They will put medals on television. They will speak about sacrifice, history, glory, memory, the defeat of Nazism, the greatness of their country.
And here in Ukraine, we listen for air alerts.
That is the whole obscenity of it.
A country that came to destroy us will stand in public and pretend to honor the defeat of evil.
The dictator who bombs Ukrainian cities will speak about liberation.
The same madness that sends missiles into homes, hospitals, schools, railway stations, power plants, and sleeping neighborhoods will tell the world it understands what victory means.
This project of evil called Russia does not understand victory.
It only knows the sadistic pleasure of seeing someone kneel and calling that peace.
For so many years they have tried to make this date look sacred by making real grief serve a project of power.
They turned the dead of the Second World War into permission for new graves.
Russians are celebrating victory from eighty years ago because they have nothing left to celebrate from this one.
They know that.
And I need to say this from Ukraine, because my life has been interrupted by the country that dares to call itself victorious.
For four years now, I do not have a life. I have a hope of a life. I have a plan of survival.
I have one ordinary morning waiting somewhere in the future when my first thought is not war.
Russia took that morning from millions of people and still walks into the calendar to celebrate itself.
This is not history. It is happening now.
It is happening while Ukrainian families are still burying people.
While soldiers are dying in trenches at this very hour. While children in this country know the sound of drones before they know the sound of peaceful childhood.
I have spent more than four years choosing love over hate in everything I write, but today I will not choose it.
I want to tell this clearly, because I have earned the right to say it:
I hate the country that did this to mine.
Completely.
I hate what it has shown me about what a people can become.
I hate that it took so many in the world years of war to understand how rotten a nation can be while still calling itself great.
How a country can lose its soul before it loses a war.
Russia did.
Every missile they launch proves it. Every stolen child, every ruined village.
Russian mothers are told to be proud of sons sent to kill people who never attacked them.
They were swallowing this lie for so long that they no longer remember what victory is supposed to mean.
And now even their parade carries the smell of fear.
No tanks on Red Square this year. Security everywhere. Signals blocked.
The man who promised to take Kyiv in three days is afraid of its own holiday, in its own capital.
Good.
Let them be afraid.
Fear is the only honest thing left in that celebration.
They can call May 9 whatever they want.
But here in Ukraine, we know what victory is.
Victory is the life they failed to erase.
Victory is a woman in Kharkiv sweeping glass from her kitchen and still making tea.
It is a soldier who has not seen his child in months and still holds the line.
It is a city repairing power after another strike.
It is a country waking up after another night and choosing to exist.
The ones who need to destroy another nation to feel great have already lost.
Anyone who turns memory into permission for murder has already lost.
It’s already May 9 in Kyiv.
In Moscow too.
Moscow will perform today.
But somewhere beyond the performance, Ukraine will still be here.
Alive.
And that is the victory Russia could never understand.
—Viktor
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Russia spends today telling the world what it wants the past to mean. This journal spends every day telling the truth of what is happening now. The readers who decided this record was worth protecting are the reason it can keep doing that.
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
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