Inside Ukraine’s Attack on a Russian Port: A Personal Perspective
What the media doesn’t tell you about ‘the other side’
I never thought I’d see Volna village in international headlines. A small area in the Krasnodar region in the Russian South that barely anyone’s heard of, but a place near and dear to my heart. A coastal village where I spent 18 summers visiting my grandparents suddenly hit the global news.
Just ahead of the four-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion and planned peace talks in Geneva, a Ukrainian drone strike hit the port of Taman, located in Volna. Two people were wounded in the attack that also damaged oil storage tanks, warehouses and terminals. Multiple other Southern cities were also attacked but were damaged less.
The paragraph above is what you would see in a typical news outlet coverage of the attack (if there was any coverage at all). Dry, fact-based storytelling is often used to describe any damage to the aggressor country during the war, especially in global news. On the other side, the same tactic is used in the media within the aggressor country. The goal of both is to dehumanize people, pin them against each other, emphasize troop advancement and politician’s decisions instead of talking about human suffering. They need to get funding, take control of more territory, and hit more strategic objects. Because ultimately ‘all is fair in war,’ right?
Wrong. At the end of the day, compassion and empathy make us human. In the world of dry headlines, numbers, and politics, I want to share a personal story, as a young Russian living abroad, from ‘the other side.’
Being a long-distance relative and friend is hard. But leaving and existing thousands of miles away isn’t the toughest part. In fact, the most difficult time comes when you sit in the middle of the night knowing your loved ones are suffering across the globe, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to help.
I thought I experienced it two weeks ago when my grandfather got into the hospital, and my family called me crying and saying he might die. I spent these two weeks thinking about how I haven’t seen him in four years and how we started talking less because WhatsApp got banned in Russia in the Fall. And I also thought about the worst: if he does die, I can’t leave the U.S. and attend his funeral. Thankfully, he got better and returned to his house in Volna to recover.
On Feb. 16, I sent out digital red envelopes with wishes to my family for the Lunar New Year. My aunt responded: “Thank you! I’m currently bawling. They are being bombed. Dad [my grandfather] was thrown back by the blast wave.”
A call followed immediately after. At 11 p.m., instead of going to sleep, I was listening how a house diagonally from my family home caught on fire from drones. My elderly grandparents, one fresh out of the hospital and another sick from a virus, sat for hours in the cold because they were scared the house will fall on them if bombed. When the cold became unbearable, they went inside and sat in a hallway for hours, holding their cat, as the strikes continued. They are too old to get into the cellar.
I did not sleep that night, trying to find news coverage of the attack. There were barely any stories overall let alone any that cover human suffering amid the ‘attack on strategic objects.’ It’s devastating to see the democratic world use the same techniques Russian media does to spread hatred and manipulate residents into viewing other human beings as enemies.
The next day I learned that my uncle ‘celebrated his second birthday’ and felt the burn on his face as he got caught up in-between two exploded objects. Turns out, my grandad was thrown back by the blast wave twice. More and more stories of damaged houses, injured people, and pure terror they experienced. This is the reality cities on the Russia-Ukraine border face every day. The global news outlets don’t cover it because we are ‘the enemy’ and Russian media ignores these stories because they make the state look weak. At the end of the day, it’s regular people who are left to collect the pieces and rebuild their homes only to continue to live in fear for the fourth year.
While my heart was breaking for my family and community members affected by the recent strikes, I also found myself in a few moral debates. Seeing how the state-pushed hatred narrative poisoned Volna’s local community and the country at large, I started to wonder if experiencing a small portion of Ukraine’s reality for the past four years might make locals more empathetic of the human experience right across the border, or would it simply create more hate? While I hope and pray that people will find empathy for their fellow human beings, the combination of factors - such as Russia’s isolation from global media and, especially for elderly people, access solely to state-funded media outlets - will probably result in even stronger hatred. Unfortunately, it will be targeted at the wrong people.
Citizens on both sides of the war continue to struggle as peace talks are not moving forward. Government officials who don’t have to face the atrocities of the war on the daily basis determine that their strategic priorities matter more than human lives we lose every day. If regular lives were the priority, the peace agreement would’ve been already reached. And as the fourth anniversary of the war is coming up, everyone needs to start pushing for a deal harder than ever.
I hope this story serves as a reminder to treat each other with empathy and appreciate what you have, because you never know what tomorrow will bring. The irony is as a teenager I always hurried to leave Volna because it was ‘too boring.’ Now, I pray it gets boring again, and there will still be a place for me to visit one day.
Sources: private testimonies, The Guardian, PBS, The Moscow Times, Reuters, AA