Yevhen Spirin

On February 23, Yevhen Spirin felt sick all day long. Everything had been going wrong. In the evening, he went to the presentation of a survey about the consumption of information from the Ukrainian media in the temporarily occupied areas. There he encountered Oleksii Matsuka, a journalist from Donetsk, and Anton Naumlyuk, the chief editor of Graty media (an “ex-Russian”, as Yevhen calls him).

"I’m not a great believer in mysticism, but at some point, I noticed that our faces were all the same shade,” Yevhen recalls. “We had probably already understood that the game was up.”

He came home with trembling hands, put on some music, drank the whiskey he had bought on his way back from the presentation, and fell asleep. At 7:18 Yevhen woke up, saw a whole bunch of missed calls, and heard explosions. By that moment, the non-stop news stream concerning Russia’s full-scale offensive of Ukraine was already flowing on the Babel website.

At that time, Yevhen lived in the Pechersk district of Kyiv. His neighbors had resented him inquiring about bomb shelters until very recently, but now they were sharing information about the explosions on the local chat. Yevhen had not gathered his essentials in advance, so he just tossed the first items he could find into a backpack, grabbed his dachshund, and ran to a nearby metro station. His wife had been on a business trip abroad; thus, Yevhen took a train to the next station where his friend Alex had stayed with his girlfriend. Alex worked as a barman at the Pink Freud bar, and there was a well-equipped bomb shelter in its building, left over from the times that the US Embassy had been there.

“Although they were way too perplexed, my colleagues continued working,” Yevhen recalls. “Three of them joined us at Pink Freud, while all the rest had evacuated out of Kyiv. I had only one sock and a sweater in my backpack. All the other stuff belonged to my dog. I thought it was more important because she could not pack a bag by herself.”

Yevhen and his fellows made a schedule for duties in the bar. Before long, they were cooking about 300 meals daily for the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on a voluntary basis. Twenty people were split up into shifts. In the Pink Freud kitchen, they mostly cooked chicken and salads plus porridge or potatoes. When the bar crew got tired, Yevhen and his colleagues from Babel came to take their place. Returning home overnight was pointless: it took too much money and time, while their work in the kitchen started at 5 am. In the bomb shelter, the journalists equipped a few sections with a ‘living room’ where they could discuss the content plan and the lists of dishes to cook, a table for a PlayStation (which had, by the way, been used just twice during their entire stay), and sleeping facilities. The bar stool cushions and cardboard boxes from under liquor bottles served for mattresses. Yevhen cleaned the fry kitchen and arranged himself a working place. His colleagues brought mattresses, sleeping bags, mats and an airbed in one of their first days of living in the bar. Initially, the shelter-mates washed their laundry by hand: it was later that they found a washing machine in the basement. Meanwhile, they began to take care of abandoned pets and solitary seniors. Every now and then they also went to the military administration and tried to enlist in the army, but were all turned down due to the lack of military experience.

The Podil district was unusually deserted. The hipster cafes were preparing to roll out new volunteer initiatives. The explosions never ceased. Yet the need to cook plenty of food eventually fell away, and March came to an end. On April 1, the Kyiv region was liberated, and the Russians withdrew from the capital city.

Yevhen returned home on April 15.

“We had been living as if we were all in a big dormitory, and I was somewhat afraid to leave,” he shares. “This may seem weird, but we had no problems or fights while we were sharing the living space. It was challenging for a bunch of different people, who had just crossed paths occasionally in the bar, to wash the floor and laundry, cook and clean the common place together. But nonetheless, we had a cool vibe. Once we talked about why this was so, and concluded that it was the matter of the primary motto of both Babel and the Pink Freud: no room for assholes.”

The Babel team now works in the Pink Freud as if it were a normal office, whereas Yevhen jokingly calls himself a music director on a pro-bono basis. He regularly invites singers and stand-up comedians to perform at charity events in the bar to raise funds for the needs of the army. About US$3000 were collected during the very first concert by the Kryhitka Band. This had ended up an effective way to support friends in the military.

“Those forty minutes of Kryhitka’s first concert was the best time in the last couple of months for many people,” Yevhen explains. “It was like a chance to get distracted. People cannot endure constantly thinking they are at war 24/7. Well, they actually are, but this doesn’t mean they have to either fight at the frontline or die emotionally in the rear. Of course, once in a while they will want to take a breath and come back to their senses.”

All the funds raised during the events are transferred to military units, while the artists refuse fees for their appearances and even make their own donations. Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, for instance, added almost US$5000 from the money collected from the audience. This was enough to meet the need of one combat unit for ten professional mobile transceivers. Yevhen has already organized more than a dozen charity concerts.

Concert management is not his only new activity these days. Yevhen has returned to writing poetry for the first time since his adolescence.

“Perhaps I was an overly sensitive kid,” Yevhen laughs and explains: “My parents had worked in a mortuary. Among their professional books, I found my favorite, a tutorial on how to dissect a cadaver. At the age of around 15, I started writing some shitty poetry about alcoholics and prostitutes: I was trying to imitate Mayakovsky. That was all very funny, but I quit it when I was 19. And then came this grueling March when I could not control myself. I just sat at the laptop and wrote whatever came to my mind. But later, as I took a closer look, it turned out to be quite a decent piece of poetry.”

Yevhen wrote his most popular poem about Kyiv, which instantly went viral, on the day he thought it was the absolute end of everything. Artillery fire could be heard a few kilometers away, yet the Babel team was determined to continue updating the news until the very last. Yevhen posted his poem on social media. Kyiv withstood, and his post was shared over a thousand times by the end of the night.

“Then Rymma Ziubina, a famous Ukrainian actress, wrote to me and asked for permission to voice it together with Ada Rohovtseva,” Yevhen recalls. “Someone translated the poem into English, French, and who knows what other languages; someone made a video, and so it went. I was not seeking fame as a poet; I was simply feeling bad. Today, I already have more than five hundred of them. Now I’ve gathered all my poems into one file and named it ‘Survival Kit’. It’s a kind of therapy, just to keep sane, not to gain recognition. It’s OK to be nervous when you are at war; yet I like it when people say that a poem resonates with them, because it means they have found some comfort in it.”

That poem about Kyiv was the fourth that Yevhen had posted online. He wrote the first one on February 26, but did it in Russian. Then he decided that it would have been right of him to switch into Ukrainian and began to use it in his daily communication. The Russian version of

Babel was turned off as well.

Ukrainian had once been an elective course in Yevhen’s school in Luhansk. He was the only student among his classmates who chose to take his final exam in it. Still, it wasn’t his patriotism that pushed him to this decision: Yevhen just liked his Ukrainian teacher. Anna Viktorivna was 22, while Yevhen was 15, and they made friends very quickly. She recommended him books to read, and he tried to translate Shakespeare for her. Finally, he passed the exam with good grades and entered the Academy of Internal Affairs in Luhansk. Yevhen tried to get in touch with Anna Viktorivna two years afterwards, but she didn’t recognize him. Nor did she a couple of years later when Yevhen came to make a report about the children born in the same year of 2014 when the Russian-Ukrainian war had started, and who had now just entered first grade. When he wanted to meet the director of a frontline school, he was introduced to Anna Viktorivna. His former teacher told him about her own escape from occupied Luhansk where her pro-Russian colleagues had remained, about her husband and kids, about a minefield not far from the school, and so on, but Yevhen never revealed who he was.

“If I ever have children, they are not going to speak Russian,” says he. “It’s rather difficult for me to change the language I think in, but I can speak Ukrainian to others, and so I have to do it.”

Yevhen never graduated from an academy. Once, while patrolling the city streets during his practical course, he mistook a person with cerebral palsy for a drug addict, and realized that he would never succeed in becoming a good policeman.

“And then my father said that I had to live on my own and take care of myself,” Yevhen recalls. “So I decided to go somewhere, so I could at least get a room in the dormitory. While in the academia, I used to read Kant, because it was, unlike the set texts, something worth reading. His works were predictably hard to comprehend, yet I really wanted to get to the point of his philosophy.”

So, Yevhen entered the Faculty of Philosophy of at the Volodymyr Dal Eastern Ukrainian University. In 2012-14, he even lectured there as a doctoral candidate. While still a student, he went to work in a mortuary with his father.

“There was no work in Luhansk, and I could not live on my stipend,” says Yevhen. “Once, I spent two months just going to job interviews. And it would have been too hard for me to work as, like, a loader. My father told me that there was a vacancy for the position of an unlicensed assistant in the mortuary, and I began to work every other night, attending classes in the meantime. I wasn’t scared at all because my father had taken me to work with him for the first time when I was only five. He showed me a dead body and said, like, ‘Look, this is what happens to a human being after death. God does not exist’.”

He made use of that experience later, when working in Bucha after its liberation. There, Yevhen helped with exhuming and identifying the bodies of the local people who had been murdered by the Russians. It felt much more terrible to work with the living – those who were trying to find their relatives among the slaughtered.

“No experience can ever help you to properly treat people who are looking for their spouses, brothers and sisters in black plastic bags containing the remains of human bodies,” he ponders.

“Seventy-six people standing in line to look at a body from the bag, someone telling a story about how their mother was shot in the back of her head as she was simply going to fetch some water. Or, for instance, there is a guy who buried his neighbor somewhere and forgot the precise spot, so now her son cannot find his mother’s body… This is hell. I think the memories of the living are the worst of all. And the dead are silent now.”

As he came to understand what war can do to people, Yevhen lost his ability to work at the frontline, much like many of his colleagues who had been covering the Russian-Ukrainian war for the previous eight years.

“Many of them broke down,” Yevhen explains, “because once, they could have gone to the Donbas, made a report and came back to live their idle and peaceful life in Kyiv. But now a missile can hit you in your own apartment. My colleagues from Babel are mostly very young people who want to go and work at the frontline. But I know that each person has their own reserve capacity. The older you get, the more frightening it becomes, for you have already seen a unit of fifty with just a couple of legs left for all of them after a missile shelling. The older you are, the more empathetic you get to be. You can feel the pain of the families of the perished soldiers, and this makes you very sensitive. I cry at least once a week. It’s good that you are still able to cry.”

He considers the lack of empathy to be the biggest problem of the Western media, which formerly had had a good reputation in Ukraine.

“The Westerners are not doing journalism; they are just morons. They can, for example, stick a microphone into the faces of a fallen serviceman’s family who are carrying the wreath at his funeral, and start inquiring about their feelings. There’s plenty of this. We, on the contrary, try to be ethical. Nobody’s perfect, of course, but our journalists work 24/7, make reports, listen to people and one another. It’s an incredible professional training.”

Yevhen himself now sleeps between two and a half and four hours daily: an hour in the morning, afternoon, evening, and the night. Over and above journalism, he has a lot of volunteer work. His memory has begun to fail him, so now he keeps his daily to-do list in a phone application and a few notebooks. His RAM, as he jokingly claims, has been reduced to 1 MB, ‘like that of an old Nokia phone with the flashlight’.

“Each time you go to sleep nowadays you think of whether there’ll be time to do something in case of a nuclear strike,” says Yevhen, either in jest or seriously. “We’re all frightened 24/7. This is our life in war. I could have left Ukraine even before the invasion but decided to stay. I’ve already fled Luhansk once, and don’t want to lose Kyiv too. We all blamed ourselves for leaving Luhansk in 2014: what if we’d stayed and given the Russians a good fight? Maybe the city would be free today? So now I definitely have to stay involved and keep acting.”