For several months, Ukraine has been living in the film Groundhog Day every day.
Back in November, the intelligence services reported that Russia was assembling troops and military equipment on its eastern borders and that an attack could be expected in late January or early February.
Since then, reports from both Ukrainian officials and Western partners have not strayed from this timeline. And in repeating their concerns, officials have talked about a month, then weeks, now only days when a Russian attack is possible.
The news is not only full of headlines about the concern that has been generated, but also videos of the equipment that is increasingly being moved to Ukraine’s borders. Diplomacy seems to have reached an impasse. Ukraine, the U.S., and Europe are exposing the Kremlin for lies and intimidating it with sanctions, while Russia, meanwhile, keeps thickening the colors of fictional narratives about the need for protection from NATO, which, according to them, “is pulling NATO military infrastructure to the Russian borders”. Recently, in an interview with CNN, Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that there was no talk of military action against Ukraine.
In general, Russia ignores Ukraine even at the level of dialogue.
It is easy to draw a parallel here: while official Kyiv refuses the Kremlin’s pressure to sit down at the negotiating table with terrorists, the Russian authorities ignore their Ukrainian counterparts. Russia is trying to humiliate Ukraine’s independence by flocking equally between the state and the unrecognized “republics,” according to Ukrainian law, the LPR/DPR terrorist organizations created by pro-Russian fighters in Donbas.
It is known that in 2014 Russia wanted to get its hands on a much larger part of Ukraine – in fact, the southeast – and called it the “Novorossiya” project. This was avoided mainly because Russia overestimated the post-Soviet nostalgia of the Southeast: even those Ukrainians who pined for the collapsed USSR know and feel that they are citizens of the independent country, Ukraine.
But the conflict, which began with Russia’s insolence to get its hands on parts of Ukraine, is now escalating into a Russian confrontation with the West. And even though Peskov says it is not about military action against Ukraine, we all know that it is Ukrainian territory that is in the way of Russia’s ambitions. And they will start with us, Ukrainians.
Nevertheless, if you come to Kherson, the southern region of Ukraine bordering Crimea, which is one of the first targets for Russian invaders and which in 2014 already survived the rolls of pro-Russian separatists, giving them a clear stronghold and keeping its area completely under Ukrainian control, now the residents of this seaside region feel no danger at all.
“What war? They say something on TV, but we don't feel it here,“
a local resident told me. And in a Kherson village, quite on the outskirts of the region, they clearly say: "We don't believe in war”.
Nevertheless, even with this disbelief the internal fear here often breaks through in the form of accusations of the authorities' inability to establish a dialogue with the Kremlin. If the war with Russia is abstract for many, the image of Vladimir Putin himself generates associations of hard power.
A psychoanalyst friend of mine says that this is a normal phenomenon, when people subconsciously push away fear because they cannot stand it.
I often talk to Khersonians because it is my hometown, my relatives live on the outskirts of the region, and I can observe how life, both urban and rural, is developing.
This peculiar non-recognition of the threat of war comes from a fear of what people would do in case of an attack and a weariness of not understanding why these people suffer such a fate. War in a peaceful country in the 21st century, when clear rules for interactions between countries seem predetermined, seems unthinkable. But in 2014, Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and seized parts of the eastern region of Donbas, triggering a military conflict in which some 14,000 people died, millions lost their homes and were displaced. What can stop Russia today – it’s a question to which people in the southeastern regions do not know the answer.
After watching months of communication badminton by high-level officials whom they can only see on TV, their faith in the possibility of stopping the war has dried up. The only thing left to do is to close themselves off from fear in order to protect their psyche from imagining the consequences of the war and the hard decisions they will have to make: to live in the place of conflict, in the region they consider home, or to flee wherever they can, trying on themselves the unenviable fate of the displaced persons.
For many residents of the southeast, therefore, the possibility of war remains a horrific picture on television, which has long made their lives a groundhog's day.
