Look Mom, No Hope - March 2nd 2024

March 2nd 2024

Yuriy talks about the friend he lost at the start of the war, and how he feels his fate is down to luck.

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TRANSCRIPT: (Podbean app users can enjoy closed captions)

  It is 2nd of March. 

Two years ago, I learned about the death of my first friend in this great war, a young, vibrant guy with a wheat colored hair and a mustache. He resembled a hero from an American movie about the Vietnam War or the second World war, you know the type of young Robert Redford. He proposed to his girlfriend on the eve of a full scale invasion where you are supposed to get married in the summer of 2022. He had so many plans for that summer, he was convinced that the war would be over before the warmth arrived. 

We all thought so. We all desperately wanted to believe that it wouldn't last long, but it was almost an adventure, a bit dangerous, but noble and interesting. And then, bam, one of us was gone and another one died a few days later. And by summer, news about friends who went missing, we were killed or captured, came in dozens. It's just an endless stream of funerals. Endless.  

A journalist I once worked with recently wrote a piece that includes the words "Our cemeteries are now bigger than some of our towns." Of course, it's artistic exaggeration, but there are indeed so many new graves that I feel sick near cemeteries. Thousands of the best sons and daughters of Ukraine have fallen into the ground forever because of a savage stupidity and cruelty of our enemies. We have a tradition of placing  the pole with a national flag on the grave of a fallen soldier, and our cemeteries are just a sea of these flags. 

 War is such a wild thing, where often your fate depends not on how trained, motivated, and brave you are, but on a pure chance. Once a Russian shell landed a few meters from the car I was in. It would have been certain death, but it just didn't explode. Sank into the dirt and that's it. It's just luck and nothing more, and for some reason not everyone is that lucky. Why? It's a big mystery to me. 

Honestly, I envy people who believe in God. We can somehow explain, or at least peacefully accept this unfairness of life, this randomness of death. Nonbelievers don't have that. We see no logic, no heavenly purpose in this horror. We just know we have to keep fighting, even when there is nothing, not even hope left.