Dear boys
(a letter to my classmates in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and an appeal to my subscribers here)
Dear boys,
I hesitate to text you to ask how you are. One reason is that I know your response: you are okay. You have been fighting for two years flat at the frontline of the Russian invasion, but you got that one military leave when you had to bury your family member; when you suffered a concussion having driven over a landmine; or when you caught a bullet in your shoulder. You have recovered and gone back to the frontline. Towns and villages explode around you. Your positions are hit with 500-kilo TV-guided bombs. You are okay.
There is another reason I hesitate to text you. If you decide to say it as it is, my response would be inadequate. I will donate and help you buy some drones which, in the absence of ammunition, you will use to fight the invaders. I will persuade my foreign friends to call their representatives in the hope of changing political calculations in democratic countries that imagine themselves to be distant from the hell of our all-out war. I will edit testimonies of war crimes survivors, write op-eds, and argue at conferences that Russians must be held accountable for the decade of the massacre they unleashed upon Ukraine.
But I will not do the brutal work of defending our country at the frontline. I lack your courage.
I call you ‘boys’ because this is how I remember most of you. Teenagers, my incorrigible classmates from the Russified industrial city of Zaporizhzhia in the south-east of Ukraine. This year, you are turning 36. There was little in our post-Soviet upbringing to suggest you would join the army and defend Ukraine against Russia’s genocidal onslaught. But this is what all of you have done. Thanks to you, I still have my country and my life. The least I can do in return is help you buy some of those damned drones.
Faithfully yours,
Sasha
My friend Yan is among my classmates fighting since day 1 of the full-scale invasion. His 53 brigade defended Avdiivka for a year. In the absence of weapons, they had to withdraw from the city and are now defending Ukrainian positions nearby.
‘It’s hard but we are holding the enemy back’, my friend says.
Yan is raising money to purchase drones and means of electromagnetic warfare for the brigade. We can all help. Please consider donating following this link.
Sasha -- I keep getting a "could not process request" message from Monobank. I've been able to use monobank before. any ideas for getting around this?