If you ever visit Ternopil, you will see the pond.
But it is not a pond in the way you imagine.
You will be hundreds of miles from the sea, yet that body of water can fool you for a moment.
It stretches across the city like a harbor. It is not the ocean and not a great river, but when you stand on its edge and look across the water, on some days you barely see the other side.
And while everything there seems peaceful, it is impossible to forget the nation around it.
The surface moves with wind and light, and the pond becomes its own small world.
I often went there and sat for hours.
When we are close to water, it seems that thoughts flow differently in our minds.
But I was there more to watch than to think.
There are many birds in the pond. Swallows, gulls, and other fast flying creatures that flash across the water and disappear before you can follow them.
The ducks are different.
They move slowly. That makes them easier to observe, and so we can follow their lives for a while.
A mother guiding a line of ducklings. A duck dipping its head under the water looking for food.
Another one chasing a piece of bread someone threw from the shore.
Simple scenes.
Yet when I watched them long enough, a strange question started to form in my mind.
Do they know?
Do they know there is a war here?
This city is in a country at war. Missiles cross the sky. Sirens break the night. Every family carries a weight that didn’t exist some time ago.
But the ducks keep swimming across the pond.
I am sure they sense there is something wrong around them. Animals always feel the energy around them, but I doubt they understand the madness unfolding around them.
Animals fight too. They defend territory. They compete for food. They protect their young.
For a long time we humans liked to say that violence comes from our animal side.
That our primitive impulses are dangerous and our rational minds are what make us civilized.
Watching the ducks, I realized the opposite is what is true.
Animals do not design systems of destruction.
They do not invent theories to justify cruelty.
It never crosses their minds to build machines meant to destroy entire cities.
Those things come from human rationality.
From plans, strategies, doctrines, and calculations created in our human minds.
We don’t need the fantasy that the world inside that pond is gentle.
Every creature there struggles to live. Food must be found, danger must be avoided. Winter always returns.
I have no idea what these brave ducks do when the pond freezes over for months.
But there is balance.
No duck wakes up with the dream of conquering the entire pond.
No bird decides that another species must disappear.
They fight for life, then they continue living.
While I was there watching the water, thinking about drones, bombs, missiles, sirens, and shelters, I realized that a duck in Ternopil is living a more peaceful life than every single human being in Ukraine.
Possibly more peaceful than any of us anywhere, in times like these.
They are living under the same threat as us humans, for sure.
But they are not ignorant.
They simply does not carry our kind of rational madness.
The duck knows water, hunger, risk, movement.
That is enough.
And that small world stays in equilibrium.
Meanwhile we, the species that calls ourselves rational, keep pushing our world closer to destruction.
November 19, 2025. Two miles from the Ternopil Pond.
So I sit by the pond in Ternopil and watch the ducks moving calmly across the water.
I didn’t come there to think, only to watch.
Just a moment of stillness.
But in a country under invasion, it is impossible not to wonder which species actually understands how to live.
—Viktor
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This journal will be always open to everyone. Paid subscriptions are what make that possible, and they allow me to continue dedicating the time and energy this work requires.
However you subscribe, I thank you for reading. Slava Ukraini!
Meanwhile, as Trump lifts sanctions to promote Russian oil:
America earlier announced it was temporarily easing sanctions on Russian oil (brought in to cut off funding for the Ukraine war) in a bid to bring down rising prices.
Seyed Abbas Araghchi’s post featured the front of Friday’s Financial Times, which claimed Russia would be making $150m (£113m) a day following the US move.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 