Slouching Towards Maidan 🇺🇦🚨

Russia began its full-scale invasion 836 days ago. Since then: unimaginable suffering, displacement, war crimes, and economic and environmental destruction. It's easy to grow numb. Let’s not.

Photo by Vony Razom on Unsplash

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It’s like falling asleep driving a car. You know it’s happening as your head starts to jerk, but you can’t will yourself to pull over.

The facts on the ground in Ukraine are not promising. The fight to liberate Ukraine from the invader has stalled. Ukraine is running out of manpower. Arms shipments are held up. Budgets are slow-walked. Supply chains are failing. Kharkiv is reeling. Generals don’t know where they can point their weapons. There’s diplomatic chaos and ambassadorial double-talk. God knows there are Kremlin talking points in the halls of Congress.

We should get real about it. On the current trajectory, Ukraine will lose. Putin may soon stroll casually about Maidan Square shaking hands with actors and informants.

He is, of course, predictable. He’ll hold grave, four-hour press conferences taking scripted questions about Nazis from the audience. With a straight face he’ll talk about a grand vision for reconstruction and providing care for the mothers and daughters “raped by Ukrainian soldiers” – all while duct tape and electricity rip and crackle in town hall basements.

Vodka will flow again. Crimean beaches will be safe for Russian tourists. Vulgar oligarchs with wet lips will dollop caviar onto crab cakes. Western European and American leaders will pose in front of flags and preen and point fingers.

Today’s apologists will become tomorrow’s pearlclutchers.

This war will never be forgotten by its victims, and if Russia didn’t believe there was a true Ukrainian people before the war, well they’ve forged one now.

Shame on all of them.

If America’s honor is exhausted in retreat and our word spoiled before our enemies and allies, Eastern Europe will tremble and second-guess our constancy. Taiwan will gird for a lonely, inevitable fight.

If we continue as we have, the current trajectory will lose this war. With the grind down of the Ukrainian people and the losses that Putin is willing to sustain, it’s hard to believe that Moscow won’t be victorious. Look at the Soviet-era horrors the man has already committed against his own people! My god, the young Russian men who have fallen for this man.

The butchery of it all, the cannon-fodder tragedy, the rape of two nations.

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At the beginning of the war, in the early days of the fight, when men and munitions and hope were more plentiful, I discovered a mobile application online: Air Alerts! by Ajax Systems.

Its function was straightforward: notify Ukrainians through their cell phones when there were incoming attacks. It advised users to proceed to shelter at once. Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame provided a voiceover for the English language version. Zelenskiy shook Luke Skywalker‘s hand in a presidential office photo op.

Like ten million others, I downloaded the app onto my phone.

The idea was that you pick one or more regions where you or your loved ones are located, and when there is an incoming attack, your phone blares an early warning. At the same time a notification pops up on your phone screen. You get a few minutes – at most – of headstart to get to safety. A basement? A subway? A hospital?

No, not a hospital.

Not a garden center.

Not a church.

Not a kindergarten.

We should get real about it. Ukraine may very well lose. Putin may soon get off a plane in Kyiv and walk about Maidan Nezalezhnosti shaking hands with actors and informants.

I picked the Khersonska region northwest of the Crimean peninsula.

My hope was that using the app would keep me mentally connected to the war. Even then, I worried about my own war fatigue, the inevitable half-life of compassion. It was a personal strategic move downloading it.

The evening I installed it, the air alarm began to blare at 3:00AM. The siren was deafening in the bedroom. In my middle of night confusion, I had no idea what the siren was. My wife was frightened. I staggered to the sill and struggled to turn it off.

Adrenaline shot through me because I understood how the application did its actual job with the civilians in Ukraine who needed it. Now I knew the application worked and the horror that it both broadcast and saved civilians from.

But the application was too real. It was too loud. You couldn’t turn the volume down. It was too much for me, my suffering was too great!, and I turned the siren off with a rush of shame. I had that luxury thousands of miles away.

But still I decided not to remove the application from my phone, because I wanted to stay connected with something real, maintain some sober awareness of suffering, stay connected to the immediate and visceral and unfiltered. I configured my settings so that I still received screen notifications when there were air alerts in Khersonska. Just to remind me this is real and happening right now whether I am awake or asleep.

They pop onto my phone screen incessantly. There is the initial alert, and then there is an all clear. Red icon then green icon. Red and green. Seek shelter. Incoming. All clear. Endlessly. Daily. Twice daily. More.

If I am on headphones, Siri reads the notification to me.

“Red emoji…”

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The people of my “adopted” region of Khersonska must be exhausted, beaten, shellshocked from the bombing. Khersonska couldn’t be further from the epicenter of battle, but even there the Russian artillery attack rains down senselessly, endlessly. Maybe war is cruelest when it is strategically cruel.

Maybe the Khersonska bombings are payback for the AFU reclaiming its city back in the fall of 2022. Maybe payback looks like this slow, grinding artillery attack to wear a battered population down, village by village, building by building, landmark by landmark, generator by generator, hospital by hospital.

Red and green. Red and green. Proceed to safety. Basement. All clear. Red and green…

This war will never, ever, ever be forgotten by its victims. If Russia struggled to believe there was a true Ukrainian people before the war, well they’ve forged one now.

In time, like all oppressors, Moscow will discover winning turns out to be far worse than losing.

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The Air Alert! application notifications won’t cry out forever.

They’ll fall silent abruptly, and if we don’t take some clear actions in the West, they will stop for the simple reason that Khersonska has fallen. Region by region around Ukraine, the little cell phone air alerts will fade, and in the end that smug devil will get off a plane in Kyiv and slouch his way towards Maidan Square.

If we – in particular the writers, dancers, painters, artists of all stripes – don’t start telling a bigger, better, clearer story than we’re telling right now, the world will fall asleep on Ukraine, and Ukraine will fall, and then shame on us all.

If they are to win, the horrors of Russian occupation will be unearthed and cataloged for a century after they are finally driven out somehow, inevitably, once again. Looking back, Bucha will be a footnote compared to what is to come if Ukraine falls. It probably is a footnote already.

But not when Ukraine falls, though: If.

If Ukraine falls.

If.

The future is still open. We can still win this if there’s the will and money and soldiers and the Kharkiv lines hold.

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This was broadcast while I’ve been writing this. Air Alert! by Ajax Systems. Download on Google and iPhone.