To (Not) Look Away
A sign for a bomb shelter on a Kyiv apartment block
Image credit: Alice Mee
If you have looked at any news publication in the past couple of months, you are almost guaranteed to find an article mentioning Ukraine. Usually not for a good reason. The bubbling tensions between Russia and Ukraine, rising with every week and threatening to spill over at any moment, are never far from my mind. Nor are all the people I met working in Ukraine on my year abroad, for whom predictions of whether or not Russia will invade are not just another news story, but forecasts which represent a tangible threat to their lives.
I find myself increasingly troubled by the knowledge that I can turn off my phone, turn the newspaper page, stop reading the news. I have the privilege of looking away – if I want to. In fact, I have been doing everything not to look away; reading any article that I come across, discussing the situation as it develops with friends and family. But it has been disturbing me more and more that we are able to choose whether to be concerned about the threat of further invasion to Ukraine (let’s not forget, Ukraine has been partly occupied by Russian-backed forces since 2014).
I can decide that on any given day, I’ve had enough of reading the news, that it’s too depressing. This is not something Ukrainians are able to do. The psychological impact is clear enough: suicides spiked in Ukraine when incursions began in 2014. Meanwhile, Kyiv’s city government has been preparing the city’s Soviet-era Cold War bomb shelters for a potential Russian invasion. Red stencilled signs pointing to the nearest shelter can be found on almost every apartment block in Kyiv, and are so unremarkable that I had walked past them for months before realising what they were. This is all on top of the city’s bomb shelters being featured on Google Maps since last spring, making finding your nearest bomb shelter as easy as searching for your nearest metro stop.
Bomb shelters in the city of Kyiv
Image credit: Google Maps 2021
Of course, life goes on for Ukrainians. Some have reacted to the news by taking their winter holidays early this year in case of an invasion. Others have signed up to first-aid courses. Still others have stopped paying attention to the news. The country is at war and yet not war-torn, and to walk the streets, you may well be unaware of anything untoward happening at all.
It is hard to come to terms with the dangerous privilege that we have of being able to look away, to go on with our lives as if nothing unpleasant is happening. That the news simultaneously functions to shock and pique our interest, and to keep us always detached enough from the reality on the ground. The media attempt to mobilise our empathy at every turn, and yet if a story goes on ‘too long’ or our empathy does not see the situation improve, fatigue sets in, as does collective amnesia.
This leaves us feeling powerless. As an outsider looking in, I feel there is not much I can do except to not look away. But I imagine this feeling is common also among Ukrainians who, yet again, must feel a curious detachment reading about events affecting their country, and with no real way to influence the outcome. I imagine, too, that even politicians in Ukraine are beginning to feel this way. For months now, negotiations about the future of Ukrainian lands have been taking place without Ukraine’s involvement. In the last week alone, negotiations have taken place between the United States and Russia in Switzerland, and between NATO and Russia in Belgium. Ukrainian representatives were not invited.
Perhaps the only thing we can do is to refuse to look away. To defy the media fatigue which Putin has been using to his advantage since 2014. The threat that Putin poses not only to Ukraine, but to any country willing to defy him, does not look set to change anytime soon. Even if all we can do is be engaged, at least we can show that we care. This, after all, is not an abstract matter of borders and policies and agreements: it is a human story. A story not just about Ukraine, but about Ukrainians.
