There has been an ancademic event dedicated to “Russianness” at my university, and this photo of tonight’s attack on Troitska church area in the heart of Kharkiv seems most appropriate. I wrote to the organizer, a western scholar of russian ballet saying that the Ukrainian students were deeply traumatized by the very idea of presenting Russianness as a cultural phenomenon in the days when the russian state administers mass terror and torture. The academic was very apologetic that their research interests in Russian ballet coincided with the genocide of Ukrainians. But the event was never cancelled. Sometimes I feel there’s no one there in the Western academia, it’s a solid wall, separating humans and us.