Hundreds of Ukrainian cities and villages are under Russian occupation. For some, perhaps, these are unknown geographical names, but for millions of Ukrainians, they represent a daily suffering under the rule of brutal invaders who destroy all that is Ukrainian, including Ukrainians themselves, simply because of their nationality. Years may have passed but there are people still waiting for liberation. They hope we won’t leave them alone with murderers. Any suggestions that Ukraine will have to give up the lands seized by the Russians in exchange for a phantom peace it met with tpainful and behement opposition in the occupied territories. For those Ukrainians, such a betrayal would mean certain death and oblivion. Today, we publish the soul cry of a journalist who managed to flee, finding safety in free territory. Conscience and truth are the words that come to mind when she speaks. Please take a few minutes to read this text. We have no right to be indifferent.
No one expected the war in Ukraine to last this long… Many people around the world are tired of us—of our grief, our tears, our struggle, which has no end in sight… In the third year of Russian military aggression, we hear louder and louder voices saying with various arguments that we should stop fighting. We must negotiate, make concessions…
Dear ladies and gentlemen, all those who urge us to sit down at the negotiating table, all those who call us to stop defending Ukraine with arms in hands… Here’s what I want to tell you… You have never… never in your life dealt with such a bloody murderer and brute! You have no idea what it’s like when an endless horde of rapists, robbers, terrorists, and cannibals invade your homeland and say they have come to liberate you! Do you know how it feels, ladies and gentlemen?! Because I sure do! Because when they invaded, I was on my native Ukrainian land, the most beautiful land in the world until the dawn of that tragic day — February 24, 2022.
My land, my seaside region on the left bank of the Kherson region, breathed spring-like gentle, salty air. The sun spared no warmth. The land was covered with a gentle carpet of snowdrops, and the sea… The waves of the sea brought hundreds of amazing shells to the coast, which we collected as if they were little harbingers of summer… Summer, which is oh so real only here, in the south of Ukraine. And we had no idea that those were actually the final days, the final hours of our happy life…
On that tragic morning, the word ‘war’ burst into our cloudless reality with devastating bullets, ripping made huge holes in our lives, our dreams, and our future. The occupier turned our beautiful, fertile, and free land into a total reservation, a ghetto surrounded by hundreds of tanks and thousands of armed murderers, from which you couldn’t escape alive. We envied only birds, because only they were able to leave our war-torn land alive.
Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, what it’s like to watch your enemy take away your home, your native land day after day, step by step?! Ukrainian families are fleeing their homes, which once smelled of happiness and comfort, in fear, clutching at the hope of getting away from the war. And monsters with machine guns in their hands cross the threshold of every house, robbing, destroying, and leaving the ashes behind!
Do you know, ladies and gentlemen, what occupation is?… Because I sure do. I was there for 645 long days and nights… Do you know what it’s like? Every morning you see through your window your enemy walking leisurely, with a proud face, out of someone else’s stolen house, as if he had been the house owner all his enitre life, watching him happily throwing his assault rifle from one shoulder to another and getting into his Z-truck to go torture the patriots of Ukraine who are kept in the basement, to kill Ukrainian soldiers who defend the right bank of the Dnipro, to shoot the liberated Kherson to, to pieces…
Do you know what the hardest thing is about occupation? No, not even the fear of being killed! And not even the fear of hunger or the cold. The hardest thing is to hear the sky being torn apart by the roar of a missile flying over you towards Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Dnipro… You realize that it is flying to kill, for someone’s death… the death of innocent people, innocent children who do not even suspect that these moments of life are their last. The hardest thing is hearing and seeing this roar in the sky and realizing that you are helpless, you can do nothing to stop this death. To live under occupation is to see these missiles — huge iron killers — transported through your city, your streets almost every day… Then from enemy positions, on criminal orders, they fly into the air and hit Ukrainian hospitals, maternity homes, schools, kindergartens, and playgrounds…
And you tell us you want us to lay down our weapons and sit down at the negotiating table?… Tell me, what is there to talk about with those who do not consider you a human being just because you are Ukrainian?! With those who break the silence of your morning sleep with a raid of armed murderers with trained military dogs, who enter people’s homes wielding a sledgehammer, just in case someone fails to open their door to the uninvited ‘liberators’… With those who throw a sack over your head and take you to an unknown destination for interrogation and torture you just because you didn’t take a Russian passport, because you didn’t cooperate with the enemy, with the invader of your land! With those who lure children with candy before raping them to death in front of their mothers… Just how many children have died a violent death like this under occupation!… Will the world ever learn the truth about this and will it be able to tell us so light-heartedly afterwards that we should stop defending our land and instead negotiate?..
Or maybe you think that people in the occupation, on the left bank of the Kherson Oblast, are no longer waiting for liberation?! That everyone there is happy about the arrival of the ‘Russian world’?! If so, oh you are so very wrong! Ukrainians do not renounce their roots even when they have been in the occupier’s murderous clutches for months… I will never forget the tragic story that shook our entire occupied region in the fall of 2023. In the village of Mali Kopani, in the middle of the night, Russian soldiers broke into a young family’s house. Anastasia was 26 and her husband Valery was a little over 30. Their two-year-old daughter slept sweetly in her crib. The Russians kidnapped the couple and took them to an unknown destination. And in the morning they were found dead. The body of the woman lying near the highway with several bullets in her head and her husband’s body, found in a forest belt… They say that the father could barely recognize his son… There was such a deep dent on his face, as if someone had driven a car over it. All this time, for more than twelve hours, the two-year-old baby was at home alone. She cried and called for her parents… Poor thing… She had no idea that she was already an orphan. That the damned invaders who had come from the northeast destroyed her family and cut short the happy lives of her young parents. Do you know why? Because they, Ukrainians, didn’t want to take Russian passports. Because they didn’t want to cooperate with the enemy, a murderer and torturer who came to Ukraine. Aren’t they heroes?! Anastasia and Valery!
I’ll never forget the kidnapping of my neighbor, a kind, quiet man who, like us, lived every day in the occupation waiting for the arrival of Ukrainian defenders. He was abducted in broad daylight, leaving an empty house with lots of bloodstains. We prayed all the time for him to be alive, for him to be released. On the fifth day of his disappearance, when I ran out to the store to buy bread, I suddenly saw my neighbor. He was slowly walking towards me, home… with his face black from the beatings, gaunt and exhausted — he was returning from the torture chamber… I could barely say “Hello!” so that he wouldn’t see my tears, which immediately rolled down my cheeks…
So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, why do we have to suffer? Why do we have to endure this pain, these tortures, these brutally cut-short lives? For being loyal children of our beloved Ukraine?! For not selling ourselves to the occupiers?!… So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, what exactly do you have in mind that we should negotiate with the murderers? To give up part of Ukraine in exchange for the Kremlin’s false promises to stop where it is already illegalling ruling our land?! Or to give up on those Ukrainians who are still waiting to be liberated from the occupation on the left bank of the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions, in Crimea?! Is that what you would do?
The enemy who stole our lives and our future, must leave our land! Forever! Leave and answer for all the blood that has been shed through his fault, answer for all the killed, unborn, and tortured Ukrainians… We have nothing to negotiate.
Olena Horoshok
Supported by the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. The views of the authors do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Government.