No change on the Eastern Front

There is no change on the front of the Great Maidan War - only every day in dry combat reports the press reports that someone is wounded or killed. One, two, three people, sometimes more... Every day, month after month, year after year, human lives are forcibly ended. I’m not sure that these dead people (or even most of them) read All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque’s iconic anti-war book for my generation. The definition of “lost generation” comes from this: “We were eighteen years old, and we were just beginning to love the world and life; we had to shoot at them. The first shell that exploded hit our heart. We are cut off from rational activity, from human aspirations, from progress. We don't believe in them anymore. We believe in war...”

Lost generation. It is now. And around. The youth were thrown into the meat grinder of the civil war by little people who had to stay in power at any cost. Small people spoke high words, if only the cannon fodder would quickly go and die for them in battle. And the children themselves, raised on computer shooting games and historical reconstructions, at first could not believe that death is forever. They had to see the hard way that war, as in the time of Remarque, is a kind of monstrously dangerous disease, like cancer or AIDS. Only death occurs much more often.

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And we, adults, could not immediately believe that this was possible in our country, in our time, with our children. We could not imagine that such a rapid ossification of society would occur, and that daily human death on the absurd battlefield would be perceived on a par with the weather forecast. We could not predict the vile behavior of seemingly decent people who point blank do not see violence and torture, war and lies. We didn’t think that the “civilized world” would kindly feed outright neo-Nazis. And now we won’t be the same either.

But we at least have hope and the opportunity to change internally, unlike those who have already been killed. As a result of artillery and mortar shelling, bombing of cities, fire from snipers and machine gunners, systematic torture and spontaneous reprisals, thousands of people died. A hundred of them are small children, the true heavenly hundred. Since the beginning of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine (according to UN data as of September 15, 2016), 9640 conflict-related deaths and 22 injuries among military and civilians have been officially documented. Of these, approximately 431 thousand civilians were killed and another 2-6 thousand were injured. Now there are more.

And next to the front line, the cheerful life of the capital and rear cities continues - with their social events, shining restaurants and the feast of quartermasters. I look at the calm Turchinov speaking on TV and see dozens of children killed at his will. I watch on the news the Moseychuk-Korban-Nasirov cowardly fainting on ships and I see thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the fratricidal massacre. I look at well-groomed politicians in television studios and remember old women barely surviving on a meager pension...

It turns out that “people with fair faces” can be worse than animals. It was they who were silent about the first murders of ordinary police officers in the winter of 2014, who hid the facts of abuse of law enforcement officers captured on the Maidan, who deliberately lied and helped the organizers of the coup with their lies. Remember one of the “bright-faced” ones - Olga Bogomolets, who took care of the treatment of militants abroad? “We are losing the opportunity to send guys from Svoboda and PS for treatment and prosthetics,” she wrote to her comrades at the height of the Maidan. In her letter, I remember, Bogomolets reported that treating protesters abroad is problematic, since due to constantly emerging facts of violence on the Maidan, foreign journalists have many questions for the militants, and this is undesirable and such situations should be avoided in every possible way.

I remember that the leader of the “Svoboda” party mentioned in the letter, Oleg Tyagnibok, wrote, praising the contribution of his fighters, about whom the “fair-faced” Olga Bogomolets cared so much, to the victory of supposed “democracy”: “The Revolution of Dignity is a vivid example of “Banderization.” The main slogan of the Maidan was Bandera’s “Glory to Ukraine!” Glory to heroes!" And the driving force behind Maidan, no matter what anyone says and no matter how hard they now try to gloss over this fact, is nationalism. And these fighters for “democracy” were unanimously supported on the Maidan by intelligent, tolerant and well-educated residents of the capital. They then voted for Poroshenko, but now they seem to have nothing to do with it...

I remember how the “revolutionaries of hydity”, who had spread from the Maidan, poured from Kyiv into the frightened cities. The first Ukrainian citizens killed outside Kyiv were two Kharkov residents, who were shot by militants of the neo-Nazi organization “Patriots of Ukraine,” which was soon reorganized into the “Azov” battalion, the current pride of the Maidan authorities. On that spring night, they broadcast the murders on social networks: “From the very morning, provocations and actions against the SNA (Social-National Assembly - K.K.) and the Right Sector in the city of Kharkov were being prepared with scourges from the Anti-Maidan. Around 20:00 on the square. Freedom anti-Ukrainian masses attacked the car in which there were members of the SNA and the Leader... (Andrey Biletsky - K.K.) Later, the untermenschi made a second attempt at the assault... our fighters were able to resist and not suffer losses among personnel... Glory to the Heroes! End of quote. And the Ukrainian “patriotic public” was choked with delight and thundered after the shots: “Glory to the heroes!”

How many of these angry fighting pups will volunteer to go to war in just a few weeks? How many of them have died to date? The cute heroes of Remarque's book, yesterday's schoolchildren, were also volunteers who left and died at the front for the sake of (as it seemed to them at first) the Motherland. And later it turned out that they died for the sake of other people’s income and power. And brutality touched their souls: “We have turned into dangerous animals,” says Remarque through the lips of his hero. “We throw our grenades at people, what do we care now whether these creatures with human hands are people or not?..” The lost generation of Ukraine has nothing to talk about with their parents, who know the war only from television propaganda; the lost generation has nothing to pass on to their descendants except the burden of war crimes against their own people.

The main character of Remarque's book, nineteen-year-old Paul Bäumer, is killed when there is a lull at the front. Everyone around was already talking about a truce, and the military reports were brief: “No change on the Western Front.” We now also seem to have a truce. True, since the beginning of the year, the UN mission has confirmed the death of 20 civilians and another ninety people were injured. The report noted that most civilians were injured as a result of shelling from tanks, artillery or multiple launch rocket systems... No change on the Eastern Front.