The following quote is attributed to Albert Einstein: “If I am right in my theory of relativity, the Germans will say that I am German, the French that I am European and the Americans that I am a citizen of the world. If my theory proves wrong, Americans will say I’m European, the French say I’m German, and the Germans say I’m Jewish.” The same often happens with musicians and other emigrants who became homeless after the First World War. And this is completely independent of success. And apart from the fact that Einstein probably never said the sentence quoted verbatim.
The answer to the question about the nationality of our protagonist varies depending on the source. And depending on the interpretation. How and whether he himself ever defined his national identity is not known. The man is sometimes referred to as a Ukrainian composer, sometimes as a Russian. Sometimes as Russian-Ukrainian. Rarer than Ukrainian-Austrian. Mostly, however, as a Ukrainian composer and pianist of Polish origin. Some critics call him a Ukrainian Rachmaninov. That will not please the Ukrainians very much today. Others consider him the last romantic. That sounds far more flattering for a nation currently at war defending itself against a brutal aggressor. Nevertheless, this romantic fell into oblivion shortly after his death – wrongly so. His name: Serhij (Sergei) Bortkiewicz.
The composer was born in Kharkiv in 1877, which was then part of the Russian Empire. The spelling of the name reveals its Polish origin. His father was of minor noble descent and owned some land, a distillery and a glass factory in the area. His mother was a well-known pianist and co-founder of the Kharkiv music school. The family lived in Kharkiv at a rather elegant address, on Sumska, which was then, as now, the city’s main street.
Bortkiewicz studied at the conservatories in Saint Petersburg and Leipzig, then worked in Berlin. After the start of the First World War, he and his wife, as Russian citizens, were first interned in Germany and then deported; they later found themselves in Kharkiv in a roundabout way. When the Bolsheviks conquered his hometown in 1919, they nationalized the family home on Sumska and the distillery, plundered the estate and soon after renamed the main street of Kharkiv: after the German communist Karl Liebknecht, who had just been shot. Bortkiewicz’s mother died of typhus during the turmoil of the civil war. He and his wife managed to escape to Constantinople, where he went ashore in November 1920, completely penniless. Twenty months later, the couple finally came to Austria and settled in Vienna, which from then on – with the exception of a five-year Berlin interlude between 1928 and 1933 – became Bortkiewicz’s adopted home. An Austrian citizen since 1925, he died in Vienna in 1952, seven years after the end of the Second World War – in the same city to which he had come shortly after the First.
In Vienna he also met Paul Wittgenstein, whose life story is much better known. The older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was embarking on a promising career as a pianist when World War I broke out. Less than a month at the front, he was wounded in the right arm near Zamo?? in what is now eastern Poland. The arm was amputated and Paul was taken prisoner by the Russians, from which he was released in December 1915. The career of a concert pianist seemed to be over. But he didn’t give up and decided to keep going. Paul practiced like crazy, arranging left-hand works by many composers and commissioning works from contemporary composers.
Benjamin Britten, Erich Korngold, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev and Paul Hindemith all wrote piano pieces for him. Also Serhij Bortkiewicz. Paul secured exclusive rights. He was able to pay his contractors well. Like all Wittgensteins, he was a very rich man. More precisely, like almost everyone. Ludwig, the philosopher, renounced his share of the family fortune.
Serhij Bortkiewicz and Paul Wittgenstein may not have had much in common other than their year of birth. But their destinies are characterized by an incredible willpower and they show certain parallels. The war left a heavy trauma on both of them. One lost his secure existence, his fortune and his homeland as a result of the Bolshevik coup in Russia after the First World War, but remained physically unharmed. The other lost his right arm in the war, but not his fortune. Both started fresh and pursued their later careers with unconditional dedication, great musical talent and a lot of artistic panache.
However, they only appeared together once – on May 7, 1928, Bortkiewicz conducted his Piano Concerto No. 2 for the left hand, which he had composed four years earlier, in the Great Hall of the Wiener Musikverein. Maestro Wittgenstein himself sat at the piano. No other pianist was allowed to play the concert he commissioned anyway. In the past few weeks, Bortkiewicz and Wittgenstein have met again in a Lviv hospital. Excerpts from Piano Concerto No. 2 were played. The musical matinee was the beginning of a series of piano concertos by the Lviv Philharmonic. The piece was chosen because it symbolizes the creativity of artists who have been traumatized or maimed by war. So are many Ukrainians. Some are being treated in various hospitals in Lviv today. Maybe the music will become a kind of therapy for them too. Just as it certainly was for Bortkiewicz and Wittgenstein.
In July, the markets are full of berries. Because July seems to be the berry month par excellence. Raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, wild strawberries, red currants, black currants… Maybe I forgot something, I’m not a real berry specialist. Only the big and juicy garden strawberries are not available in July. Meanwhile, all berries have something in common. They are bred. Only the blueberry, which already has its black color in its name in Ukrainian, is out of line here. Because blueberries are collected. In the forest and on the edge of the forest. The cultivated blueberry, on the other hand, has only been cultivated here on a large scale for a few years and is not really considered a blueberry. Even her name in Ukrainian has nothing in common with her much blacker forest sister. Linguistically, great importance is attached to clearly distinguishing between different species.
This is also the case with forest and garden berries. Except that the wild strawberry mostly comes from the garden these days. For a German, it basically represents a philosophically insurmountable language obstacle. How can you actually name something that already has a reference to its natural growth area in its name, but is bred somewhere completely different? A garden wild strawberry? What a strange fruit. So the strawberry of the month had to be invented. Again, no non-native speaker can understand that. I do not know whether German philosophers have dealt with this crazy language problem in the past.
In July you can find berries everywhere. You hardly ever buy them in the supermarkets, even if they are beautifully packaged there and look tempting in the artificial light of the spots that are optimally placed for advertising purposes. At the small, spontaneous street markets, which are not actually allowed but are tolerated by the police, they are part of the regular assortment alongside vegetables and herbs, even if the range is rather modest. Usually it’s a few women from the surrounding area who sit on the sidewalks and sell fruit from their allotments. Or an old Omachen who pulled a few roots of parsley and a few heads of lettuce and radishes from her bed in the suburbs early in the morning. You don’t meet men more often in this impromptu street sale than in the driver’s cab of a tram.
However, this type of vegetable trade is only worthwhile for gardeners in the vicinity. If you live further away, you have to sell the goods to an intermediary. There are many of these in the right market. Things are a bit more orderly here. And international. At our market, an Azerbaijani sells fruit and vegetables. It’s always loud with him. He set up his sales stand right at the entrance, at the strategically most important point. The turnover is higher, but so are the rents. Right across the street is a large fruit and vegetable stand run by a mother and two daughters. There’s a lot going on there too. The day traders are more likely to be found in the interior of the market where places are cheaper. But sometimes they stand right in the entrance when they hope to quickly get rid of their bucket filled to the brim with blueberries. Because war or not – they don’t go home until they’ve sold their berries.
My friend Pavlo is a mountain specialist. We hiked and skied together back when the world got by without cell phones and GPS trackers. Once in the Alps at an altitude of 3500 meters we forgot to apply sunscreen because on that day there was no sun in the sky behind the dense clouds. A mistake that is quite typical for Alpine beginners and residents of a country where the highest mountain peaks hardly rise above the 2,000 meter mark.
It has been well known since antiquity at least that mountains can become an insurmountable obstacle in war. The Soviet Army experienced it painfully in War in Afghanistan, which has been euphemistically called an “international duty”. After their brutal invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces are not fighting the mountains, which are only found in the south-west of the country (only a few rockets have landed in the Ukrainian Carpathians). But they still have a hard time with nature. Especially with rivers. And with bridges that belong to a civilized river like ketchup belongs to a hot dog.
Because the bridges are important strategic points that even have a double function in war – to make it easier for your own units to cross an obstacle and to make it as difficult as possible for the enemy. Perhaps for this very reason, many bridges built in the Soviet era had a rather specific design. It was not uncommon for there to be a small incline before a bridge, while on the other side the road descended slightly. The bridge looked like a small hill. Why some bridges were built like this in the paranoid communist empire is beyond me. Perhaps saboteurs should be able to hide behind the bridge in the event of war, or the enemy should be able to lose their bearings if they suddenly saw nothing but the blue sky on the approach to the bridge. But it could also be that it was only due to structural reasons.
Once Pavlo this bridge design had almost become fatal. Many years ago he was on a business trip with a colleague in Romania, which was not yet an EU member state at the time. It was already a dark, moonless, muggy summer night when they passed a small border crossing far from the main traffic arteries on their way home. Before them lay a dead-straight stretch of empty country road. The small Skoda Fabia was barely 90 km/h when they saw a small bridge in front. In the driveway, the headlights shot their cold, white cones of light into the warm, infinitely black sky. Only on the bridge could the two see that the road turned sharply to the right immediately afterwards at a 90-degree angle. They had no chance and drove straight into the field.
The car broke down, luckily the two escaped with minor injuries. In the middle of the night in a godforsaken cellphone deadlock, they somehow managed to call the police. Pavlo had only one question: why was there no warning sign or speed limit sign on the road? The policeman just shrugged his shoulders: “Everyone here knows this bridge.” The next day I picked up Pavlo and his colleague.
If the story had happened somewhere in the East today, one might have believed that it was not a matter of simple administrative sloppiness, but of preparations for a possible emergency. Because since the end of February there have always been new bridge stories. Sometimes you hear about a Russian tank that falls into the water along with a bridge because the farmers have taken the precaution of dismantling the traffic sign that was supposed to inform about the load limit. Sometimes a hastily erected pontoon bridge becomes a deadly trap for Russian soldiers. Sometimes an enemy column builds up in southern Ukraine because it has apparently been surprised by the many irrigation canals, and then becomes easy prey for artillery. In the very first days of the war, the Ukrainian armed forces blew up the most important bridges north-west of Kyiv, bringing the advance of the “second largest army in the world” to a standstill.
Actually, bridges are predestined for a double life. Because they can separate as well as connect. The Crimean Bridge, illegally built by Russia, cut off the port of Mariupol from the world. Their headroom has been deliberately chosen so low that the large ships can no longer get through under the bridge. Now the Russian army will have their hands full to protect this structure. On the other hand, Ukrainians hope that the bridge will soon repeat the fate of the cruiser Moskva. Then it will be possible to declare them a national underwater cultural heritage.
In an old Soviet joke, an American and a Russian argue over which country — the United States or the Soviet Union — people enjoy more freedom of expression. “I can step onto the lawn in front of the White House in Washington and shout out loud that our president is an idiot,” says the Ami. The Russian is not impressed at all. “That is absolutely no problem. I can also go to Red Square and shout that the American President is a jerk.”
In this joke, not only is the lack of freedom of expression in the USSR ironic, but terms are also swapped here, which contributes to the comedy of the situation. But this is not always the case. When it happens while arguing in a discussion, it’s usually a serious logical error that causes cause and effect to be confused. Immanuel Kant wrote about this.
Unfortunately, exactly such a mistake was made by a group of intellectuals who, at the end of June in Die Zeit, called for an end to the war in Europe (or at least a ceasefire). It may be that they wrote their appeal out of noble motives and heartfelt sympathy for Ukrainians. You even rightly called the “brutal Russian war of aggression” at the beginning. However, the conclusions they draw directly or indirectly from this are most surprising: the West should reconsider its policy, stop arms sales to Ukraine and bring both sides back to the negotiating table. Unfortunately, what is to be negotiated is not defined. And the accusation that the international community has not yet tried to negotiate sounds extremely strange given the intensive pilgrimage of European politicians to Moscow and talks between Russia and the USA.
It is amazing that the signatories are not appealing to the party that brutally broke international law and attacked a sovereign country without any reason whatsoever; not to the party that every day commits war crimes, kills civilians and children, kidnaps and tortures people, plunders occupied territories and blackmails the world with a possible hunger crisis. Instead, the West is implicitly accused of supporting Ukraine in its unequal struggle for freedom and existence.
You want to fight the consequences, not the causes. It is a dangerous confusion of cause and effect. If the signatories had tried to call for the end of the war on Red Square, their action would have been over in less than two minutes. The police would have been there immediately and arrested everyone. It would probably be asking too much of Western intellectuals to dare such a protest. But it never occurred to them that an appeal should be made to Russia and the Russian President to end the war. Mind you with slightly different formulations. It’s a shame they’ve missed it so far.
It was an illustrious company that was invited to this feast. The hall was solemnly decorated, the massive chandeliers donated light. The festively dressed guests were escorted by servants to their table seats, which were assigned to them according to rank and dignity. In the elevated atmosphere of ceremonial tension, everyone waited spellbound for the after-dinner speech of the host, who was to give the main speech that day. There were still nineteen years before the great war into which he would plunge his country.
It was dead quiet when the head of state began his speech. He was aware of the importance of this moment. It was a fervent speech delivered with great passion by the speaker. He spoke of a day of grateful reflection, invoked the patriotic spirit, appealed to social duties and made a vow to protect his countrymen. Even before the speaker raised his glass to his beloved fatherland and shouted “cheers” three times, he said: “Thousands of our compatriots live everywhere in distant parts of the world… It is your duty, gentlemen, to help me , this larger (…) realm to also be firmly attached to our home country”. These elated words must have caused great enthusiasm among those present.
Actually, one can easily imagine the Russian President in this role. After all, he has already claimed that Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere. This “joke” fits in perfectly with the notion, widespread in Russian society, that wherever there are Russians, Russia is there. But it wasn’t Putin, even if it would have suited him very well. Where there are ellipses in brackets, the speaker used an epithet that referred to his country. It wasn’t about Russia. It was about the German Reich. The speaker was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who gave his speech in the Berlin Palace on January 18, 1896 on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the German Empire.
Maybe “The Plastic People of the Universe” weren’t the best band in the world. In any case, the critics have seldom written about their music. Heavily influenced by Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground, the band initially played psychedelic rock, later adding elements of jazz and Czech folk music. Founded in September 1968, barely a month after the “Prague Spring” was crushed, it was considered the most important representative of the Czech underground and a symbol of resistance against the communist regime.
Even if their songs weren’t directly political, “The Plastic People of the Universe” around bassist Milan Hlavsa and Canadian singer Paul Wilson had problems with the authorities from the start, who revoked their professional musicians’ license in 1970. Now their equipment consisted of self-made amplifiers and borrowed instruments; their performances were secretly prepared and took place in remote locations. In 1976 the band was banned, its members arrested, slandered in the state media and sentenced to several months in prison. Paul Wilson, although he had left the Plastics in 1972, was deported from Czechoslovakia. The famous Charter 77 civil rights movement arose in part as a response to these arrests and convictions.
Back then we didn’t know anything about the Plastics. In the Soviet Union, the music business was controlled even more tightly. The bands, which were not particularly numerous, were officially employed by the local Philharmonic. Some played in the rare restaurants that ordinary people had little access to. The repertoire had to be approved beforehand by the regional party headquarters; a sheet listing the approved songs was on the wall somewhere. A maximum of two songs that were not on this musical menu were allowed per evening. Sometimes the musicians were encouraged to play other pieces by specially appointed Agents Provocateurs. If the band was caught doing so, they were sent somewhere in the deepest provinces as punishment for a month as part of the socialist culture industry. The rebel spirit of rock ‘n’ roll did not fit the ideal of a happy communist future in the dreary Soviet everyday life.
It wasn’t easy to get hold of Western bands’ records. They were rare and sought after. As a rule, they were brought by foreign tourists or bought by Soviet athletes or musicians for their performances in the hostile capitalist world after they had successfully defended the sporting or musical honor of their socialist fatherland there. The records were traded on so-called music exchanges, i.e. on the black market, by “Fartsowschtschiki”, as illegal traders of Western goods of all kinds were called at the time. Someone who was allowed to hold a recording of the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd felt like Micha Ehrenreich from Leander Haussmann’s “Sonnenallee”.
Most of the time the records were never seen, they were copied from another copy that was already on tape. You just had to be careful that the quality of the tape recording remained acceptable. The best way to do this is to continue copying from the first copy. Once I even undertook a journey of almost 100 km on a chugging regional train to transfer some albums to an acquaintance that he had previously recorded on audio cassettes directly from vinyl records.
An even bigger problem were the lyrics. They often circulated as handwritten sheets or booklets. If the doodles were legible, you were particularly happy. The alternative was an attempt to hear the lyrics from the song. It was a crazy exercise in English, which we didn’t really know. Sometimes it came out that Ian Anderson sang in a Jethro Tull song about a man who didn’t look at young girls with bad intent, but watched them play badminton. Sometimes I felt it would have been easier to decipher cuneiform.
Many years later, with the memory of communism remaining as a bad dream for some and romantic nostalgia for others, Internet searches rendered copying obsolete once and for all. The old rock icons no longer sounded very credible and caught up in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, which would have been unthinkable before. Their live concerts caused boundless excitement among music fans everywhere. Some musicians even ended up on Red Square, where you could even watch the then and current Russian President at some of the performances of a rock dinosaur. Among real music fans, he and his entourage seemed rather out of place.
Milan Hlavsa, the co-founder of the Plastic People of the Universe, died in 2001 at the age of just 49. Otherwise he would definitely have sided with Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion. That’s exactly what numerous other rock musicians from all over the world have done – from Paul McCartney to Pink Floyd, from Elton John to U2, from Metallica to Scorpions – who have declared their solidarity with the country under attack. One looks in vain for people who understand Putin in this group. The old rock ‘n’ rollers can apparently distinguish between good and bad without any problems.
In the history of mankind, flags and banners play an important role. Already in the time when there were no nations, the troops went into battle with the royal standard. In the Age of Discovery, the national flag was hoisted on every newly discovered island, even if it was an uninhabited rock.
It was the same in the areas totally unsuitable for living. Otherwise Robert Falcon Scott would never have found out in time that Roald Amundsen had reached the South Pole before him. The Americans raised the US flag the first time they landed on the moon. At some point, sport and, above all, the most political of all sports, were added. It would be unfair not to mention football and its fans with their national colors, flags and pennants in the stands. Because the connection between this ball game with 22 running figures and national pride cannot be denied.
A nearly two-minute video released today shows three men affixing a blue and yellow Ukrainian national flag. The recordings were probably made by a drone. At the beginning of the video there is a crater in the middle, apparently from a rocket impact. All around are only ruins, nothing is left of the small buildings but rubble. The sea off the small cape is very calm, the sun is low on the horizon. The video shows Snake Island early in the morning.
Two soldiers in full gear cautiously approach the ruins one by one, grab two heavy blocks from the pile and trudge back to the big flag waving in a strong Northeast. They place the blocks on the flag bearer’s arms, then the scene repeats again. end of recording. Mission accomplished.
It is a very important symbolic moment for the Ukrainians: Snake Island, which was occupied by Russian troops for more than four months, is back in Ukrainian hands. Although the Russian garrison left the island in a hurry on the night of June 30, the island was somehow not quite Ukrainian without a flag. A few days later, a helicopter gunship dropped the Ukrainian flag over the island. But the last symbolic step was still missing.
The importance of such symbols is confirmed by the rather risky action with the flag. Because a permanent presence on the island is not to be thought of at the moment. The threat of Russian missile strikes is not over.
Nevertheless, the effect of the daring venture on the Ukrainians is almost comparable to the historical act of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Perhaps conspiracy theorists will soon claim that something like this never happened. Conspiracy theories of all kinds are particularly popular in Russia these days. Because if you follow Russian propaganda, the entire world has long since conspired against poor Russia.
“Who cares about figure skating in this country?” says Daryna as she microwaves a slice of cheese and spinach pie for me. Daryna comes from Nizhyn, a city in the Chernihiv region in north-eastern Ukraine. She came to Lemberg in a roundabout way. There was heavy fighting near Nizhyn, where the Ukrainian army was able to stop further advances by Russian troops. Fleeing from the Russian war of aggression, Daryna came first to Ternopil, then to Poland. A few weeks later, when the qualified computer scientist was thinking about returning to her home country, albeit not to her hometown, she received a message from Serhij. He had landed in Lviv with his friend and business partner Ivan and planned to open a small diner. He asked Daryna if she wanted to join. She spontaneously agreed.
Serhij is a math teacher and hobby cook from Irpin. Most recently he worked with Ivan, who lived in Borodyanka, in a café in Bucha. Ivan worked as a bartender, Serhiy baked cakes. These three place names speak volumes. It is no longer necessary to explain what happened in Irpin, Bucha or Borodyanka. The whole world knows, except the Russians.
On the very first day of the Russian invasion, the guys decided to flee the region. It was just the right time. A day later it wouldn’t have worked anymore. Like many other refugees from different regions of the country, the path led them to Lemberg.
Serhij’s cooking blog, which he ran on YouTube before the war, enjoyed tens of thousands of followers. Daryna was one of them, at some point they agreed to meet in Kyiv. That’s when they realized that they not only share a love for cooking, but also a passion for – figure skating.
Today only Daryna and one other employee are in the snack bar. It’s not particularly busy in the early evening. Daryna wears a pink T-shirt with an optimistic slogan: “It could always get worse.” The kitchen room is small, the entrance leads through a small fashion shop. A coffee maker, a fridge, a microwave, a sink. Baked at home, in the rented apartment.
From time to time, a few passers-by stop in front of the snack bar. “Hello, Lemberg!” reads a black board below. “Serhiy from Irpin, Ivan from Borodyanka, Daryna from Nizhyn welcome you behind this shutter. We’re starting a new life here. We do what we do best: prepare delicious food.” Next to it is a small flowerpot. On the other side a donation box for dog food.
“We were walking through town and suddenly saw that a takeaway was for rent. We called and found out that the owners had fled to Poland,” Serhij tells her story in a video. “We didn’t even have enough money to pay full rent. We agreed that we’d come up with the rest if business went well.” Now, business isn’t bad. Half of the profits are donated to the Ukrainian army. Soon three partners want to open a second snack bar near the university. His name will be the same: “Kiit”.
That’s the name of Serhiy’s cat. With a double i, which means “Kaater”. This is how the young man called his house cat when he was very small and Serhij had not yet thought of a real name for him. It stayed that way. Now he’s gone, the snack should be a reminder of the favorite animal.
A few days ago both boys went to Kyiv. Maybe they will look for Serhiy’s cat in the area again. Before leaving, he dropped him off with his friends in a neighboring community. When a Russian rocket landed nearby, the windows in the apartment flew out. The cat disappeared in a panic and was never seen again. Serhiy never gave up the search, he kept going there, questioning the neighbors and showing photos. So far the search has been unsuccessful.
There is a tram stop right next to the snack bar and it is less than a hundred meters from the town hall. It’s actually an ideal location. But two months ago, in the first two days after the opening, there were no visitors. Then Serhiy came up with the idea of ??writing down their story on the black board. Someone posted a photo on social media. On the third or fourth day, people were queuing for the snack bar. Within a few days, all Ukrainian media jumped on the story. Then the hype was over. That’s how the media business works. Figure skating was not mentioned in any post.
Actually, there are no snakes on Snake Island, only bats. In terms of shape, the island, which is only 0.2 square kilometers, has nothing to do with the reptile of the Serpentes suborder. Sometimes that happens with geographic names. There are no pigs swimming in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The misleading name of the Gulf of Cuba, known as Bahía de Cochinos in Spanish and made famous by a failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuban exiles against the Castro regime in April 1961, stems from a linguistic confusion. In Spanish, “cochino” can actually mean ‘pig’, especially when it comes to a slaughter pig. But in Cuba, this word is used to describe a coral fish common in the western Atlantic, the so-called queen triggerfish. So it’s nothing more than the bay of the triggerfish. Doesn’t sound very romantic.
However, while there were probably never pigs in the Bay of Pigs, Dice Snakes were still sighted in the waters off Snake Island in the 19th century, washing up on the local coasts from the Danube Delta. Many an ancient author also reported on this. According to an ancient Greek legend, Achilles was buried here; The sea goddess Thetis is said to have raised the island from the depths for her almost immortal son who fell near Troy.
For the Greeks, the island, which in ancient times was called ‘Leuke’, the white, because of its white shore, was an important base in the colonization of the northern Black Sea coast. Later, the island, which is around 20 km from the mouth of the Danube and no longer white, belonged to the Roman Empire, then to Byzantium and then to the Ottoman Empire. From 1788, after the Russian fleet defeated the Turks in the Battle of Fidonisi, as the island was known in Turkey at the time, it fell to the Russian Empire for several decades. With the defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856), Russia also lost the island, which from then on belonged to Romania for almost a hundred years.
After World War II, their fate was sealed by a secret protocol. No wonder, considering Stalin’s penchant for secret protocols of any kind. The Romanian government in Bucharest reluctantly ceded the island to the Soviet Union, a deal the Romanian public was unaware of for many years to come. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, Kyiv and Bucharest argued for a number of years about the island’s affiliation until it was recognized as Ukrainian state territory in a border treaty in 2003. NATO membership was more important for Romania than a conflict with the neighboring country over a sea rock. The dispute over the continental shelf was no longer very spectacular and was resolved by the International Court of Justice in 2009. After that, everyone forgot about the island with its bats. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Although Russia was able to occupy Snake Island on the first day of the invasion, it became a prominent symbol of the Ukrainian resistance. With no prospect of successful resistance, the Ukrainian garrison refused to lay down their arms and surrender. A soldier’s radio message telling the Russian warship to fuck off became world famous. The island itself and the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which was sunk by a Ukrainian missile nearby, have been immortalized on a million-issue Ukrainian postage stamp.
In recent months, the Ukrainian army has repeatedly sunk Russian supply ships in the local waters and attacked the Russian troops stationed on the island and their military equipment with rockets. The strategically important island would have given Russia control in the northwestern part of the Black Sea. However, the Russian Navy never really managed to gain a foothold there. Yesterday Russia finally gave up the island and withdrew its decimated troops. Moscow tried to sell this as a “sign of goodwill”. The Ukrainians immediately took up the issue. “As a show of goodwill, a Russian helicopter fell from the sky near the island. Maybe he just wanted to land aboard the cruiser Moskva,” read a sarcastic post from Ukraine’s Military South Command on Facebook. If things continue like this, the Russian military leadership will soon describe the deaths of their soldiers in Ukraine as a “sign of good will”. Ukrainians will only welcome it.
During the war, all-wheel drive boomed. For soldiers as well as for volunteers. There are no freeways in the combat zones. Often there are no roads at all. You just know which way you want to go. Nothing works without all-wheel drive. A reinforced bottom plate and all other possible reinforcements are also very important. And the army, of course, has priority.
Cars are a consumable in the Frontiers. Just like fuel or ammunition. They break, explode on mines, get stuck in ditches, end up on roofs. You always need supplies. Again and again there are calls on social networks to donate for cars. Off-road vehicles and minibuses are the most popular. You don’t drive back and forth in an armored personnel carrier every day. There are other tasks too.
Many Ukrainians donated their cars to the army. But their possibilities are not unlimited. Now help is coming from abroad. You don’t have to guess from which country most of the cars are brought. It’s Poland.
Vitaly has been going to Poland more often in recent months. His friends have already prepared several cars for the transfer. Today he is unloading a minibus. There are several canisters with fuel in it, they are urgently needed at the front. For the time being, however, they come to a garage. The car must first be given a camouflage finish in a workshop. A few days later he will be heading east. “People you don’t even know will often help you. It’s amazing how everything works. The solidarity is simply overwhelming.”
My friend Ihor knows from personal experience. His brother, who was drafted and is fighting at the front, asked him for a minibus. Ihor recently posted an appeal for donations. The necessary amount came together within a few days. His mother and his girlfriend went to Poland and picked up the minibus. With the camouflage finish, he only had to pay for the color. The workshop refused to charge the full cost. Sometimes I have the feeling that we live in a different, wonderful world.
Juri Durkot was awarded the Brücke Berlin Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for his translations of the works of Serhij Zhadan – together with Sabine Stöhr.
