Volodymyr Yermolenko and Tetyana Ogarkova

Early in the morning of February 24, in a military town near Brovary, Volodymyr Yermolenko and Tetyana Ogarkova woke up from the first explosions that went off. Both were already flooded with missed phone calls and messages from relatives and friends. The couple’s three daughters, aged 13, 5, and 3, were still sleeping tight, but Volodymyr and Tetyana knew that the girls weren’t going to kindergarten, to school, or to any other activities that day.

As foreign journalists started calling and inquiring about the situation, Volodymyr and Tetyana instantly got to work from the very first hours of the full-scale invasion. By the evening they were thinking about moving to Tetyana’s parents who lived in a private house in Obukhiv: it seemed a safer place to stay during bombardment than a nine-story apartment block. It was there that the family spent the first week of the full-scale war, driving occasionally through checkpoints to Kyiv and Brovary. Once at the beginning of March, Volodymyr and Tetyana saw the photo of a 64-kilometer tank column approaching Kyiv, and decided to move to one of the western regions for a week or two. Yet in the end, their forced evacuation lasted for six weeks. Volodymyr, Tetyana and their children only returned home in mid-April.

“Everything is clear in comparison,” Volodymyr considers. “I tend not to be dramatic about the circumstances we find ourselves in, even during blackouts. Thank God, our town of Brovary has not been bombed, and we are still living in our apartment, while many of our friends have their homes ruined now. Thank God, we are safe and sound. Looking back at our people who have gone through so many tragedies and pain, we can’t but be grateful for what we have.”

It's hard to talk about life in wartime to those who haven’t had such experiences, especially abroad. Traumatized people live in different emotional modes than those who have suffered less. Volodymyr and Tetyana have seen that in their own experience while delivering humanitarian aid to liberated places in Ukraine. There they met people who had suffered under occupation and had to bury their closest ones, people whose relatives had been slaughtered before their very eyes, and whose cars had been run over by Russian tanks. Life in Ukraine is no longer totally normal since February 24. Different experiences lock people in a kind of shell, and it becomes ever more difficult to find a common ground.

“The war has impacted us all to a certain degree,” says Tetyana. “It’s not that hard to slip into competing for whose affliction is worse. Yet you should not devalue the other’s experiences. Someone’s expertise is required at the forefront, while someone else may have had to stay in the rear and be of help, or take their children abroad to save them. There are no unimportant people. It’s inevitable that everyone draws upon their own experience, of course, but on the societal level, we must understand that none of us ever chose such a fate, and so we have to be careful and empathetic. No one in Ukraine is to blame, whilst we all have a common enemy who is not to be defeated otherwise than by joining our endeavors.”

Like many Ukrainians, Volodymyr and Tetyana have firmly kept using the words “when (not ‘if’) we prevail” since the very first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion. As the fighting drags on and the Armed Forces of Ukraine are reclaiming the Ukrainian land piece by piece, the couple has no doubt that Ukraine will definitely win this war. Their conviction is based on the concept of values: in their opinion, it’s impossible for Ukraine and its allies not to be able to handle this unfair and unreasonable terrorist aggression. This is a suicidal war for Putin and the last one for Russia in its current political status.

“One may consider it naïve faith, because history offers us many examples of how evil goes unpunished,” says Tetyana. “At the same time, we realize that this war is not just about Russia and Ukraine. It’s a conflict of values where, on the one hand, there is a country which does whatever it wants, inventing pseudo-historical justifications for its own actions, and on the other hand, there’s the rest of the world that consistently insists that Ukraine is a sovereign state and on the crucial importance of playing by the rules. No authoritarian state can ever be allowed to systematically destroy a sovereign nation.”

Back in 2014, the world did not respond properly to the illegal annexation of Crimea. This proves that making concessions with evil only helps it to spread. Now the Global West must learn from its own mistakes.

Volodymyr and Tetyana do a lot of educational work: their anglophone podcast Explaining Ukraine for theUkraine World project is just one of its elements. The podcast addresses issues of Russian atrocities and Ukrainian resistance, and helps the international audience to discover Ukraine’s identity and political traditions. Funds raised through the podcast are allocated to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and civilians with military and humanitarian aid.

“We make a big mistake if we try to convince our every listener 100%,” says Volodymyr Yermolenko. “Our experience indicates that it’s better to have trust and the commitment to talk than absolute consent. Sometimes, naturally, our mere existence depends on whether we have full support or not: for instance, we must explain that the Western leaders should support Ukraine and in no way stop supplying weapons or be afraid of nuclear blackmail, because it plays into the enemy’s hands; we must convince them that Russia is never going to be the same as it was during the last two centuries. The de-imperialization of Russia will constitute our ultimate victory.”

Volodymyr and Tetyana spent much of their lives studying and researching in different universities in Europe and the USA. They can attest to Ukraine’s longstanding absence from the mental map of the world. The full-scale invasion has finally drawn attention to our country in a very tragic way. The fact that the world is now willing to listen to us is a great achievement for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It’s our Ukrainian army which has helped us to enhance our agency, culturally as well. Volodymyr and Tetyana talk about the iconic authors, cult phenomena and epochs of Ukrainian history in another project, Kult: Podcast, which will soon be translated into English and French.

“There is great demand for issues related to Ukrainian art,” says Tetyana. “Thus, people in France are ready to know that Sonia Delaunay, the renowned originator of simultanéisme, was born in Ukraine and spent five years of her life in Odesa. In her autobiography, she wrote that it was her Ukrainian childhood and images emerging in her mind as she was getting the knowledge about Ukrainian traditions that she owes the invention of simultanéisme to. People in France are ready to know that Kazimir Malevich was never a Russian artist. He was born in Kyiv, his family was of Polish descent, and his first language was Polish, while Ukrainian was second, and Russian was perhaps third. They are more willing to know this now than they were a year ago because our culture gets extra attention, thanks to Ukrainian military valor.”

Tetyana and Volodymyr talk about Ukraine for the world’s leading media on a regular basis. While appearing on French TV channels, especially France 24, they often meet those who urge them to understand Russia’s position: these are mostly ex-ambassadors of France to Russia, or the so-called ‘French generals’ who try to push a false idea of the aggressor’s invincibility. Sometimes the French correspondents put the official Ukrainian position on a par with Russian propaganda. This is outrageous, and the evident fact that the rule of maintaining balance does not work in the situation of an aggressor and a victim still needs to be explained over and over again.

“Ukraine is moving forward ever more powerfully thanks to our allies’ support,” states Tetyana. “Nobody wants to stand on the side of the defeated. In terms of meeting strategic objectives, Russia has already implicitly lost this war. We must do our best so that Russia ceases to exist in its current status. The last empire must split up. This is the only guarantee that history will not be repeated. Otherwise, our children will sacrifice their lives in this insane fight again, ten or twenty years later, as our generation is doing now.”

In their humanitarian trips, the couple have seen the effects of Russian war crimes firsthand. Volodymyr and Tetyana give special symbolic significance to Kharkiv where they deliver aid almost every month. The towns and villages of the Kyiv region, liberated from occupation in spring, are still before their eyes.

“There are macabre cemeteries of cars in Irpin, Hostomel and Bucha,” Volodymyr Yermolenko shares. “Behind every burnt car, there is somebody’s story. We met a man in Bucha who told us that his friends’ family came under fire while attempting to drive away from the town. Six months afterwards he could recognize their car by his friend’s penknife found inside. I can still see the totally ruined village of Moschun: this is the place that probably saved Kyiv from occupation. I can still see a Daewoo Lanos whose owner had barely managed to jump out of the car as a tank ran over it in the village of Bobryk near Brovary.”

“The village of Bezruky in the Kharkiv region makes an even more powerful image,” adds Tetyana. “It’s there that a Russian cluster bomb killed a girl who was reading a book in the garden together with her 38-year-old aunt in June. We met the grandmother who survived because her own house was located several hundred meters away from the place of the tragedy. That lady lost both her beloved daughter and granddaughter. She showed us the stairs where the girl was sitting with her book, and told us that the blood was right there. ‘I washed off the blood of my children,’ she said. By the power of empathy, I could imagine my mom in her place. It was clear for me that we were no different from that family. We are all targets of this horrible war.”

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Volodymyr, Tetyana and their kids used to go camping on a bank of the Desna River. Fortunately, they say, the war has not touched their favorite vacation spot; yet the petrol stations destroyed by the Russians are located just a few kilometers away, while Velyka Dymerka and other villages where the dreadful tank battles took place are just a stone’s throw from there.

“It’s plain as day that this war is always about you,” Tetyana summarizes. “I think it important to stay here physically and realize it’s not happening just somewhere on TV. We must synchronize ourselves with the pain of others to keep talking about this war, to keep working, and keep understanding why we are doing all this day by day.”