eastern europe will be free

Okay, for the last 1.5 months I've been trying to fight the "delayed life syndrome" and do "normal" things despite the war - working, cooking, cleaning my dorm room, ordering pizza, buying dishes and new clothes. But I still can't wait for the news: "The war is over, Ukraine has won!" and I will go out with all the other Kyiv people to the evening streets!

In my opinion, the fact that Jordan Peterson and Noam Chomsky have almost identical views on the war in Ukraine (they both believe that the main responsibility for the war on the US) speaks more not about right and left ideologies, but about how much Westerners limited by their own context. This blog was created under the impression that people from Western Europe and the US don't know ANYTHING about Eastern Europe and, most importantly, a lot of them don't want to know more, and the war only proved this!

One of the most invisible categories in this war is LGBT couples, where one partner is from Ukraine and the other is from Russia. The impossibility of reunification due to closed borders and the lack of a chance to be recognized as relatives in both countries, homophobia and the risk of being accused of "national betrayal" from both sides.

There are many problems with the information policy of the Ukrainian authorities, but one of those that infuriate me the most is the dichotomy "poor Russians against rich Ukrainians", "the impoverished horde plundered the rich and well-groomed Ukrainian yards." This rhetoric harms the Ukrainians themselves. You could hear a lot about crimes against civilians (not a description of military operations) in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, but much less about Borodianka, Popasna or villages in the Kherson region. I don't think this a coincidence. Before the war, Bucha and Irpin were suburbs of Kyiv for the middle class, who could afford to buy a new apartment and travel to Kyiv by car and live in a green and quiet satellite town. A lot of money was invested in Mariupol after 2014, including in urban beautification, it was also a city with a lot of middle class. But Borodianka, on which air bombs were dropped, is a village for locals who have lived there for generations. Wiped off the face of the earth Popasna is a small town in the Luhansk region, which after 2014 has lost its economic potential. Deep poverty and unemployment have been reigning in the villages of the Kherson region for decades. Obviously, even before the war, there were a lot of poor people in Ukraine, whose lives were complicated by neoliberal reforms (for example, in the field of medicine) and constant increases in public services. There are many depressed towns, where every year more and more facilities went bankrupt. And it's obvious that the poorest after the war will be put on the brink of survival, but the information policy now makes us think that they will be silent about them.

The war in Ukraine further exposed the problem of big "charitable" organizations - especially the International Red Cross - and charity in general on the part of Western countries. Expired medicines, meager portions of humanitarian aid, corruption - all this existed before this year. It's just that Ukrainians have more opportunities to record what is happening than people in African countries with less access to the Internet. But the question of the right to existence of charity as such also appears. As today's events show, it's needed at critical moments (war, natural disasters, the spread of dangerous diseases), but when you have organizations with nice offices and expensive cars that have been sending humanitarian mineral water to children in Africa for decades - maybe it needs something to do with poverty rather than donate money to bureaucrats?