Russia spent the week telling diplomats to leave Kyiv.
Telling foreign residents to leave Kyiv.
It warned embassies to empty their offices, treating a capital city like a room with a light switch.
As if life could be folded and zipped into a bag, so carried somewhere safe before the next missile arrives.
“Leave Kyiv.”
Where exactly are we supposed to go?
There is something almost obscene in the way some people say evacuation. The word sounds clean from a distance.
The vocabulary of people who have never had to do it.
They speak as though everyone already has a map open, a road chosen, and a bed prepared somewhere else.
But ordinary life just does not work like that.
People are not loose objects. We are tied to places by rent, parents, jobs, cats, pharmacies, documents, debts, school schedules, doctors who know our history, neighbors who have our spare key, the small grocery store where the woman behind the counter already knows what bread we buy.
A person cannot simply become portable because Russia has decided to threaten the city they happen to live in.
This is the part that always disappears when powerful men speak.
They say “leave.”
And they forget that not everyone in this city is a member of some diplomatic mission, with evacuation plans prepared long before the rest of us even know where to begin.
Sometimes people abroad ask me why Ukrainians don’t just leave the threatened areas.
I understand the question. Most of them have never had to calculate escape like this.
So let me give you the calculation.
Do you have money for a week somewhere else?
Can your mother walk down five floors?
Does your salary depend on showing up tomorrow?
Well intentioned people ask because they have never had to imagine war entering every small decision, and I completely forgive them for that (that is one reason I write by the way.)
Russia, no.
Russia does not ask because they just and simply do not care.
Russia knows ordinary people cannot simply move, and this is why the warning is part of the attack.
The bomb is one violence.
The order to disappear before the bomb arrives is another.
It tells people that the problem is their presence, not Russia’s violence.
And I cannot accept that.
Kyiv is not a hotel people can check out of because a criminal government sends a warning.
This is a city where three million sleep-deprived souls are waking up this morning, making coffee, answering messages, going to work, holding their children, feeding their cats, looking at the sky and continuing because continuing is still the only honest answer we have.
You, reading this from a place at peace, hold this for a second:
A neighboring country has decided your home is now a “legitimate target.”
Notice the word they use. Legitimate.
What a clean little word for such insanity.
As if a city were obligated to empty itself politely to make room for someone else’s missiles.
As if staying were the provocation.
People stay because the place where you survive becomes part of your body.
If an embassy leaves, the missile is still a missile.
The family forced to leave is still a family forced to leave.
The attacker who warns before attacking only proves he knew exactly what he was doing.
So let this be recorded, Russia threatened more than buildings.
It threatened the idea that people are allowed to keep living where their lives already exist.
The simple human right to belong somewhere.
And still, Kyiv is here.
Kept alive by people who wake up every morning and choose this city again.
Kyiv is here because a home is not abandoned every time a murderer points at it.
Because people do not stop belonging to a place just because someone else wants it empty.
Sometimes the most radical act left is to remain where your life still knows your name.
—Viktor
🇺🇦
I usually ask you to subscribe if you can, but today, I want to ask something different: please send this piece to one person who should understand why “just leave” is not a real answer.
This testimony already belongs beyond me, and if it reaches them because of you, then this record has already gone farther than I could take it by myself.
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 