Now, when I think about it, we were always at war in some way.

The year I was born, Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. I was too young to care, but the news of that endless, pointless war with no winners were a constant background of my childhood. Later, when the violence erupted in Artzah (that we knew as Nagorno Karabakh), I was not scared – I was conditioned to think that there was always war, somewhere, far from me. Those, who didn’t grow up in the Soviet Union, cannot imagine how vast it was and how little we cared about what was happening there. This morning I read that one of the primary symptoms of PTSD is the loss of control, the feeling that whatever happens is done to you, rather than by you. By this measure, the Soviet Union was a giant PTSD camp.

The first war that truly scared me and shook me to the bones was the invasion of Chechnya. I remember reading Anna Politkovskaya’s Second Chechen War in Kyiv metro and literally shaking from pain and rage and helplessness. I couldn’t get a hold of the real book, so I printed out a file, two pages per sheet of paper, landscape orientation, held with a paper clip. Back then, I couldn’t see it for the foreshadowing it was, the war was still happening to someone else, but it was creeping closer.

I don’t remember my reaction to the news of the wars on the Balkans and the genocide in Rwanda, but I do remember the experience of reading books about them – the helpless grief about something that already happened, that no one stopped at the time and no one could help anymore. I don’t remember strong reactions in the society. I think it was partly due to the fact that we lived in Ukraine, a place that everyone, including ourselves, considered a periphery where nothing of interest happens.