Mônica Sodré 26 January 2025
Face-to-face to a world in absolute transformation, plunged into conflicts and groundbreaking environmental crises, one needs to go ahead and see things through
“The head thinks from where the feet tread” is a sentence by theologian and writer Leonardo Boff. And this was the reason that took me to Ukraine. Face-to-face to a world in absolute transformation, plunged into conflicts and groundbreaking environmental crises, one needs to go ahead and see things through. I was interested in the environmental impacts of the war and its incompatibility with a world that is warming, from greenhouse gas emissions to the devastation of biodiversity, that has costs and planetary impacts. I came back crossed by its human costs, non-mensurable, in most times inviolable and, by far its most tearing component.
The journey lasted about 10 days between January and February 2024. We took a path that crossed all the country of Moldova by car, which at that moment was the safest land entrance heading to the capital, Kyiv. This route took over 14 hours. Until then, my cluelessness about what was going on had been disguised by my reading the news and crossed by my remembering of a sentence I heard at an international meeting, which now I know for sure that it only served to ensure one can find a better position on their pillow: “That is a war of white people.” The world keeps sleeping everyday.
At that moment, I could talk to local and national authorities, journalists, militaries, war prisoners and translators, the latter was thoroughly translating to English all of what the guts had already done the understanding, as it was looking for a shortcut.
In Odessa, the first stop in Ukraine, I was taken by the emotion of seeing the harbor of “Battleship Potemkin”, a 1925-film that perpetuated its staircase in one of the most famous scenes in the history of cinema got new references with the sighting of a partly destroyed front of a bombed cathedral. In the visit to Bucha and Borodyanka, two of the first invaded cities and now taken by the Russians, about 40 km away from the capital, I could talk to dwellers who survived the slaughter. They revealed to me that one of the strategies was to bomb the church that sheltered civilians during the first invasions, as a series of actions that resulted in approximately 300 people buried in a mass grave.
In Ukraine, I understood that life is handled in an apparent normality because that is also a silent way of resistance.
The conversation, the visual memory of the hole embedded in the faith of people seen in Odessa, the documentary scenes of “20 days in Mariupol” that I had partly watched during the way and the figures disclosed by the Ministry of Environment – 30% of the territory infected by mines, 75% of the territory equal to the size of Belgium affected by fire and environmental damages estimated in U$ 60 billion up to November 2023, compromising the world’s food security – all of this made me wander, being there for the first time, if God ever goes on vacation. What if that was the explanation to all I have seen, as well as other wars the world has seen between 1914 and 1939.
In one of those conversations, now with the mayor of one of the cities in which the population got the weapons and provided its own defence, I noticed myself staring at the debris of a civilian building wrecked by a missile, in a region where there was no military camp and, therefore, if International Humanitarian Rights existed at all, attacks to civilian would never be accepted. He has seen the country’s death through his own window. Partly destroyed books on the shelves drew my attention. I was also taken by Bansky’s graffiti on one of the walls to my side. It translated the braveness of people going through an unequal fight and putting a martial wrestler, in reference to Vladimir Putin, to the floor.
After the short yet intense journey, I learned that us Brazilians had no clue regarding the meaning of contempt. In a conversation with a correspondent, I mentioned that we had no idea of what it is to go to sleep and wake up hating someone, with the bias intention that this refers to feelings that were both felt and inherited at the same time.
These feelings are felt due to the fact you are the one in pain: it is your life hung for years in a country it is not yours, within that limbo that tackles all people forced to leave. Your parents were the ones who stayed. They are your godchildren who could not flee, which might become much more obvious when you realize they will be yours to nurture when the parents are gone. That makes the role of godparents in Ukraine a much less instagramable task than usual. They are your friends who could not go back to the place they were born, under the risk of being recruited by the army.
These feelings are Inherited due to the fact it is also the first memory that occurs to you about your grandmother: she has starved during the war, but never complained about a thing. It is also what connects you with your father: he did not talk about the subject, but one day he told me about the war and that changed everything between us. It is what earmarks your identity: while my country prepared to receive the World Cup, yours were looking for garment manufacturers that made clothes for women. You had barely turned 20. War is the pillar that sustains pain in entire generations. I was there before anyone arrived and it is possible that I will be there after many people are gone. It runs in my blood, from a side of the world in which blood has always run down: 65 wars in a bit less than over 2 thousand years.
The absence of contempt and hate – which I imagine it to be its superlative version – in the inventory of our national feelings is something that puzzles me in Brazil. I find it curious in the face of the fact that we are the result of a violent colonization. Perhaps it has been the myth of the kind man, of racial democracy, maybe even the fact that Bahia, land that has received the first colonizers, has been able to take all saints in, which is the ultimate expression of care that makes no distinction nor undermines anyone. In our report, there is anger, inequality, discrimination, prejudice, but there isn’t the other two. In one of the leading producers of food in the world, some of us wake up starving everyday and no one is there to be found guilty. It is the responsibility of the government, of the state, of the authorities, of all of them, all blurred objects. The phrase, while carrying a complete subject, does not carry any personal names.
The difference is equally noted in the face of an inherited feeling. Notice that we are a people that knows of inheritance. We know that most of us will leave this life through the same door we got in and that thing sociology calls “the absence of social mobility” is nothing less than the expression of acquisition by succession. Misery precedes as well as succeeds. However, in our baggage and differences here, contempt is not passed over as a collective inheritance.
I have learned we cannot measure the peace of falling asleep without the imminence of being hit by a missile on our heads. And any comparison to urban violence that strikes our cities is misleading and misplaced. Nobody can negotiate with war. In my country, in the absence of safety to those who did not inherit misery, there’s always an alternative. In São Paulo, most of my neighbors have armed security guards, armored cars, and rarely go out on foot. In my corner of the world, sleeping is a right on sale and the object of negotiation everyday.
In Ukraine, I understood that life is lived in an apparent normality because this is also a silent way of resistance. “We need to enjoy every minute of peace”, I heard that on the day I arrived. If it is war that defines the pain of generations, to prevent it from defining our existence is a conscious choice.
We get out and walk down the streets, we see open movie theaters, we go to restaurants and we get the bombing alerts on our cell phones. That goes on. A siren rings out while a couple of girls is photographed in what seems to me as a wedding photo shoot. The sound is unmistakable, but no one stands up. The shoot keeps happening because it is necessary to always keep going. Any other option would be a form of surrender.
I could notice that the noise of war contrasts with the silent effects it triggers. A watch that monitors heart beats of a physiologically healthy heart goes off during the day, as a reminder that the mind that chooses not to have its existence kidnapped belongs to the same body that shelters heart beats.
I heard that lexicon matters a lot. In the spelling of city names such as Kyiv and Odessa, contrasting with the Russian version of Kiev and Odesa, the language as an expression of identity is also a dispute. I took two days to understand that the term “full scale invasion” meant that “another scale invasion” had already occurred. There have been 10 years since Russia attached Crimea, a term that in our language can lead to a big euphemism. Therefore, there are ten years of war instead of two, like the rest of the world tends to face it. The precision of acknowledgement probably changes according to the distance you are from the problem.
I learned how the war is a masculine operation. Clothes and boots are not produced for “other bodies”. In Ukraine, after listening to the violence suffered by a prisoner of war, we knew – she, who talked at that moment about the threats of having the tattoos removed with a knife, and I who listened to her as she was staring at me – that you only talk about what you allow yourself to tell.
I have learned that hope is a verb of the subjunctive tense. It is conditioned to something that does not depend on you, but that does not mean, in any circumstance, the absence of permission to be happy. I have seen miracles everywhere. I have seen lovers being born when everyone else is asleep, and with that said, it opens spaces so that lives can stay alive. Mortgages are contracted, revealing altogether the desire to welcome the winds of change. There are women getting their haircut, not for enlisting, but as an expression of what has changed inside. I have seen the richest soils be prepared for new wheat harvests, showing that life renovates itself everyday under the seal of hope. At this exact moment, marriage proposals are being made at restaurants, probably earlier than usual when staring at a clock that sets curfew as well as the absence of certainty about tomorrows that can be interrupted at any moment. We only have today.
We have crossed the Ukraine-Moldova border by car. The first part of the way back included a long stay in Istanbul. Sniffer dogs come in, passports are taken while the tense gaze of a military woman looks for suspicious evidence. I imagine Ukrainian young men are on the priority list of what is not expected to flee the land. I have whiskey from a plastic cup, a relief of which the friendly purchase was improvised at a roadside gas station.
It is February 2024. Here, we don’t like February, I heard it afterwards: it was when the Revolution of Dignity started, in 2014, and when Russia invaded Crimea also in 2014. The only good thing about February is that it is the shortest month, as my correspondent put it.
From that stretch of the road the warnings stop, I can walk around with no security guards and resume the use of the internet. A reminder on the screen draws my attention, tickets are available for “February”, Maria Bethânia’s ultimate tour. With the passports back, the car moves forward. I remember “Wind, Sand, and Stars”, by Exupéry as he stared at France before the Nazi occupation in the country and at the war machine of bending people: “What disturbs me, the popular soups won’t repair. What disturbs is not those chiseled faces nor this ugliness. It is a little about, in each of those men, Mozart being murdered.
Since then, almost one year later, what has changed does not seem to diminish the suffering: Russian bombing the children’s hospital, newer and more violent attacks to the electric structure, which leads to the absence of electricity for days especially during winter, the reelection of President Donald Trump, with the perspective of ceasing the financial aid of the United States and, as a consequence, speeding up the negotiations of peace, probably forcing to a loss of territory and weakening the principle of state sovereignty. Giving up a territory, as I heard, means also giving up all of those people who are irregularly occupying the land, especially children who have been captured, had their identities changed, educated, and trained by the Russian army as a strategy of cultural erasure.
I remember looking back, still standing at the border, and seeing the blue and yellow signs getting far away. I know it is not possible to “unsee” what one has seen nor to “unhear” what one has heard. Until now, February has always been about Carnival. The head thinks from where the feet tread.
Mônica Sodré is a political scientist, holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of São Paulo (USP) and is a fellow of the Brazilian Center of International Relations (CEBRI).