The medical commission said  A little prayer to their maker,  Which done, they dug with a holy spade  The soldier from god’s little acre,  When the doctor examined tlie soldier gay  ‘Or what of him was left,  He softly said: This man’s I-A,  He’s simply evading the draft,

Bertold Brecht. Legend of the Dead Soldier, 1918

I found out that there is a war on between Russia and Ukraine at a small gas station, where I met some Ukrainians who like me were traveling across Europe by car. Neither Russian nor European nor American media had made any mention of real military encounter between our countries, and so it was hard to believe these agitated women when they told of atrocities committed by Russian occupants on Ukrainian soil. They seemed like yet another element of brainwashing, just like the reports of Ukrainian Nazi atrocities that flooded the Russian media against the backdrop of the annexation of Crimea, only now with a Ukrainian accent – a mirror image of aggressive propaganda from the other side of the conflict. Our’s was a meeting on neutral territory, so to speak, somewhere in the middle of a generic Europe. The womens’ tone toward me was unfriendly, even accusatory; as if being Russian automatically made me guilty of the atrocities they were describing. At some point it even seemed that they were screaming at me. Yet their stories of welded-shut zinc coffins returning “from the East” etched themselves into my mind.

Oxana Timofeeva / And not even the dead will be safe… / 2014
Oxana Timofeeva / And not even the dead will be safe… / 2014
Oxana Timofeeva / And not even the dead will be safe… / 2014
Oxana Timofeeva / And not even the dead will be safe… / 2014

Vlada Ralko – from Kyiv Diary, 2014