Cowards

At this time, you all know what happened in Turkey.

Or better, what didn't happen.

And I was thinking to tell you what betrayal feels like. What being humiliated is.

But instead I will just open my heart.

I will say what’s stuck in my throat, because today I am not a writer anymore.

Today I am not Ukrainian.

I am not a father.

I’m not even someone who has a family.

I am not someone who loves peace, or people, or truth.

I am not someone who is capable of love.

I am no one today.

I am not a person.

I am nothing.

I am not dead, but something was killed inside here.

Because that’s what that coward in Moscow just made to me.

He proposed the meeting.

He told everyone in the world that he was willing to negotiate peace and stop this hell of a living experience for this unhappy corner of the world.

He said he would go to Turkey and sit at a table to find a way to end this disaster.

Think about how you would feel if the man who for more than three years has been coming to your home to kill every person in your family, suddenly comes with a great idea of joining a table of discussion to negotiate the possibility of stopping killing your mother, your children, your sister.

To consider the possibility of stopping the killing, inside your home.

And even with every reason to doubt that psychopath, someone in your home decides to give him a try and accept the "invitation."

Not by choice, of course, but because of lack of choices.

This was not an invitation to a party. It could only be considered a party in the eyes of those sick people in Moscow, and I would not be surprised if there are people in that stupid Kremlin who celebrate with a banquet at every school and every hospital that is hit by their missiles.

So he proposed peace to a country that is probably bleeding its last drops. I tell by myself, by my last drops of energy.

This is not life.

It's not worth living this way. Our bravery have no limits, but we are humans, and we are made of flesh. We are done.

With all my honesty, our energy is in its final moments.

Not courage, I'm talking about energy.

And so, the dictator didn’t show up.

The wisest of us didn’t take it seriously, because we can never take cowards seriously. I'm sure Zelenskyy didn’t either, but still, who knows the pressure he gets? Especially when we have a narcissistic devil called Trump beside him, spreading to the planet that nothing happens in the world without his approval.

And I feel outraged also because I was naive.

I don't know how I forgot that Putin is just a senseless coward, and I believed that something good might happen. Something unexpected.

I dreamed of an agreement. I still have the visual image I created in my mind from two nights ago.

This war is making me as insane as those bastards in Moscow.

But in my case, fortunately, and as far as I know and so far, it is not evil. Only the most disappointing naivety.

I’m so far from the diplomats, from the decision makers. From the people who live in palaces and travel the world.

Imagine me. A man who’s never been on a plane. Who walks around the backyards of a country that lives in the backyard of empires,, driving trucks, baking bread, delivering food.

A country that pays the price for a thousand years of the worst luck in terms of history, of geography, and fate.

Don’t be fooled by my usual effort to be balanced, to be polite.

I am full of rage.

I am completely possessed by it.

This polished behavior here, my careful words, only reflects the ideal world I still have in my close to insane mind.

That old-fashioned dream of a world where people would love and respect each other.

The love and respect for you my reader, the wish of bring something nice, insightful, to show that our strength as people, in Ukraine or anywhere, may be tested at its limits. But we are bigger than any challenge we might ever face in life.

And I usually manage to hold it silently when I get disrespected. But inside me, the pain accumulates. I lost count of how many literal grenades I let explode in my stomach just so I could carry on and control my instincts.

And now this collective humiliation.

A humiliation of a whole country.

That coward didn’t just betray us.

He planned it.

He thought it through.

He prepared it for months.

When he proposes a meeting to stop the stabbing of a nation that is bleeding to death while he is still holding the knife, he is not just being a coward: he is being the worst possible kind of psychopath.

Because he knew, previously, that he never had plans to go, and that Ukraine had no other option than to accept whatever the stabber proposed in the hopes that some miracle would happen.

Because we live everyday the miracle of keeping hope alive in this country, so we believe in hope because we believe in miracles, and every new day is a miracle for us.

If not for all of us, at least for our country it still is.

And so the psychopath had his moment of rejoice. Because for a day, he found a way to reduce our nation to nothing.

Exactly like I'm feeling right now. Like I am nothing.

I never thought I would see so much cruelty like this.

A man stabbing you, looking at your face, talking about thinking about considering stopping stabbing you, making a stage, bringing media and photographers, and at the time to talk, comes with: "nah, we are comfortable with the knife where it is."

It's midnight in Moscow, and there are probably laughs and loud music to celebrate this morbid party, their last round of accomplished humiliation.

And I swear, my friends, if that were to be the last act of my life, I would be glad to invade a party like that and do the worst things that could come to my mind, and that I won’t describe, just to avoid thinking twice before them.

Have you ever seen someone mistreating a small cat, or a small dog? I am feeling exactly like that at this moment.

Ukraine feels like that.

Ukraine is that little kitten that didn’t ask to come to the world but has only the instinct and the desire to survive in its heart, and suddenly an evil man thirty times its size comes to kick him to death.

For the sake of pleasure in seeing someone else's pain.

This is psychopathy, my friends. There’s no other word.

And if they had their way, they would make this whole land a wasteland.

They would open whatever gates of Chornobyl, poison our rivers, make Ukraine unlivable. Just to create their precious “buffer zone.” To push NATO away as they like to tell. To protect their imaginary “security.”

But what is national security in a country of cowards?

A nation is a place where people live. Where people build. Where children grow and dream.

And you, Russia, you are not a nation.

Because you are not people.

You are something else.

You are cowards.

You don’t just invade, you lie. You stage peace talks you never intend to attend. You wear diplomacy like a mask, only to tear it off and laugh.

You are the worst sickness of this planet.

And if there is any justice left, Russia, if there is, you will lose everything you have.

Everything you never dared to be and to have.

Because you are nothing.

You’ve never been anything.

Russia, you are an illusion.

An illusion capable of killing.

But still, just an illusion.

🇺🇦

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