I Killed Vladimir Putin Last Night

SO I GUESS I’M A MURDERER NOW.

That’s what my dream said. That’s what my hands said when I woke up and couldn’t stop staring at them.

I didn’t flinch. I didn’t hesitate.

I didn’t regret it.

I killed Vladimir Putin in my sleep.

I still don’t know if that was justice or just rage. But it left a kind of peace inside me I wasn’t expecting.

Let’s stop pretending.

Let’s stop using words like "unthinkable."

Tell me, who hasn’t let that image cross their mind lately?

Maybe not in detail, maybe not with your hands, but the idea?

The possibility that if this man disappeared, the world might breathe again.

In my dream, he didn’t disappear. I made him disappear.

In my dream, I killed him.

I made an assassination.

And I am so ashamed for the feelings that I felt after this dream.

I felt ashamed for one reason.

Because I liked it.

Illustration by Morten Morland

He wasn’t far on a stage, or in a screen. In my dream, he was just there, at a close distance.

The dictator, at the reach of my hands.

The monster, in flesh and blood. A human being, just like me and you.

Close enough to smell the fear leaking from him.

Suddenly I jumped on him like an animal.

My knees crushed his ribs. My fingers curled around his throat like they knew the way. He struggled. I pressed harder.

No one was able to release me from the body of that monster. I was determined and carrying my country and the world with me that moment.

His eyes widened, empty and watching. My heart didn’t race. It slowed.

I felt everything go still.

He was a dead body in my hands.

Then I woke up.

I didn’t feel victorious. I felt sick.

Absolutely sick.

And it wasn’t because I had done something wrong. But because something inside me had shifted, and it seems that I couldn't shift it back.

I stared at my hands. Half in horror, half like someone trying to remember what they were for.

My hands didn’t feel like mine anymore.

What kind of person I turned out to be?

The same person whose hands once held my wife as she cried.

Hands that built tables, turned screws, stitched fabric with care. Hands that are so proud to come here and write the world about peace, forgiveness and resilience.

These same hands, last night, wrapped around a human being’s throat and crushed the life out of him.

I’ve always called myself a pacifist.

I still do, though now it feels like a mess inside me.

I learned how to handle rifles when the war came, because I had to. But I hate guns. I hate the sound of them, the feel, the smell.

I hate what they turn people into.

I’ve never fantasized about killing anyone. Not even Putin.

Not until now.

But hatred is a strange thing.

It takes control of you to the point you see yourself from outside your own body, and you don’t even recognize who that collection of body and soul in front of you has become.

Or maybe this is what grief becomes when it rots too long. When the funeral is never over.

When the war keeps taking, and you run out of prayers to offer.

You start imagining other solutions.

You stop waiting for justice.

And something in you decides: I’ll take it myself.

I am someone who collects sleep disorders along my life, even before the war.

I talk, I walk, I move, sometimes I hurt myself while sleeping.

Once, during a nightmare, I hit my wife.

She forgave me, but I didn’t. I still haven’t.

Fortunately she’s not with me now. And I’m scared of what would’ve happened if she had been beside me last night.

If my body had followed the dream into waking.

Because this time, it wasn’t “flailing.” It was surgical. Controlled.

Deliberate.

Even knowing killing the dictator wouldn’t fix everything. Even knowing someone worse could rise. Even knowing the blood would flood back faster in revenge…

I still want it.

I want him gone. I want it to be me who does it. I want it to be slow. I want to look into his eyes and feel his power disappear.

And I hate that I want it.

But it’s there. I can’t deny it anymore.

If you woke up from that dream with your hands still burning, would you call yourself a monster?

Would you hide from the truth?

Or would you finally admit what this war has turned all of us into?

This isn’t just about me. It’s about what’s been done to us. All of us.

It’s about how so many in the world expect Ukrainians to stay noble while dying.

To live after the sirens but before the healing.

To carry yourself like a human while something inside you starves for vengeance.

To dream of doing what the world refuses to.

But we’re still here.

And without our own consent, we’re dreaming different dreams now.

They don’t end in treaties. They don’t end in summits.

They end with hands. Our hands. And silence.

And I won’t apologize for that.

I’m not sorry I dreamed of killing him.

I’m sorry that the world made that dream feel like the only kind of justice left.

I’m sorry that peace turned into a fantasy.

And I’m sorry that I ever had to write this.

But I did.

Because if I don’t, the dream becomes real.

We just don’t know anymore the difference between reality, dreams, and nightmares.

What if the thing I’ve been holding down finally rises?

And I refuse to disappear like that.

I refuse to vanish under my own rage.

Last night, I killed Vladimir Putin.

And now, I’m doing everything I can to stay human while I’m awake.

Trying to be someone who still deserves to live.

🇺🇦

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📖 “The Divine Comedian: Ukraine’s Journey Through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise” is my first book: about Ukraine, seen from inside the fire, and the hope that refuses to die. Download it for free (PDF & Kindle).