September 23rd 2024

Yuriy he recounts his recent travels across war-torn Ukraine, including a visit to his hometown of Kharkiv. In this episode, Yuriy delves into health issues exacerbated by constant stress, the agony of seeing his city under attack, misguided foreign perspectives on the war, and heartbreaking stories of Russian oppression. He ends on a hopeful note by discussing his involvement in a veterans' theatre project and plans for a new podcast initiative.

You can email Yuriy, ask him questions or simply send him a message of support: [email protected]   

Yuriy’s Podbean Patron sign-up to give once or regularly: https://patron.podbean.com/yuriy  

Buy Yuriy a coffee here: https://bmc.link/yuriymat 

Subscribe to his substack: https://yuriymatsarsky.substack.com/ 

----more----

TRANSCRIPT: (Apple Podcasts & Podbean app users can enjoy accurate closed captions)  

Hello, I'm back with you again. It's September 23. 

I've been away for quite some time. This is partly due to health issues, which are certainly not getting any better under constant stress, and partly because over the past few weeks I've had to travel around Ukraine for my military duties. I even visited my hometown of Kharkiv, which suffers from daily bombings, where soon there won't be a single intact window left and which the Russians are trying to simply destroy. It's an incredibly heavy feeling- being in the city of my childhood, the city of my daughters childhood, and witnessing how it suffers from shelling, how people there are in agony, it's unimaginably difficult.

The only thing harder is reading how foreign commentators are teaching us how we should deal with Russians. Lately, I've been coming across more and more advice from foreigners directed at Ukrainians, which sounds more like calls for capitulation. Of course, if they don't phrase it that way. Usually, it's just amusing about how one can live under any regime and, but it's not necessary worth suffering and dying just to prevent your state's flag flattering over your city being replaced with that of another country. I even suspect that these aren't Russian bots, but real people from Western countries who just don't fully understand what's actually happening here. What this war is truly about. Let me give you some examples. 

A few months ago, two Ukrainian priests were released from Russian captivity. They had been captured in the Kherson region at the beginning of a full scale invasion.  They weren't chaplains. They had no ties to the military. We were simply from a church that were Russian authorities deemed uncanonical and incorrect because it does not recognize the primacy of Moscow and holds services in Ukrainian language. Just four this, the two priests were arrested, sent to camps, tortured and abused. Naturally their congregation, was given a "proper" priest. One with a Russian passport, a prayer book edited to feed the times, and probably an FSB ID too. 

In occupied territories, not only praying in Ukrainian forbidden, but even speaking, it is prohibited. That's why the occupiers immediately destroy all books in schools and libraries burned down the offices of Ukrainian language publications and bomb printing houses. Russians boast in very news about sending a young shop assistant from the occupied territories to prison for greeting customers in Ukrainian, out of habit, not knowing that they were Russian soldiers. For the simple words, 'good day' in a banned language, she was sent to the torture chamber. 

The Russians aren't just replacing one flag with another; they want everyone to immediately become Russian to forget, their language renowned their faith and even throw away favorite books into the fire. This is a deliberate destruction of everything that matters to a person. Everything that makes a person human. Their history, their roots, their understanding of the world. None of that is supposed to remain. The Russian government has restructured its own country into a vast territory, full of people without their own thoughts, without their own views, without their own values. Everyone is ordered to love what we're told to love, hate what we're told to hate, and ignore everything, not mention it by the authorities. And this is precisely the order they want to force upon Ukraine. And kill anyone who disagrees.  

I don't think it's worth ending on a said note again. So here's some good news. I'm currently serving in a unit that, among other things, focuses on the rehabilitation of veterans and war disabled individuals. We even have a special project, the Veteran's Theater, where 15 veterans have been trained in the basics of dramaturgy and have written their own plays about our war. I've joined this work and now I'm working on creating a Veterans Podcast where we will record the plays in radio format and discuss them. 

I'm slowly putting together a studio for this. I've already bought a recorder and one microphone. I'll be ordering two more microphones and a mixer, even if we're slightly used, very soon. And all of these. Thanks to you. Without your help, I would not have the money to set up the studio that we are building right now. There wouldn't be the opportunity for war scared people who engaged in creativity and share the stories of the world. True stories of heroism and resistance. And you are all directly part of this because if you are listening to me and helping -you are the resistance.