'We must resist the normalisation of cruelty'

Hope is not the belief that everything will be fine – it is the deep understanding that all our efforts have meaning.

This is the fourth winter since the full-scale invasion began. And it is proving to be very difficult. Russian missiles and drones are deliberately destroying the energy infrastructure on which civilians depend for survival. In January and February, temperatures drop to minus 25 degrees Celsius.

Ukrainian cities are literally freezing. Millions of people have limited or no access to heating, water, and electricity.

I remember in 2022, when the Russians first began striking the energy infrastructure, a photograph appeared online of a Kyiv schoolteacher.

Wearing a red winter jacket and a warm hat, she was standing on tiptoe beside a metal pole on which she had placed her computer – right outside, somewhere near a shop where a power generator was running and there was internet access.

There, in the freezing cold, she was giving her students a lecture. And I thought: the Russians came to take everything from us – our land, our freedom, our future, our children’s education.

But this Kyiv schoolteacher refused to give them have anything. Even something as simple as teaching a lesson had become an act of resistance.

From my own experience, I know that when the international system of peace and security cannot be relied upon, people can always be. We are used to thinking in terms of states and intergovernmental organisations, but ordinary people have much more power than they even realise.

Four years ago, I was in Kyiv when Russian forces tried to encircle the city. No one believed that we could withstand such an enormous military threat. We greeted each morning as a victory because we had survived another night. I remember international humanitarian organisations evacuating their personnel.

But ordinary people stayed – and began to resist. Ordinary people started doing extraordinary things.One of those people was my friend, the Ukrainian writer Viktoriia Amelina.

In the early days of the full-scale invasion, she interrupted her trip and returned to Ukraine. She soon joined efforts to document war crimes. And she did many other things at the same time.

I remember telling her: “You are already doing so much – writing a book, documenting war crimes, travelling on field missions, volunteering – it’s almost beyond exhaustion. Why take on new projects?”

She replied that she had a persistent feeling that she was not doing enough. She added that she did not know how much time she had – or how much time any of us had.

A month after that conversation, a Russian missile hit a café in Kramatorsk. Vika was there at that moment, with some Colombian writers she was accompanying to the east. She was seriously injured and fell into a coma.

It may sound irrational, but I wrote to her every day on Messenger. I was convinced that she would wake up and read them all. Even when our mutual friend, who was with her in intensive care, told me that we needed to prepare ourselves for and accept the inevitable, I said that I would not lose hope.

While preparing this text, I opened that final conversation that Vika never read. This is what I want to tell you.

Firstly; I do not know what historians of the future will call this period. But the international order based on the UN Charter and international law has been broken down.

The UN system was created after the Second World War to protect people from war and mass violence. But even my phone has an expiry date. This system has never been reformed. Now it is stalling and performing ritual gestures. It is easy to predict that fires like wars will erupt more frequently in different parts of the world because the international wiring is faulty and sparking everywhere.

Ukraine has found itself at the epicentre of events that will shape the world’s future. This is not simply a war between two states – it is a war between two systems: authoritarianism and democracy.

Vladimir Putin is seeking to prove that a country with a powerful military capacity and nuclear weapons can disrupt the international order, dictate its rules to the global community, and even alter internationally recognised borders by force.

The Russian leader did not launch the full-scale invasion merely to capture more Ukrainian land. It is naïve to think Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers just to occupy Avdiivka or Bakhmut. Putin launched this invasion to occupy and destroy Ukraine in its entirety – and then move further.

His logic is historical. He dreams of restoring the Russian Empire. People in other European countries are only safe because Ukrainians are holding back the Russian army.

Secondly, people only begin to understand that war is happening when bombs fall on their own heads. But war also has an informational dimension, and this struggle for reality knows no state borders.

The way people see the world determines their decisions and actions. This is why authoritarian regimes attack truth. We all spend more and more time on social media, which is flooded with fake news and disinformation. People are losing the ability to distinguish truth from lies.

Now, even residents of the same small community no longer shared a common picture of reality. Without this common perception, they cannot act together. And without collective action, how can we defend our freedom?

We live in a so-called “post-truth world.” But it seems to me it seems like a post-knowledge world. Knowledge is losing value. People would rather listen to Instagram bloggers rather than to researchers or scientists. They demand simple solutions. Perhaps we could afford that in peaceful times.

But no one lives in peaceful times anymore. Therefore, rather than simplifying things, we must embrace complexity.

We must also resist the normalisation of cruelty. Just a few weeks ago, Russians killed an elderly couple who were attempting to flee an occupied village in the Sumy region. The husband was pulling his wife on a sledge towards a spot where rescuers were waiting.

An FPV drone dropped explosives directly on the woman. Her husband wept and would not leave her body. Then a second FPV drone struck him. Their bodies were left lying in the snow.

Studying these materials, I recalled that the gas chambers in Auschwitz were built by professional German engineers. I also remembered that the collapse of the international system was preceded by the loss of humanity.

Finally, freedom is not a given – it is a prerequisite for survival. Ukrainians lived in the shadow of the Russian Empire for three centuries. We would never have survived as a nation if we had not persistently sought freedom throughout that time.

I recorded the testimony of Ukrainian scholar and philosopher Ihor Kozlovskyi after he spent 700 days in Russian captivity. Before that, I had interviewed more than a hundred survivors. They had told me how they were beaten, tortured, raped, locked in wooden boxes, given electric shocks to their genitals, had their fingers cut off and their nails torn out, had their knees drilled, and they were compelled to write with their own blood. So, there was little that could surprise me.

However, Ihor mentioned something seemingly insignificant to the evidence base – and it struck me deeply.

He described his days in solitary confinement. It was a basement cell that, in Soviet times, had held death row prisoners. There were no windows. No sunlight. No fresh air. It was hard to breathe. Sewage flowed across the dirty floor. Rats crawled out from the drain.

This scholar, known across the country, told me how he gave philosophy lectures to these rats – simply to hear the sound of a human voice.

Ihor Kozlovskyi was a victim in the legal sense: he was kidnapped and held in inhumane conditions, and tortured so severely that he had to relearn how to walk. Yet even this did not make him see himself as a victim. The foundation of our existence is dignity, not victimhood. And dignity is action. We are not hostages to circumstances. We are participants in this historical process.

Dignity gives us the strength to fight even the most unbearable of circumstances.

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. The murder of Ukrainian intellectuals, the bloody repression of poets and artists, the artificial starvation of millions did not destroy Ukrainian identity in Soviet times.

Because then, as now, there were always people teaching Ukrainian children. People who wrote Ukrainian books. People who preserved the memory of the past. We sow. We sow seeds. We even sow in winter, when everything is frozen. We sow things that are not afraid of the cold. We sow as an act of faith, knowing that spring will inevitably come and everything we have planted will grow. Yes, it’s a long work.

But it is those who plan for the long term are the ones who win.

Rereading the messages that Vika never read made me think about how much she managed to achieve in her short life. I reflected on the love she generously shared with me, with her family, with our friends.

Ukrainian Nobel peace prize Oleksandra Matviichuk. Photo: Gian-Paolo Accardo

I looked again at the photographs in her unfinished book about women in war - a book that was published in different languages after her death. Human life is fragile. Yet it can still be filled with eternal meaning .I now know many things about hope. Hope is not the belief that everything will be fine. Hope is the deep understanding that all our efforts have meaning.