I’ve been getting a lot of comments from people who believe that staying in Ukraine while there’s a war going on is nothing short of idiotic, as well as people who are convinced that the fact that Ukrainian men aren’t allowed to leave the country during wartime means that they are being forced to fight for Zelenskyy personally and I’ve come to realise that a lot of foreigners don’t really understand the concept of civic duty the same way as I (and many Ukrainians) do. For many people the idea of civic duty means owing something to the state as an

Look, I’m not a diplomat, nor am I an expert on international relations, but I’m getting tired of the lazy old ‘Ukrainians hate Palestinians because they’re old hardcore Netanyahu fans’ narrative that’s been doing the rounds on social media.

https://twitter.com/rynkrynk/status/1762923440460214328

Ukraine formally recognised Palestine as an independent state way earlier than many European countries did, and we have a long history of diplomatic relations, which is more than you can say for many of the countries that aren’t being called ‘far-right zionist states’ online.

Oh, MiGs are *very* dangerous since they can carry hypersonic missiles that can reach any part of the country in mere minutes, are very hard to shoot down, and cause incredible destruction when hitting their targets. But most of the time the MiGs aren’t actually carrying them but

https://twitter.com/al_sabbat/status/1758638709350756654

are just taking off to do recon or spook us. Of course, there’s no way to know if they’re carrying them or not until they launch the missiles, which is usually too late to do anything except maybe run to a bathroom or corridor and pray for the best. But if we went down to the

Good question! Kyiv has been fortunate lately (thanks to our incredible defenders!) so we’ve been getting anywhere from 0 to 3 air raid alerts per day these past few weeks. Some air raid alerts are treated with more seriousness than others: if it’s a MiG taking off then most

https://twitter.com/al_sabbat/status/1758497246209794401

will tend to ignore it and hope for the best, but if missiles have been launched/detected in our airspace and are heading in the direction of Kyiv then it’s time to head to a shelter/basement/bathroom/corridor with sturdy walls. But it obviously depends on how much you worry

Do you know why these Ukrainian ‘farm boys’ (and I’m going to ignore the fact that portraying Ukraine as a nation of peasants is deeply rooted in the chauvinistic stereotypes historically perpetrated by russia) are dying? Because they’re protecting their loved ones.

https://twitter.com/johnlefevre/status/1756421889293942834

And as someone who happens to be a Ukrainian civilian I will be always grateful for their bravery and the sacrifices they’re making every goddamn day to keep us safe. If it weren’t for these ‘farm boys’ I would be dead by now. So would my entire family, probably.

Seeing well-written opinion pieces with headlines like ‘What happens if Ukraine loses?’ in western media as a Ukrainian feels surreal because the authors are talking about geopolitics and you’re sitting in Kyiv thinking ‘oh, well I guess I might die or lose my home forever?’. And listen, it’s not a new feeling, since this very time in 2022 was even more deeply horrifying, but I really really really don’t want to go through the experience of fleeing your own home and wondering if you’ll ever see it again all over again.

Alright, I went to my husband’s best friend’s birthday yesterday, and here’s a little linguistic case study for you guys. I’ve known this group of friends since about 2016, and for a while we all used to speak russian when hanging out together. My husband and I spoke Ukrainian to one another from the first day we met, since we both come from (predominantly) Ukrainian-speaking families, but we’d switch to russian with these particular friends since most of them preferred to speak russian.

Ukrainian… what now?

https://twitter.com/todd_toddleston/status/1748965658447290836

You know why there are so many people who consider/used to consider themselves to be ‘ethnic Russians’ in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine? Two reasons. If you could pass for an ethnic russian in the USSR by slightly changing your surname and switching to speaking

Many Ukrainians such as myself grew up with New Year’s Eve being the biggest and most anticipated holiday of the winter season. New Year’s was when most of us got presents under the tree as kids, and winter festivities as a whole were mostly known as ‘новорічні святаʼ (new year’s festivities). The reason for this was, of course, yet again the goddamn Soviet Union, which spent decades persecuting Christians and other religious people, trying to wipe out local traditions, and purposefully popularised New Year’s Eve as the main secular holiday of the year.

I might regret mentioning this topic, but I’ve seen far too many posts insinuating that the so-called collective west is arming Ukraine and not Palestine purely because it likes Ukrainians more (and because we’re white, of course), and also takes about how Putin, ‘unlike the IDF, is holding back and not actively trying to murder all of us in cold blood.’ And guys, I can’t take this bullshittery anymore. I have tremendous sympathy for Palestinian civilians who do not deserve the horrors they’re going through — nobody does. Period.

Ukrainians are dying. Dying. Every single goddamn day. Dying at the hands of your former classmates, your neighbours, maybe even your distant (or not-so-distant) relatives. Dying because you spent 20 years complacently watching your president accumulate more power and nurse his

https://twitter.com/krotovukha/status/1736252970961109091

imperialist ambitions. Ukrainians have been waking up to air raid sirens and explosions multiple times per night for almost two years now, and in that time you haven’t managed to convince the majority of your own countrymen — your own neighbours and classmates and relatives —

Since you’re obviously privileged enough to live in a country that’s never been invaded, let me explain why your big ‘gotcha’ moment really isn’t one. Apologies in advance for any possible typos — Kyiv had 10 ballistic missiles fired at it tonight so I haven’t gotten much sleep.

https://twitter.com/carlbeijer/status/1734623858462761367

‘Supporting a war’ when your country is the one being invaded doesn’t automatically mean being brave enough to enlist as a volunteer — although a lot of Ukrainians including my own family members and friends have been enlisting as volunteers since the very beginning of the

You know, I’d love to stop worrying about my loved ones getting drafted, and I’d love waking up to my normal alarm clock instead of an air raid siren howling outside my window at 4 am. But let’s talk about what a negotiated solution would entail right now.

https://twitter.com/davidtbeito/status/1730987702026125593

What terms would russia accept? They’re obviously not going to give back the territories they’re currently occupying — not after they’ve changed their constitution to reflect their recent acquisitions. That would be a goddamn nightmare for putin in terms of his reputation.

I remember many of the leftists currently cheering on horrific violence against civilians in the name of decolonisation lecturing Ukrainians on how joking about dead russian soldiers on was unethical and borderline psychopathic. Don’t tell me this is about anti-imperialism.

https://twitter.com/saritah_91/status/1730240535003091152

Justifying the actions of Hamas isn’t about your deep devotion to anti-imperialist ideas, nor is it about your sympathy for Palestinians. You’ve just found what you think is a reasonable excuse for your antisemitism and bloodlust.

The thing that drives me up the wall is that the war in Ukraine is such a clear-cut and solvable issue, you literally don’t need to come up with convoluted theories and complex solutions. We’ve got internationally recognised borders. We’ve got allies that are more than able to provide us with the weapons needed to push russia back to those borders. We’ve got a more than capable army that’s already fighting tooth and nail to push russia back. We’ve got a government that has all the public support it could ask for, and a civil society that’s unified and

I seriously can’t handle the levels of criticism and judgement levelled at Ukrainians right now, and the impossibly high standards we’re being held to. We’re not perfect victims — because there’s no such thing. But cherrypicking thousands of tweets to use the few racist or just plain mean ones in order to accuse a country with a pretty diverse population of over 40 million people of being unworthy of support in the face of genocide while simultaneously claiming to be a firm believer in human rights is… well, insane.

Do the people saying ‘Ukrainians don’t deserve our support because they’re racist’ realise that what they’re actually saying is ‘I’m okay with Ukrainians of colour and Ukraine’s indigenous Crimean people dying under russian missiles and under occupation but I draw the line at a handful of viral videos of racist assholes being racist assholes’? Look, I’m always hesitant to approach this subject because I’m a white Ukrainian who hasn’t lived through the experiences Ukrainians of colour are living through, and it isn’t my place to assess how

Alright, I can’t ignore whatever the holy hell happened in the Canadian Parliament (because the entire internet definitely isn’t going to, either), but I really don’t want this to spiral into a whole discussion, so I’m going to say what I think and turn the comments off. Yes, it’s a pretty cowardly thing to do, and I’ve mocked quite a few people for doing the same, but let me just protect my inner peace for ONCE. So, to recap: Zelenskyy had a trip to Canada this weekend, and made an address to their Parliament, and all went well but they decided to

As a Ukrainian leftist, lemme tell you exactly how a ‘prolonged war’ is going to affect us: it’ll mean that we’re not being tortured under occupation, all of our cities won’t be razed to the ground like Mariupol was, and we won’t be forced to join an ethnofacist state.

https://twitter.com/postingcrusader/status/1697374430953943273

And don’t get me wrong. I absolutely don’t want a prolonged war. I don’t *want* to spend my nights listening to missiles explode all over my city. I don’t *want* to worry about my child having to go down to his daycare’s basement whenever an air raid alert is on. Nobody wants

So my kid has declared that he wants to learn russian because apparently his best friend at daycare speaks it and… honestly, I don’t know how to react. For the record, I know russian. So does my husband and pretty much all of our friends and relatives. When I was starting out as a journalist, roughly 70% of the stuff I wrote was in russian. I used to speak exclusively in russian when talking to my great-grandmother, my

I’ve often seen tankies spew ridiculous takes claiming that everyone repressed by the Soviet Union was either a nazi collaborator, an ideological enemy of the state, a greedy wannabe capitalist, or a kulak — whatever they actually mean by the word. But the truth is that the Union

https://twitter.com/vlstarodubtsev/status/1686080055099736070

imprisoned and murdered entire generations of socialist thinkers, human rights advocates, poets, writers, directors and other people whose only desire was to help create a better, fairer, happier, more democratic society.