, with whom we became friends. Yevgeny died of illness this summer, a month after Viktoria Amelina. The evening before the reading on Saturday I wrote to Anna asking how she was.
She replied that she was under bombardment and that she was afraid of the relief she would feel when the alarm sounded and she found herself alive, knowing that the bombs had hit someone else a couple of miles away. «Causing terror is not just killing but scaring people, depriving them of their humanity. This is why they shoot at night, when a person is defenseless. But for two years we have remained human and considered the pain of others as our own. We resist, we hope, we believe.
And that means that no matter what happens, we win every day.”

Source: Vanity Fair

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