I can’t remember anything that hit me as simultaneously inspirational and heartbreaking as Ukrainian President Zelensky’s purported refusal to accept safe passage from Kiev: “The fight is here: I need ammunition, not a ride.” Then there was this video of him with his ministers telling the country they were all still there. It was defiant, but still furtively shot, at night. At the time the reports were that some 400 Russian mercenaries were already in Kiev looking for him. I’d often heard about people sacrificing their lives for their country, but this was the first time I’d ever seen what it looked like.
Everything I knew about the guy already made me love him — that he was an actor, not a politician, and President more by chance than design. And God Knows after Trump’s “perfect” phone call, we as a nation, owed him. By February of 2022 I’d spent so much time watching the very worst of our species trampling everything decent I didn’t recognize what I was seeing for what it was: actual courage and the determination not to fight to the death, but to fight until you fucking win. Instead I tried my best to discount it as bravado from the gallows — an actor playing his role. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had an actual hero, and I couldn’t afford to have one now if he was just going to die. See, like many of us, I thought of the Russian Army like it was the old Soviet Union’s army, and thus saw Zelensky simply as a dead man.
What made it all worse was his death would be at the hands of a man I’d not only helped humanize, but profited from it as well. In fact, after playing e-mail tag for weeks, what I was supposed to be doing on February 24th was negotiating the film rights to my original Kos diary about Putin over the phone. The bottom dropping out of the market for Putin-as-hippie-minstrel stories remains the only funny thing about that day for me. I even saw it as funny at the time, but it also added substantially to my feelings of guilt.
Even after all the shit we’ve had to put up with, that next week was the only time I can remember ever seriously avoiding the news. I just couldn’t bear to hear what I thought was the inevitable. The only story I heard was about the Defenders of Snake Island telling the Russian warship to go fuck itself before becoming obliterated. Talk about simultaneously inspirational and heartbreaking… After a week or so, with the invasion stalled, I started to crawl out of my hole and little by little allowed myself to hope. I have tried my best not to take any of what’s happened since for granted.
When I found out the people on Snake Island hadn’t been killed as reported but had been captured and were all still alive I literally screamed. And then I started crying uncontrollably — tears of pure joy, for absolute strangers… That’s something else that’s never happened before.
I try to make at least one in every fifteen or twenty signs for Ukraine, and remain eternally grateful to live in a country where I can do this.
Slava Ukraíní!