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NOTES ON HOW TO SURVIVE A WAR  
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Aman Sethi
November 21, 2025
Open Democracy
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_ As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on, philosophers, poets,
anarchists and soldiers contemplate what they have lost, and what is
still to emerge. _

, Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

 

This spring, a Russian missile slipped through Ukrainian air defences
and crashed into a three-storey building, killing 13 members of an
extended family, save for a young girl who was pulled free from the
wreckage.

When I arrived a few weeks later, an area the size of two tennis
courts was flattened into rubble, the windows of every apartment
looking out into the blast zone were blown out by the explosion and
now boarded with plywood, parked cars were mangled out of shape, the
paint burnt off their chassis. Somehow, amidst all this wreckage, a
few walls of the building were still standing, wallpaper intact,
fittings still protruding from the upright surfaces.

On a small rectangle of grass, not far from the blast site, neighbours
had assembled a small shrine to the dead: photographs, bouquets of red
plastic flowers, two basketballs scribbled with messages of
condolences, dozens of stuffed toys, and a large plastic flask of
drinking water.

Around the corner on Aviakonstruktorska street, where aeronautical
engineers once lived in the Soviet-era apartments and worked at the
nearby headquarters of Antonov (makers of the An-225 Mriya, the
largest aircraft ever built), Kyiv felt like any other Eastern
European city awakening from the winter.

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The city was beautiful in the spring; the chestnut trees were in
bloom, their silken seed pods hung in the air like snowflakes,
enshrouding the city each time the wind blew. People went about their
lives – running late for meetings, buying groceries, cursing at
traffic, enacting their rituals of the everyday, knowing all the while
that at any moment some inventive new munition could whistle through
the air and detonate their lives on impact.

Each night of my visit, and sometimes in the day, Russian forces
launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Kyiv. Most were shot down
by the city’s air defences, every now and then, one made it through.

The war wasn’t always visible, said Anatoliy, a young man who lived
in one of buildings that looked out into the blast zone, describing
the surreal experience of awakening each morning in what was
recognisably a warzone, descending through a staircase of broken
windows, walking past past mounds of rubble and mangled metal, before
turning a corner into a fully functional city en route to university
where he studied cybersecurity.

“But the war is never far away,” he said. “It is always
close.”

My companion on this visit was Volydymyr Yermolenko, an essayist,
journalist, podcaster, the president of the Ukraine chapter of PEN (a
world-wide association of writers), and a philosopher who has spent
the past three and a half years thinking about how experiences like
Anatoliy’s – where the war is both distant and proximate – are
playing out across his country.

“In 2022 there was this, you know, adrenaline, that whatever
Russians do, we will mobilise, we will beat them,” Yermolenko had
told me when we met in 2024 at Zeg, a storytelling festival held
annually in Tbilisi, Georgia. “Now, primarily because of the death
toll on the front line, people who volunteer for the army, they
understand that they will probably never come back. So this, this
makes things a lot, a lot tougher, there are more fractures in the
society, like, who does what? Soldiers are asking, why I am on the
front line, when you are not on the front line? Why did you leave
Ukraine?”

A year after that conversation I was in Ukraine to understand these
cleavages; these cracks and fractures between bombed out
neighbourhoods and treelined boulevards, between frontlines in the
east and cities in the west, between those who stayed and those who
left, between Europeans and Americans who insist this war is an
existential battle between Good and Evil (but are still open to
striking deals with both sides) and the rest of the world who see it
as yet another proxy war between Great Powers.

I was here to witness how Ukrainians were negotiating these fissures,
even as they navigated the daily horrors of war and considered the
prospect of a supervised dismemberment of their nation.

To survive this war, and the dirty peace that will follow, Ukrainians
will probably need to re-imagine and re-constitute themselves with a
fifth less territory and the loss of tens of thousands their people,
in the backdrop of decades of headspinning revolution: the Revolution
on Granite in 1990, which set the stage for Ukraine’s departure from
the Soviet Union; the Orange Revolution to overturn the stolen
election of 2004, the Euromaidan protests and the loss of Crimea to
Russia in 2014, which metastasized into this current conflict.

This spring, signs of collective reimagining were everywhere. Active
duty soldiers, grieving parents of the dead, poets, writers, young
Ukrainian emigres, senior officials at the Ministry of Culture,
philosophers like Yermolenko, each spoke of the urgent need for new
solidarities and forms of kinship, without which the relentless
exposure to death would strip everyday life of meaning and would make
it impossible to dream of the future. Each conversation carried the
weight of living through a historic moment as if the ideas that
emerged from the present would shape the future of Ukraine, and much
of Europe, for many years to come.

“If I think of a Ukrainian identity, I think of a palimpsest,”
said Iryna Starovoyt, a poet, essayist and a scholar of cultural
studies, one evening as I accompanied her on a walk through the centre
of Lviv, a medieval city in western Ukraine that was settled by
Galicians, raided by Mongols, gave refuge to Armenians fleeing war in
Central Asia, and was taken by the Soviets as part of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that divided Poland between the Soviets and
the Nazis.

“Like a palimpsest, every new power writes their story but leaves
traces of what was before,” Starovoyt continued. “There is a new
Ukrainian identity; but I don’t know if I can translate it. Not from
Ukrainian into English, but from intuition into language.”

[IMG_0068]

Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

“A country is not only a ‘piece of land’, but a narration about
this land,” Renata Salecl, a Slovenian philosopher and
psychoanalyst, writes in _Spoils of Freedom_. In her book about the
fall of Yugoslavia and the rise of post-socialist societies, Salecl
describes a country as a collective fantasy with land, and the myths
and narratives that link people to that land as its constitutive
elements.

Salecl was writing in the mid-1990s, but her insights from that period
offer a useful prism to understand the crisis unfolding in Ukraine
today.

The aim of a war of aggression, she wrote, is to shatter the very way
a people perceive themselves and formulate their identity.

“When Serbs occupied a part of Croatia, their aim was not primarily
to capture Croatian territory but to destroy the Croatian fantasy
about that territory,” Salecl wrote. “The Serbs forced the Croats
to redefine their national identity, to reinvent national myths and to
start thinking about themselves in a new way, without linking their
identity to the same territories, as they had done before.”

Something similar is underway in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The
Kremlin insists that Ukraine itself is a Soviet creation, that its
lands have always been Russian, that the Ukrainian national identity
has no historical basis and is a ruse to divide Russians and
Ukrainians who, in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, are
“a single whole”
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Russian soldiers and munitions have killed at least 55,000 Ukrainians
since the invasion began, of which 12,654 are civilians, according to
figures released by the UN
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in February 2025, and the remaining 43,000 were soldiers according to
a December 2024 Telegram post
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by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with another 400,000
injured. Over six million Ukrainians have left the country as refugees
and an estimated 3.7 million people had been internally displaced by
the war as of March this year according to the International
Organisation for Migration
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At present, Russia’s armies occupy nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s
land area. Death, displacement and outward migration have meant that
Ukraine, which had just over 50 million people when it gained
independence in 1992 and about 40 million people prior to the Russian
invasion in 2022, has a population of about 31 million today in areas
controlled by Kyiv. That is a lot of people and territory to lose, and
a lot of grief and trauma to process.

Today, Russia demands almost all of eastern Ukraine, including lands
it does not yet control, as a precondition to halt its military
aggression. Lands that, the Kremlin insists, were never Ukrainian to
begin with.

So Russia’s war in Ukraine is about territory and the various
geostrategic imperatives described by foreign-policy experts. But it
is not just about territory, much like the bloodshed that accompanied
the disintegration of Yugoslavia was not simply about who got what
piece of land, but what it _meant_ for a particular parcel to be
designated Serbian, or Croat, or Bosnian, or Kosovar, or – in this
instance – Ukrainian.

“Russia does not need more land. It is the largest country in the
world by land,” Yermolenko told me. “This is a war about
identity.”

“Ukrainian identity, we cannot find it in the past. We can find
elements of this identity in the past, but we need to make a kind of
patchwork of something new,” he said.

This patchwork, Yermolenko surmised, could even serve as a model for
other communities and peoples struggling to hold on to their sense of
self at a time when questions of national identity have never felt
more urgent, or divisive, and military skirmishes along long-disputed
borders are increasingly escalating into full-blown wars.

“None of us Ukrainians are thinking about returning to a Golden Age,
because what is our golden age?” Yermolenko said, “We’ve only
had 30 years of independence. Wow. Incredibly deep history but just 30
years of independence. So it is an identity in the making.”

[IMG_0312]

Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

It is important that ordinary people, wherever we are, understand this
war on our own terms. Unless we are careful, the sleight of hand of
‘national interest’ nudges each of us to role-play as
international statesmen speaking on behalf of our countries, our
militaries, and our oligarchs, at our own expense.

We live in a time of extraordinarily unrepresentative political
leadership: In the Middle East, flotillas of concerned, unarmed,
civilians sought to intervene in the Israeli genocide in Gaza by
dodging Israeli military barricades at sea just to deliver baby-food
to dying Palestinians only to be turned back, even as our own leaders
struck arms-deals with Israel and wrung their hands when the Israeli
military used those same weapons to bomb schools and hospitals, and
continues to kill with impunity despite a ceasefire.

In Ukraine, the war has led supposedly resource-strapped governments
in Europe and the United Kingdom to shower their defence industries
with largesse even as their citizens are forced to make do with less;
it has prompted the Indian government to insist that buying crude oil
from Russia is a strategic necessity that outweighs all other risks to
the economy; it has normalised an old-fashioned colonial resource-grab
in which the US now sells arms to Ukraine in return for access to its
minerals. Each of these trade-offs has been sold to us, wherever we
live, as the sacrifices we must endure to preserve ‘our way of
life’, or as Salecl would put it, to preserve the sanctity of our
respective national myths.

We are all shaped by our myths, but we needn’t be bound to them. We
are all born into our respective national identities, but we can each
choose to reinterpret what they mean to us.

One morning, at a museum in south-western Ukraine, I glimpsed how two
Ukrainian women from the city of Odessa, born 50 years apart, each
painting in her early thirties, had both strived to make sense of a
time of cataclysmic change, each making art and myths for her people
to comprehend history’s long arc.

Few cities are better suited to such thinking: Odessa is built on
lands that, over 2,000 years, have been claimed by the Greeks, the
Tatars, the Ottoman Turks, the Russians, and, of course, the
Ukrainians. The palace that houses the National Fine Arts Museum was
built in the 1820s in the Russian classical style, when Odessa was a
major Black Sea port of the Russian Empire.

The city has been repeatedly targeted by Russian airstrikes since
2022, so when I arrived, the museum’s most treasured collections
were sequestered away in crates in bomb shelters; a video projector
displayed photographs of these artefacts on a darkened wall near the
entrance, in much the way that museums across Africa and Asia must
make do with facsimiles of their stolen treasures now on display at
the British Museum in London.

Even so, two halls of the museum had been turned over to the work of
Liuda Yastreb, a Ukrainian modernist who graduated from the Odessa
school in 1964. Yastreb was trained in the prevailing style of Soviet
social realism at a time when the regime viewed art solely as a weapon
of class struggle.

But the work on display was from Yastreb’s days in the Soviet
underground art scene in the 1970s, when artists in Moscow, Odessa,
Leningrad, displayed their most interesting and transgressive work in
so-called “apartment exhibitions” in the relative privacy of each
other’s homes.

The figures in Yastreb’s work occupy much of her canvases: Eve,
naked and voluptuous, looks over her shoulder and smiles knowingly at
the viewer as she holds a tiny, cherry-sized apple, and a cheerful
serpent peeks out from behind a tree. Three naked women, their tangled
limbs create the illusion of a three-headed four-armed many-legged
creature as they run through a riotous watercolor cityscape in joyful
abandon, an enormous winged female figure hovers in midflight over
toy-like apartment towers.

The final exhibit was a translation of _Spiritual Stoicism of the
Artist in Soviet Society,_ Yastreb’s 1979 essay, in which she
described the psychic dislocation of selfhood and identity during
Ukraine’s Soviet period.

“People's souls must be brought back from the emptiness caused by
the revolution, war, famine, and destruction that accompanied them for
so long,” Yastreb wrote. This task, she said, fell to artists such
as herself to act as “rubbish collectors” gathering the discarded
relics of her time: Churches, icons, sculptures, ancient books,
painting, engravings, folk art.

“All this was being dusted off, cleaned, as if it were seen for the
first time, but known long ago.” she wrote. “There was an urgent
desire to revive despised traditions” in service of creating what
she described as “real works of art appeared, reborn, radiating
light and power.”

Across the hall from the Yastreb exhibition, I visited an exhibition
by Anastasiia Kolibaba, a Ukrainian artist born in 1994 – three
years after the dissolution of the USSR.

On her website, Kolibaba describes her practice as documenting events
in service of “the creation of an elementary modern myth.” Her
paintings of the current war look like photographs washed by a
blur-filter to create an effect eerily reminiscent of Soviet-era
imagery updated for the age of Instagram.

Where the figures in Yastreb’s work occupy most of her canvases –
the individual self striving to take up space – Kolibaba’s work
tries to claim Ukraine’s vast empty landscapes from threats that
originate just beyond the horizon.

In _Combatants_, the exhaustion of three soldiers and their dog on
patrol seeps through the canvas; in a series of three watercolours
titled _Trophy,_ the artist offers three perspectives on a destroyed
tank; in a work titled _Air Defence,_ a distant flash of light
illuminates a darkened sky along a desolate shore_._

My phone buzzed with a notification for an incoming air strike as I
left the museum for my next meeting. “Usually it is nothing,” said
the taxi driver, gesturing out of his window to people sipping coffee
at an outdoor cafe. “Usually.”

[IMG_0225]

Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

After two weeks of sheltering from Russian air raids in the corridors
of the apartment complex where he lived in Kyiv, the anarchist looked
into the eyes of his spouse and children and thought, “It cannot go
on like this. We cannot keep living like this.”

He signed up to join the army the next day, and has been rotating in
and out of the conflict’s shifting frontlines ever since.

“If there is anything I can take from my anarchist self, I think it
is to resist the feeling of powerlessness,” he told me over a patchy
WhatsApp call from somewhere in eastern Ukraine. “When you drive
through destroyed cities, when you look inside bombed apartments, you
see the remnants of people’s lives. And you tell yourself, ‘I will
stand against this.’”

In the years before the war, the anarchist was a keen observer and
lucid interpreter of the ideological undercurrents and debates
animating Ukrainian society. In the years after the Russian occupation
of Crimea in 2014, human rights organisations in Ukraine tracked the
rise of volunteer paramilitaries who embraced far-right politics and
Nazi imagery, opposed LGBTIQ rights, and embraced Christian
nationalism in a manner increasingly visible in far right movements
across the US, the UK, and Central Europe.

Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, the members of these
paramilitaries have been absorbed into the Ukrainian military where
they fight alongside a wide cross-section of Ukrainian society who
have thrown themselves into the war effort. As a consequence, the
anarchist said, the classic divisions of left and right are becoming
much harder to parse because the world has changed so much that it has
ceased to make sense.

“We have all kinds of people in my unit. The far-right, far-left
divide is completely irrelevant now, ” he said. “Right now, the
blunt reality of things is that I am killing Russians. And I’m
trying to get better at it. Does that make me a right-winger? I
don’t know.”

When the men in his unit spoke of identity, he said, “we speak about
emotions.” And for now, the Ukrainian identity at war is defined by
one pure emotion: A defiance shared by 30 million people united by
extreme circumstances. “It is the simplest emotion of ‘What the
fuck? Get out of my space.’”

But the longer the war goes on, the more it is changing him. War
coarsens, war bruises, war scars. War warps your perception of reality
and stretches the boundaries of what is normal. Sometimes, the war
makes it impossible to imagine peace.

“For me, as a writer, it is crucial to be able to feel things. My
job is to feel things, to keep my emotions attuned to what is
happening in front of me,” he said. “But right now, I’m in
survival mode. Right now, I need to shield my emotional self.

“Am I becoming someone else? Who will I become? I want to preserve
my ability to listen to people,” he continued. “And from the level
of an individual, imagine this process going upwards to the level of a
country.”

Ukraine’s future, he continued, will be determined by who and what
survives the war. “It will be shaped by what survival means for me
versus my comrade,” he said. “Right now we are riding a tsunami of
emotions to who knows where. If we are lucky to live, we will have a
very interesting period of identity building and we will each be in a
position to shape what emerges after.”

For much of 2022, three-quarters of Ukrainians favoured fighting on
until victory was attained. Three years later, polls indicate nearly
70%
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now favour a negotiated end to the war, even as they doubt the
fighting will end anytime soon. But as much as many in Ukraine, in
Europe, and around the world, yearn for a ceasefire, some of the
soldiers on the front fear a temporary pause in the fighting almost as
much as a war without end.

“Sometimes I feel the worst case scenario is a ceasefire, the army
is dismissed, we all go home. And then two years later, the Russians
go again,” he said.

Right now, 30 million Ukrainians are sacrificing their lives, their
careers, their mental health, their ability to feel, as if four long
years ago, the entire country took a deep breath and is yet to exhale.
Right now, it is impossible to predict if the experiences and traumas
of war will shift Ukrainian society to the left, the right, or what
these labels will even mean.

When I was reviewing my notes and transcripts, I noticed how often the
people I met on my trip said “Right Now”, as if the war had
trapped them into fossilised amber of the eternal present: Right now
is not the time to ask how the war is going; right now is the time to
fight the war. Right now is not the time for divisive talk. Right now,
we can only think about the right now.

Or, as a senior adviser to the Ukrainian government put it when I
asked him about his department’s plans to deal with the PTSD that
would inevitably follow the war, “Right now, there is no trauma.
Right now there is only life experience.”

_A mantra to survive the Right Now, as narrated to the author on a
late night taxi ride in Lviv:_

Live in the moment.Ask yourself:Is this a catastrophe?Or is this just
catastrophic thinking?Remind yourself:Before the waryou and all your
friends could still have died in a road accident,or some other
unforeseen calamity.

Tell yourself:Before this, it was almost like this.

[IMG_0111]

Poet Halyna Kruk | Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

When her young son died on the front, a woman stopped talking to her
sister.

She stopped talking to her sister because her sister has many children
and grandchildren.

And her sister always has news to share of her children, but the woman
has no news to share of her dead son.

Halyna Kruk heard this story from a woman who walked up to her after a
poetry reading. This is, as Kruk noted, only one of hundreds of
thousands of such stories. This is what a war feels like.

Kruk is a poet, writer, and professorof medieval literature, who has
volunteered along the grey-zones in east Ukraine since the 2014
invasion when Russia took control of Crimea. She met her future
husband on one of these trips when she stopped to distribute
medicines, supplies and books at a military camp not far from
Marioupol.

The day we met at a coffee shop in Lviv, her husband had just returned
home from what he hoped would be his last deployment at the front.
After our coffee, we walked out into the street where Kruk bumped into
an acquaintance she hadn’t met for many years. When Kruk asked about
her family, the acquaintance said her son had died on the front.

“There are these new divisions emerging in society,” Kruk said,
recalling the grieving woman at her poetry reading.

“In the first year of war, families were broken because the distance
in experience was so vast that the connection was broken,” she said.
“In one family it was hard for people to speak to each other.”

Since the outbreak of war, Ukrainian men of fighting age have needed
special permission to leave the country. The law was very recently
relaxed to allow men aged between 18 and 22 to travel. Meanwhile at
least 6 million mostly women and children have left Ukraine in 2022 in
search of safety. With every passing year, they become less likely to
return according to data gathered by Centre for Economic Strategy, a
Ukrainian think tank. And however and whenever the war ends, Kruk
expects a sizable number of people will want to leave the country, if
only to start on a clean slate because they have lost so much.

This dynamic was visible on a long bus ride from Chisinau, Moldova to
Odessa. The travel restrictions meant all my co-passengers were women,
children and a solitary white-haired man. Beside me sat a young
Ukrainian woman from Odessa, who was only 19 in 2022 when her mother
bundled her into a car with a distant relative and shipped her off to
Germany when the war began. This was her first trip back home.

“My mother was terrified I would be posted to the frontlines,” she
said, explaining she was training as a paramedic when the war began.
“I haven’t told her I’m coming to see her, because she is sure
they will draft me.”

In the three and a half years since, she had learnt German, enrolled
in a German university and was now a handful of examinations away from
becoming a qualified nurse. Nearly four years of war and devastation
have meant that nurses are in great demand in Ukraine, but eighty
years of peace and prosperity have meant that nurses are also in great
demand in Germany
[[link removed]].

In her first year away, she said, she was desperately homesick and
worried for her mother especially when Odessa was repeatedly hit by
Russian air strikes. But as the war settled into a grim pattern in
Ukraine, she built herself a life in Germany. “Now I know the
language,” she said. “Now I have a career. Now I have a
boyfriend.”

These aren’t trivial things to want; these are arguably the most
important things — life, community, love, freedom and dreams for the
future.

“I don’t know if I will come back,” she said. “Just for short
trips. Just for holidays. Just to see my ma.”

For Kruk, leaving Ukraine was not an option she considered. She has
continued to write poetry. It is one of her ways, she said, to survive
the war. But she said she has struggled to write prose.

“For prose, I need more inner space. I need greater distance from
reality, and I can’t do that now.” she said. “But I feel alive
here. I feel more alive here than elsewhere; I feel I live in history;
and I know many people feel it.”

[IMG_4889]

Bogdan Dubovic, soldier | Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

In the summer of 2023, Bogdan Dubovic was in the trenches, working as
a sapper clearing the way for his unit as part of the Ukrainian
counteroffensive, when he was transfixed by the sudden appearance of a
Russian drone followed by a deafening explosion.

Once the smoke and debris cleared, he was rushed to a hospital where
surgeons were forced to amputate his left arm. His unit members told
him he was lucky to be alive, but they all knew that Bodgan was not an
ordinary man, he was a Leshy, a forest spirit, an enchanted protector
of the forests, who as per legend could either aid or hinder
travellers lost in the woods.

“When I first signed up to fight, my unit said, ‘Everyone has to
have a call sign, what is your name?” Bogdan recalled. At the time,
Bogdan was working as a forest ranger in eastern Ukraine. “I said, I
am a man from the forest, call me ‘forest man’.” But that
call-sign was taken, so he said, “Call me Leshy.”

In his new identity, his first assignment was to assist in the
exfiltration of civilians and soldiers from Marioupol, in the days
after the city fell to the Russian forces. Thereafter until he lost
his arm, he operated in some of the most gristly theatres in the war.
In his previous life as a forester, Bogdan had learnt that the way to
survive in the wild was to take every chance to turn the odds in his
favour, and that is what he taught his unit of young volunteers.

With every passing skirmish, his unit came to believe that he really
was a magical being, a forest spirit who would protect them in the
face of dangers, and slowly Bogdan came to embody the Leshy.

“We never lost control of ourselves as a team, we were confident in
our decisions, and that saved us every time,” he said. “My team
trusted me as if I was not someone real, but from a legend.”

Yermolenko, the philosopher, and his wife Orgakova had first
encountered Leshy when they were delivering supplies to his unit.
Since then, they had struck up a deep friendship and met whenever
Leshy was visiting Kyiv.

On the day we met, he sported a satyrid white beard, his eyes
sparkled, and he constantly pulled on cigarettes that enshrouded him
in a plume of smoke; the absence of his left arm lent him an aura of
an otherworldly being who can be hurt but not defeated.

Leshy is from the Pontic steppes, a region known in Ukrainian as
_dyke-pole_ (literally “wild fields”) the vast grasslands that
stretch across southern Ukraine, past the Sea of Azov, all the way
into central Asia.

“This is not a place of nationalities,” he said. “It is a place
of geography. It is a particular state of the soul; it is a place
where people from different ethnicities, different histories,
different nationalities, are drawn to a particular feeling of freedom.
It is a freedom that forms your character and your perception of the
world.”

The Ukrainian identity, Leshy said, was drawn from the steppe
grasslands, from that rolling landscape of freedom that had long
served as a battleground for armies, a hunting ground for raiders, and
a refuge for men like him.

This war, much like those that came before it, he said, was not so
much about territory as it was a clash between two world views.
Between those who lived in freedom on a limitless frontier, and those
who sought to destroy what they could not control.

“The next time you come to Ukraine, I will take you to the
steppes.” He said, “If you stay there just a while, you will want
to live there for the rest of your life.”

On one of my last days in Kyiv, Yermolenko dropped me off at the PEN
Ukraine office for a conversation with his colleague Vakhtang
Kebuladazhe, who looks exactly as one would imagine a middle-aged,
Heidegger-quoting East European phenomenologist who plays bass guitar,
and has written both a thesis on Kant and a rock opera inspired by a
poetic play written in 1911 by Lesya Ukrainka, a Ukrainian feminist
poet.

I started, as I did for much of my trip, by asking Kebuladazhe how he
thought the war was shaping Ukraine’s national identity. We argued
for a while about national identity, language, power, colonialism and
decolonisation: Russian in the case of Ukraine, English in the case of
India; language as simply an instrument, versus Heidegger’s
description of “Language as the house of being”; and then he told
me a joke.

“It is like the boy and the salt,” Kebuladazhe said, when I asked
him to describe his conversations about identity with his students at
the university.

“There was once a boy who would not speak. His family took him to
the finest doctors in Kyiv, but to no avail. He didn’t utter a word.

Then over dinner one day, soon after he turned five, he said, “Pass
me the salt.”

His mother was astounded: Why didn’t you say anything until today?

“Until today, dinner always had enough salt.”

“We are that boy,” Kebuladzhe said with a wry smile. “Now
Ukraine is in an existential crisis. Now, my students are immersing
themselves in philosophy and history and the humanities. Now they are
speaking, now they are asking, ‘Who are we as Ukrainians?”

_Aman Sethi_
[[link removed](Africa)andChhattisgarhcorrespondentwithTheHindu.Hisaward-winningreportagebothinIndiaandaroundtheworldhastouchedonsomeofthemostpressingissuesofourtime,suchasmigration,landgrabs,labourrights,publichealth,nationalism,democracyandinsurgency.Heistheauthorofthecriticallyacclaimednon-fictionbook‘AFreeMan’.]_
is editor-in-chief of openDemocracy. Before joining us he was deputy
executive editor at HuffPost. Before that he was the executive editor
for strategy at BuzzFeed, editorial director with Coda Media,
editor-in-chief of HuffPost India, associate editor with the Hindustan
Times, and foreign correspondent (Africa) and Chhattisgarh
correspondent with The Hindu. His award-winning reportage both in
India and around the world has touched on some of the most pressing
issues of our time, such as migration, land grabs, labour rights,
public health, nationalism, democracy and insurgency. He is the author
of the critically acclaimed non-fiction book ‘A Free Man’._

_openDemocracy_ [[link removed]]_ is an
independent international media platform. We produce high-quality
journalism which challenges power, inspires change and builds
leadership among groups underrepresented in the media. Headquartered
in London, we have team members across four continents. We are a
mission-focused organisation, which means we always think about the
impact our journalism can have. We're keeping our journalism free for
everyone to read. If you value our work, __please help keep it free_
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This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence
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