If Russia can’t kill you right away, it invades with culture

When Russia first attacked Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, I was living with my partner and his mother in an industrial city neighbouring the Donetsk region.

Dnipro was the closest metropolis to the eastern frontlines. Our hospitals took injured soldiers. We volunteered to help them recover. We saw military helicopters flying over and many of our friends went to serve.

For us, the war was omnipresent, the enemy was obvious and sometimes we felt powerless because the world didn’t care.

Russian propaganda was active in Europe and the US before the war. So, when Russian soldiers and mercenaries made their first incursions into Ukrainian territory, the propagandist lie had already taken root.

Many abroad were conditioned to believe that we had a ‘civil war’ in the East. Many bought the lies about a ‘Nazi government coup’, ‘violent ultra-nationalist militias’ and ‘persecution of Russian speakers’.

Unfortunately, some Ukrainians believed it too.

My partner’s mum had spoken Russian all her life. She had family in Russia. Was she ever punished in Ukraine for her language and origins? Definitely not. Was she certain that she lived under Nazi rule and that Russophobia was all around her? Yes. But how?

She watched Russian television on satellite every day, that’s how.

Russia created RT for the West and bought some American journalists. For Ukrainians they had their original state-sanctioned brainwashing: Rossiya 1, NTV and others.

One of the main topics of Russian channels in 2013-2014 was ‘LGBT propaganda’. Moscow had just approved its first ‘anti-propaganda’ law, and queers became enemies of the state. In Russian official narratives, Ukraine had become a hotbed of queerness (while somehow being under a Nazi junta at the same time).

So, my partner’s mum had a queer transgender couple in her house, her own child and me, but she still repeated those Russian TV scenarios. “All those sick people are to blame,” she said. “There were no gays in the USSR and we lived happy lives without them.”

Her Russian relatives were even worse. She didn’t tell them about her child’s sexuality. They would cease all contact if they knew. They kept in touch with her as a token Ukrainian to confirm all the horrendous news they heard on TV.

When the war started in 2014, we witnessed the first peak of activity from Moscow’s  propaganda machine. It was fuelled by imperialistic hatred, xenophobia and constant assertions of Russian superiority. I worked as a journalist back then and saw the media craze from the inside. I saw how it influenced the world. International outlets wanted to listen to both sides, giving weight to Russian lies in defiance of the reality in our regions occupied and under attack.      

The world did not care about the Ukrainians dying in Donetsk and Luhansk. That war was too small for them to care, I guess.

By February 2022 almost everyone outside Ukraine seemed to have forgotten that Russia had invaded our country in 2014 and occupied a big chunk of its territory.

I lived in Kyiv when the full-scale invasion started and worked for a local Pride organisation. Being the best English speaker in my team, I became one of the media faces of Ukrainian queer people. Suddenly, the international press wanted to know how LGBTQ+ Ukrainians were surviving under the bombs. I gave my first interviews on 24 February 2022, between air-raid alerts and trips to the bomb shelter.

None of the foreign journalists remembered the war had been with us for eight years. Almost all asked if my organisation keeps contacts with Russian LGBTQ+ activists. Many wondered what I, a trans person, would do when (not ‘if’, but ‘when’) Russia occupies Ukraine. I gave lectures on history instead of interviews. I tried to explain Russian realities while dodging Russian missiles.

I can’t say that all of my lessons were successful. Months into the invasion, Western media still recalled the ‘Ukrainians are Nazis’ myth and interviews were peppered with questions on far-right groups in Ukraine, racism and transphobia in our country. I had to debunk decade-old Russian propaganda, while an army of Russian transphobes and racists destroyed my country, killed my people, tortured queer activists in occupied Kherson.

But for me, it was important for me to send a warning. Vladimir Putin is not waging war on Ukraine on his own. He has a nation behind him. So-called ‘liberal Russians’ quietly promote imperialist culture in Europe, living abroad as ‘heroes’ against tyranny while doing nothing to bring any real change in their country.

If Russia can’t kill you right away, it subverts your mind with culture, hiding the murderous reality behind figure skating and ballet, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. You get used to it, you start sympathising, and then it kills you. We in Ukraine are familiar with this scenario because our nation has lived through it for centuries:  in 2014, in the 1990s, in the 1920s, in the 1880s and beyond. Russia has tried to destroy Ukraine since the first days of Russia’s existence.

Our nation and state is actually much older than theirs, but theirs is bigger and scarier because of colonial occupation, nuclear weapons, lies, oil, gas and their still persuasive cultural soft power.

After centuries of enforced exposure almost everyone in Ukraine understands Russian. We would love to forget this language, but at the moment at least it enables us to learn what they are thinking, day by day through the Russian media.

We can hear their plan to destroy the Baltic countries, Poland and then the UK. We can hear the  propagandist song about Sarmat rockets aimed at the US and ready to fire. And we can read all the happy comments by ‘ordinary Russians’ under the posts about murdered Ukrainian children. We understand what they say and we know they won’t stop.

This little story is just one of thousands of messages that Ukrainians are sending to the world since 2014. I hope someone will hear it.

This article is part of Friends of Europe’s Ukraine Initiative series, find out more here. The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.