When people die, they often live on in the memories we have, the physical objects we associate with them, certain fragrances, jokes, accents, or inexplicable, complicated things. Whenever I see a soft sign (ь) in Russian, I always think of my nan. It was through the way she said “fil’m” in her lilting Irish accent that I learned how to pronounce the soft sign as a teenager teaching myself Russian from a book.
My nan is one of at least a dozen people I know who died this year, but she was the only one who was old. With one exception, all the rest were killed by Russians. I remember a close friend once telling me he’d stopped counting how many of his friends had died. He tried to list them, one by one: “Sanya, Misha, the guys at [humanitarian organisation]—four of them died, Kostya, Seryozha K, and Seryozha R…” As he continued, more and more names turned into callsigns, people he’d met after the full-scale invasion, after he had signed up. He started going back, adding people, perhaps striving for chronological order, or maybe because the names were networked somehow. Eventually, he went silent, and we had to get back on the train.
In Kharkiv, I sometimes visit Cemetery No. 18, where soldiers from the city and region are laid to rest. Most of them died fighting in or near Kharkiv—at home or close enough—because Russians came to their homes to kill them. The last time I went, I broke down. The graveyard had at least doubled in size since May. The smell of corpses, too many for the allotted space, clung to my throat, like an acrid ghost I can still taste. Open graves were everywhere, waiting for bodies to fill their void. They wouldn’t be waiting long. Adding to the unnaturalness, old grandmothers shuffled through rows of bright blue and yellow Ukrainian flags, visiting their young grandsons’ graves. It felt like a microcosm of war: death and the upending of life’s natural cycle.
A happier graveyard (of Russian military equipment), also on the outskirts of Kharkiv.
During wartime, death is always reduced to statistics. I’m always grateful for efforts to humanise the dead, like Olesya Khromeychuk’s beautiful The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. Such works bring the dead back to life. They give us the fragrances, memories, and weird moments they left behind—and even create new memories in our minds. We continue to learn new things about people we knew personally after their deaths. Their personhood can no longer develop, but our understanding of it does.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the deaths of children affect us so deeply. Dead children are the most “dead” of all. The younger the child, the more dead they truly are, because they don’t have the time to leave a mark. The two-month-old baby killed when Russians bombed a hotel in Zolochiv, Kharkiv region, earlier this year hadn’t had the chance to mispronounce words in ways that would become familial in-jokes, pick a favourite colour, or develop an obsession with turtles. Their personhood never formed outside of themselves and their parents.
When a child dies, it’s not just the loss of someone you once had —it’s the loss of something you were supposed to have in the future.
Tiny lego blocks and shards of children’s toys outside a bombed house in Kharkiv region.
And then there are the undead: the missing in action. I know several such people. In one case, it’s the brother of a friend who went missing in spring 2022. She hopes he’s still alive, but then reprimands herself for the thought—because that would mean he’s in a Russian prison, being starved and tortured. The conflict in her is palpable.
Recently, in a place I won’t name, I met relatives of another missing individual. Some time later, the soldiers I was with explained that the individual was dead, but no one had the heart to tell the family so they were leaving it to the system – the military bureaucracy - to pass the news on.
In war, we think about the living and the dead, but we often forget about the liminal—the undead: the missing, the deported, those languishing in Russian-occupied torture chambers, those who’ve lost their minds from trauma, unable to remember their own names and sent to psychiatric units. Last week, Yale Humanitarian Research Lab published a detailed report on Ukrainian children deported by Russia, showing how their identities are nullified and they are given fake names, ‘adopted’ by Russians, disappeared but living on. In writing their report, they bring these children back from limbo to the side of the living. It is very much worth reading.
I think that the deported children tell us most of what we need to know about this war and why it is unlikely to be solved by Ukrainian concessions to Russia’s genocidal appetites and imperial insanities. Yet, it would appear from media reports that negotiations are on the horizon. Whether they will lead to anything of worth, or any form of peace, is another matter. I remain sceptical, though at this point I’d be delighted to be proven wrong—provided it leads to meaningful security guarantees for Ukraine.
Remarkably concise timeline of Ukraine’s historical struggle for freedom and independence, on the wall of a Kyiv cafe and art space.
Without that, this war won’t go away. The undead have a habit of living on—in relatives searching for answers, in returnees, in miraculous survivors. Over the last two weeks, we’ve witnessed and heard uncanny voices and faces from Ghouta and Sednaya, Syria. Voices forgotten, until they returned.
Some Western leaders’ empty platitudes around Ukraine, the ‘stand with you as long as it takes’, or the ‘we’re with you (just not literally or tangibly👍’) crowd, remind me of the Catholic tradition of offering prayers for the dead. It is meaningless, it does nothing to help the people being prayed for (or stood with) but it makes the person saying it feel better. Calling out the meaninglessness of it is also met with considerable upset from both, as both have developed some overwrought theology as to why it actually is helpful.
But what would be helpful? Well, unlike the prayed for, Ukraine is not dead. So doing something to help more of it stay alive and free would be useful. Russian air strikes on Ukraine outside the frontline have reduced in recent months, in part because of ATACMs and F16s. So the obvious answer would be weapons deliveries to strike Russia’s missile launchpads and military sites, more air defence, more fighter jets. But everyone knows these answers anyway. The question is whether anyone with the power has the political will to recognise that these answers are obvious.
The horror in Ukraine—the dead, undead, and suffering—is not some abstract tragedy. All this horror is caused by Russian (and North Korean) individuals choosing to invade and kill in someone else’s home—for money, patriotism, a job, a prison sentence reduction, and so on. Stopping the war means stopping them.
Any negotiations that fail to do so, that fail to offer a credible impediment to the Russian perpetrators, will only shield the murderers, giving them time to bandage any wounds and plan their next attack. For that reason, I hope whoever is contemplating Ukraine’s future security will rewatch the Sednaya prison footage and the videos of survivors from Ghouta. And that they then ask themselves: when the time comes for Ukraine’s undead to rise, will I have done enough to avoid being haunted?
Fundraiser
First, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the medevac fundraiser—we raised the money, and it’s now saving lives. Here is a thank you photo from the Kraken guys and a thank you video will follow.
For those who’d like to save more lives (caveat: only Ukrainian), I will soon be sharing another fundraiser for my sniper buddies. In September, I raised money privately for .338-calibre bullets, specialist cameras, and electronic warfare jammers. Today, Ukraine’s Military Intelligence reported that using those same bullets, one of the snipers, “Lektor”, took out an enemy sniper at a distance of 2,069 meters. You can read about it here, in a very dodgy translation…
A new fundraiser for more bullets will open soon, this time publicly.