Today I thought I would relax for a while from the daily grind of living in a war zone. I would go out and smoke a shisha pipe, and I would enjoy the cobbled streets and the beautiful people and the autumnal weather, and I would cast off the shackles of the looming Ukrainian war and the steady, slow but relentless Russian advances in the East, and I would have a day to myself. It was not to be.
I must make arrangements for an imminent trip East. This involves meticulous preparation of trains (the tickets are never easy to buy for difficult journeys to the front line); choosing your hotels with care; preparing your team for the need to carry the right sort of body armour; making sure your medical kit is up to date; studying roads and maps and evacuation options in case things go wrong; studying military reports of recent front line activity; communications with your team; and all the other things that are part and parcel of hazardous travel in military zones.
I found myself awake early, writing messages in Ukrainian and Russian to accommodation options, booking train and bus tickets, writing to car rental companies, coordinating with my team, and doing all the other things that are necessary incidents to front line travel that I have done before but you must repeat the procedures again and again, each time you undertake a trip of this kind.
By 5pm I thought I had finished my work, but it stretched on until 9pm as I calmly sat in my favourite shisha cafe in Lviv, Ukraine’s western and second capital, brooding on all the events ahead of me. I also undertook my repetitive languages lessons, that I engage in daily, so that I have at least some credibility with the Ukrainian people: that I speak their languages, or at least that I am trying to do so. This is particularly important when one travels in the East, up and down the front line, where English is not spoken in more than mere fragments.
Exhausted, at 9pm, I decided to go to have a drink in my favourite bar. I sat next to a gentleman from an unnamed country, extremely polite, who told me without desperation in his voice that he was here because he had no options and because a large and unnamed country intends to apply the death penalty to him. So he has no choice but to come to Ukraine to fight. He was a fit and healthy man but he had failed the physical test for the International Legion. So he didn’t know what to do. He said he had come here, fully expecting to die: because that is a realistic assessment for people who join the International Legion (the foreign soldiers) who are part of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and who are treated as cattle. He had money, but he had no other choices. He told me all these things with a blank and calm face. And I felt sobered by the fact that this man had come here to die for Euro-Atlantic values, from a far side of the world, and that he faced his destiny with such stiff resolve.
We chatted and I talked to a few other members of the international volunteer community I know here. My favourite NGO in Lviv is by all accounts awash with confrontational behaviour, drama and discord. What happened to it? It was once such a harmonious place, a group of friends trying to help Ukraine, now dominated by primadonnas each fighting with the other and thereby derogating from the common purpose of supporting Ukraine in her intractable battles with Russia. Now the volunteer community in Lviv fights one-another, individuals attacking one-another relentlessly. What’s the point of that? Why don’t we overcome personal conflicts and differences and fight for the common cause? Personal selfishness and competitiveness destroy the work that NGO’s are trying to do. And in a war zone, there is no effective government regulation that can be applied to prevent this sort of economically destructive behaviour.
Then, at 10.30pm, my good friend came over to see me, with Halloween make-up showing blood-stained tears down her eyes. I could tell that she wanted a conversation with someone, anyone. So I talked to her and I introduced her to my friends, and maybe she was a little drunk, and I understood there was a problem from her tear-glazed eyes. Just a few weeks earlier, I had met her lovely husband, and they are very much in love. And now he is on the front of the Zero Line, in a place I cannot name, and he is at daily risk of death. She told my friend, who was outfitted in military fatigues, that nobody who dresses in olive can be sane. And she lives in daily and nightly torment, knowing that her beloved husband could die at any moment.
So I put my troubles to one side, and I walked home with a sombre mood in my step, and I came home to write these words. Because whatever we do to help Ukraine, it is nothing compared to the dangers, risks, and palpable risks of death that those heroes of Ukraine undertake to keep their country independent and free from the malign Russian influence. We foreigners have no right to engage in our petty squabbles with one-another when Ukrainians are going through such suffering in the interests of a just cause. We should pull ourselves together. I am embarrassed by internal squabbles within the international community in Ukraine. We have nothing to complain about. This is just an extended vacation for us, compared to the relentless pain and suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the Heroes.