I didn’t want to go on the site of the strike in Holosiivs’kyi this morning, I knew what I would see: death, despair and destruction. We see it too often here. One shelling would already be one too many, and it keeps on happening, at various scales and over various cities, everyday.
But we need to see. We can’t afford to close our eyes. Hours after the strike, the smoke is no longer there, but the air is still filled with its smell. It has started to rain and a strong wind makes debris swirl around the people still there.
As the night falls on dozens of flat no longer inhabitable, people look on what used to be their homes. Some are waiting at the entrance of the building hit, they are trying to retrieve whatever belongings they have left. Others already carry a backpack, suitcase and plastic bags. Firefighters are still on site to clear up the crime scene. The sounds of drills indicates that wooden panels are being installed to replace broken windows.
Today, in Kyiv alone, here in that residential building in the otherwise quiet, green district of Holosiivs’kiy, four people died and over 40 got injured, including a pregnant woman. Other civilians lost their pets to this horror.
As you can see from the some of the pictures, despite all this, lights are on in the untouched part of the building. People live here. Люди живуть тут.
You might remember Max from the day of his liberation, a year ago, when after ten months in Russian captivity, he was returned to Ukraine. That day, a photographer captured the moment when Max was looking at an apple in disbelief and awe, having not seen fresh fruits or vegetables during his whole time of detention.
Last year, on the picture, he was looking gaunt, having lost 32 kilos during his ordeal. Shaved, skeletal, he was nothing like the tall, healthy-looking man who stood in front of me. The wounds run deep, he still have to deal with injuries both physical and psychological, but he is alive, and safe, for now.
It is almost a year to the day since he was freed, and I have a thousand questions, and the fear that each of them could cause more damage by reviving all the trauma. I know that I shouldn’t show emotion, in order to not make it worse. I know that I should not feel as much as I do, because it is not my place, but that particular day, I feel more intensely than usual, and I know it from the moment I leave home to meet Max. I feel the pressure and the privilege of being able to hear and share his story: we all want to know how he, and any other person who survived this ordeal, is doing right now. We all have those thousand questions.
Only, how do you ask them? How do you ask someone to share the unspeakable?
I don’t think there is a roadmap. What there is though, is very simple: we are many things, me a journalist, having moved to Ukraine, a learner of the country, and an ignorant of war until recently. Max, a civilian turned soldier, returned to civilian life for now, a husband, a father, a victim and a witness of the harm caused to his country, to his people and to himself, by the aggressor neighbor, now sitting here at a café table with a coffee and a macaron in front of him. My first thought is that I would like him to have all the macarons in the world for the rest of his life, every day, as if that could erase the ten months of privations. What there is, is very simple: humanity, as two people simply sit in front of each other.
And then we start talking. We start from the moment when Max, a civilian but also a reservist born in Donetsk, joins the army again. His battalion was surrounded in Kyiv region at the end of March 2022, and dozens of soldiers were captured. His ordeal starting March 20th. What he tells me is something I only ever read about. The pattern of abuse, beating, tormenting, reminds me of what a survivor of Russian torture in Balakliya, in Kharkiv region, was saying, but on a way larger scale. You can’t listen to such things without feeling you are having a bad dream, a dream you can’t wake up from because you are already wide awake. Several times, I am shocked not just by what Max went through, but by the casual aspect of the torture routines he describes, until Max says “one moment, please…” and looks for the exact word in English for the feeling he wants to express: “Absurd! It was absurd…” he says.
The banality of evil is here, right here. Everything he explains reminds me of what Charlotte Delbo or Primo Levi described when talking about concentration camps. The malnourishment – two large cups of clear soup with sometimes a leaf of cabbage in it, the randomness of “punishments”, people being chosen at a drunken guard’s will to be beaten up or tazed, hundreds of squats or push-ups having to be made by already frail prisoners, civilians and soldiers alike. And the utter ignorance of guards and officers alike when it came to Ukraine, assuming it was as backwards a place as the ones they came from, and assuming Max was constantly tormented in Kyiv because he came from Donetsk. thinking that because Max came from Donetsk, not believing him and other prisoners that Ukraine was a country where people had, prior to the war, an actually nice life.
With every word describing life in captivity, I understand that we are beyond the limits of reason, not to mention way past the respect of international law, and that the only difference I see with the concentration system of WW2 is that Russian prisons are not extermination camps – they are places where the individual is meant to be broken, emotionally and physically, subjugated, and forced into submission and admission that Russia will crush all of its neighbors. As months go by, the violence eventually decreases, minus some outbursts, because even tormentors understand that those prisoners have more value alive than dead.
Throughout our conversation, Max sometimes holds his cup of coffee, and I see the same hands as the ones that held that apple a year ago. Those hands could be those of any of my friends, and like the hands of thousands of civilians turned soldiers after February 24th. They are the hands that held a phone for the first time in ten months on February 4th, 2023, to dial in the number of his wife Julia, the one number he knew by heart, and he could finally hear his love after all that time, and tell her he was free. Max got lucky to come home, he now can hold his family, his wife and his daughters, his parents, tight in his arms again. He told me that he had been so worried to lose his ageing father during captivity, and to remain imprisoned for years.
After everything Max told me, I have one question: how did he manage to remain sane all that time? and again, the answer is very simple: because he is human, and along the dozen other prisoners in his cell, they kept each other sane by sharing stories, recounting nice moments of their lives, exchanged recipes of their favorite foods, looking forward to the next time they would be able to eat it. Those very thoughts of the love they knew existed, contributed to keeping them alive. All of this was stronger than the abject mediocrity and casual violence they were subjected to.
What is there to say, and what is there to do after having been through that, and having recounted it? Max and I look at each other, he asks me why I decided to come to Ukraine. I share my story as well, and now both of us have tears swelling in our eyes. It’s not sadness. It’s very simple: it’s our humanity.
It didn’t come as a total surprise. For quite some time, the skies above Kyiv were far too quiet. We all knew Russia was probably saving as many missiles and drones as possible to hit Ukraine at the worst possible time, in the middle of the winter.
Living in Ukraine, we are used to the sound of wailing sirens, shrieking through the night. This is the best case scenario. The worst is when we hear the whistle of a missile, or the buzzing sound of a drone, and of course the sound of an explosion.
Last Friday, on December 29th, I slept through all the night’s air raid alerts. Instead, I woke up to the roar of an explosion nearby. The ceiling lights shook, the windows as well. I got up quickly and opened the curtains – to a scene of devastation. In a sunny, otherwise beautiful morning, columns of dark smoke rose high before me, towards Lukianisvka subway station, in the Shevchenkivs’kiy district, my district. Somehow the nice weather made it all the more terrible. I looked at my cats, eager to get breakfast and no longer scared by a sound that had become familiar to them, and looked back in the direction of Lukianivksa. A lot of my friends live nearby, so I immediately thought of them, messaged to see of they were ok.
In the safest place of my flat, as I had no time to seek shelter elsewhere and it was pointless to go out, as the danger of strikes persisted, I messaged the newsroom, with “URGENT: Kyiv under attack”. Catching up with the news through multiple channels, I could see that Ukraine was again under a barrage of missiles and drones launched by Russia.
We, journalists, are first responders too, we do not rescue, we do not repair, but we do show what is before our eyes. Security-wise, we are not supposed to leave a shelter during an on-going air raid alert. Plus, there is a risk of double-tap – as Russia has a well-documented habit to wait for rescuers to be on site before launching a second strike on the same spot.
When it is safe enough to do so, I meet with Illia, my producer today. He was on his way to the swimming pool with a friend, when the attacks happened. We have to decide which site to cover first – the warehouse on fire in Podil? The subway station in Lukianivska? I opt for the latter, it’s closer and we think we know where to go.
The thick column of smoke comes from the very same place shelled last summer. Dozens of ambulances are on site. Police cordon off the area, not accessible to the press yet. There is a factory of interest in the neighborhood.
An elderly woman shouts at us to stop filming, saying that we’re helping Russians. We tell her we are authorised to film, she goes straight to a police officer and points her finger at us. She’s frantic, still shocked because of the explosion. The officer looks at her, looks at us, we wave towards our accreditations which we quickly took out of our pockets. He silently nods in approval and looks, unfazed, at the woman who seems now dejected.
We can’t go live on the scene of an attack for the first couple of hours, precisely so as not to give out any information to ill-intentioned people.
We meet with people whose offices were already destroyed the last time this area was shelled. There is Oleh, a business owner who exclaims: “In Ukrainian, we say that a bomb never falls twice on the same place. Do you see, this is the answer for politicians: in a city far away from the frontline, without fighting. Should they be helping us or no? They should come in Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, looking at what happens to our Ukraine every day!”. Katarina, a young mother, and her little boy Vovochka who tries to steal my microphone, were about to leave their home to go to the kindergarten when the missile struck the subway station. Katarina says: “We decided against the kindergarten and sheltered at home, and it was for the best, because it quickly became so chaotic over there, with of all the people seeking shelter”.
After filming, I call V., my friend and also producer, to use his laptop, as mine is broken. We spend the afternoon between editing and radio lives. In the evening, back on Sophia Square for more TV lives, I hear a street musician playing “Forever Young” on the guitar and this is the last straw that day – this is forever the song of Arman, a French journalist who died last year in Chasiv Yar. But people stroll, they enjoy the music, while I enumerate the horrors of the day for an international audience.
***
It only takes another couple of days, during which various other shellings happen: Kherson, Odesa, where teenagers, among others, are killed, their lives cut short by drones and missile strikes on civilian infrastructures, before the capital is hit by another large scale attack.
On January 2nd, we in Kyiv wake up again to the sound of explosions. Drones had already been sent in the middle of the night, but I hadn’t heard anything. This time, it’s missiles. 99 of them, most aimed at Kharkiv and Kyiv. It’s loud, it lasts several hours. I had no time to get out and reach the safest shelter: the Kyiv subway, to I shelter at home, in my corridor. One of my cats in my arms, the other two hiding somewhere, while the windows are shaking, and the light is flickering.
I’m texting with my colleagues in Paris, they’re worried for me, ask if I want to postpone our live. Precisely because we are under attack, I want to proceed, from my corridor.
Today is the 2nd time in four days that Illia and I check on each other during the shelling, then he picks me up when it’s safe to do so, and we go to a site where destruction and death try to obliterate life. From the road, we can see hellish dark columns of smoke, all across the city.
When we arrive on site, we arrive shortly after first rescuers. When we can, if authorities agree, we report live from the spot, and we film. It’s a sadly well rehearsed ballet of responders. We all know our job, and all acknowledge that we belong together here. The firefighters, the police, the intelligence, the army, and the press. And in the middle, the countless victims.
There is no time to cry, but it’s always time to feel.
Just before recording that video, I was greeting a photographer from Frontliner, a photographer who I always meet during those awful, awful circumstances. He too is visibly shaken.
There is no time to cry, because people need to know. Until you spot a friend in the crowd. You think he’s working too, as he is a journalist as well, but no, he tells you he lives in one of the buildings damaged, and you see his eyes full of tears.
All around us, firefighters, fire hoses, smoke, ashes, people injured, people crying, people already removing shards from their flats and trying to fix what has been undone by Russia.
We move to another location. Charred cars, more emergency workers. A strong smell of gas. Is it dangerous still? Everything is grey and muddy. Everything but us. We’re alive, still.
There is no time to cry but I often wonder if it will ever stop, why it keeps on happening, and if I will ever unsee all the horrors before me.
I had wanted to go to the Museum of the History of Ukraine during the Second World war in Kyiv for quite some time, but the current war always got in the way. I managed a few weeks ago, and there were many, many interesting aspects to talk about.
First of, for those unfamiliar with Kyiv, the museum itself is located under the monumental Mother Ukraine, Україна-мати, a 62m-tall (102m if you count its base) Soviet-era titanium statue built in 1979 as a war memorial. Its two sculptors were both born in Dnipro: Evhen Vuchetych, who died in 1974 and is also the designer of the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in Berlin, and Vasyl Borodai, who completed the project.
You might have heard that Mother Ukraine got a decommunisation make-over on August 1st, 2023, when the Soviet crest, showing the hammer and the sickle, got removed to the benefit of the beloved (here) Ukrainian tryzub. Although this was years in the making, since Soviet and communist symbols were outlawed by the Ukrainian Parliament in 2015, a referendum held in July 2023 showed that an overwhelming majority of the citizens consulted were in favour of getting rid of the Soviet symbol on Mother Ukraine’s shield.
To illustrate this sentiment, my first sight upon entering the museum was that of a Ukrainian soldier giving a disdainful kick in the Soviet Crest, now exhibited in the entrance hall, but looking belittled by an immense blue and yellow flag engulfing the entire ceiling.
In the same hall, the monumental architecture is entirely subdued by Ukrainian identity. Ukraine now is reappropriating itself spaces of propaganda, and the museum of World War II is one shining example of that effort made for Ukraine to decommunize, decolonize and redefine its history from a Kyiv-centered, and no longer from a Moscow-centered perspective.
In the darkness of what used to be a Soviet architectural token, Ukraine has managed to make shine not only its beloved flag, but also its history, which it is now intent on separating from that of the agressor.
In one of the rooms, artifacts retrieved from the battleground and families’ archives give an idea of what everyday life was for a Ukrainian soldier, not unlike the possessions of soldiers currently fighting.
A vitrine showcases pictures of burnt cities. Kharkiv destroyed. Kyiv destroyed. Again, not unlike the current aftermaths of Russian shellings. There are also birth certificates – they emphasize the regrowth of the country. A very moving display shows a postman’s bag with letters from soldiers that never reached their recipients. They were written in Kharkiv region in June and July 1941. A team of researchers is still trying to find surviving family members and hand them over, if 80 years delayed. 660 copies of letters have been handed over to relatives, and the research continues to find recipients of the several dozens remaining.
In another room, the monumental architecture is matched by an equally monumental display of thousands of pictures retrieved from family archives: ad infinitum, “The Wall of Memory” depicts thousands of soldiers, “a collective portrait of a generation that has suffered the bloodiest war in history. There people were in different armies, under different flags, some returned and some remained lying in the soil on the land for which they fought until the very last”, reads a sign.
Along music instruments and a long banquet table where funeral letters are displayed in a macabre last supper formed by soldier’s mess tins and a few music instruments, the display is a reminder of the humanity lost in what historian of Ukraine Timothy Snyder calls “the bloodlands”.
Like a solemn reminder to contemporary Ukraine, the sign reads further: “We are the memory we keep. The attitude to human life as the highest value determines the maturity and civility of a nation. Therefore, the memory of the Ukrainian people about the war is the memory of each lost and destroyed life.”
With more than 25000 artworks, the Khanenko Museum used to host Ukraine’s biggest collection of Fine Arts, ranging from Ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian art, to Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese artifacts, while also being home to artworks from Hieronymus Bosch, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Antonio Canova, Peter Paul Rubens, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, and many other European artists, but the full-scale invasion drastically changed the collections presented. Thousands of paintings were brought to safety – the museum recalling the losses suffered during World War II. On October 10th, Russia launched missiles on the very heart of Kyiv, aiming for, and missing, the Shevchenko University and the Khanenko museum. One missile fell on a playground, only a few meters away from the museum, and another in the middle of the road. Both blasts blew up hundreds of windows. Albeit plunged in the dark from the wood panels sealing its windows, and empty from its collections, the museum now hosts a series of exhibitions from contemporary artistes inspired by the current events.
These days, the work of artist turned fixer for foreign journalists Evhen Bal is showcased in a vitrine full of objects he found on the frontline (“point zero”, for soldiers), and worked into artifacts reminiscing the artist’s life: “Things that the artist finds in the front-line area or in everyday life become triggers that make him recall scenes from his life. At the same time, they highlight the events that have become our common past (…). We become a single body into which the bullet invades and which continues to live with it”, reads the museum’s presentation board. It continues: “Metaphor transform pain into struggle. In this project, working with found material objects is an attempt to grasp reality and displace the fear of the unknown through knowledge”.
In mixing these artifacts with everyday objects, Evhen Bal recalls to the visitor the presence of war in every aspect of life in Ukraine. The “two octaves of bullets” created within a piece of piano decoration seem to give life to a new music instrument, while a dented aluminium shrapnel planted into a base painted in red looks like a houseplant from hell. Irony is everpresent, such as with a porcelain statue of Russian writer Alexander Pushkin pierced with rusty shrapnels and cathartically called “Suicide of Russian culture”, at the very same time that Ukrainian culture and heritage is being endangered by daily shelling and war crimes committed by the Russian agressor.
“Artifacts of kilometer zero” also reminds that behind scraps of metal and empty shells, human beings once held or made the decision to throw those objects with an aim of destruction. Equally, the non-lethal everyday objects showcased emphasize what is lost in civilian life during the war, especially for people stuck on the frontline: the uncertainty of every moment, the fragility of life, and the daily loss of what used to be normal, seem to be conveyed in the artifacts exhibited. They are a vivid testimony of what war feels like in Ukraine.
En Ukraine, loin de la ligne de front, la guerre se décline aussi dans la façon dont on s’en souviendra – on s’en rappellera dans les livres d’histoire, mais c’est justement cette histoire en cours d’écriture s’agit de sauvegarder. Les Ukrainiens l’ont bien compris et pour ce faire, institutions et historiens se réunissent pour créer des espaces de réflexion et de coopération pour documenter les événements sous toutes les formes, y compris via des archives orales.
In a year from now, I’ll probably say “Листопад”, “November” in Ukrainian, like I would any other word, but for now it still feels magical to call a month with a word that means “falling leaves”. Here are some of my pictures of Kyiv’s beautiful autumn foliage.
In the very heart of Kyiv, just next to the ruins of the Tithe Church, the first religious building made in stone in the slavic world, dating back to the 10th century, you can find the monumental National Museum of the History of Ukraine. Its basement windows are still sealed with sandbags and wood panels, but its huge windows on the upper flows are rid of protection, not even showing signs of tape, generally used in times of war as a precaution to minimize the damages caused by shards, in case of explosions. Despite the war, the museum is open, but how does one speak about the history of a country, when one of its bloodiest chapters is still being written? How to make sense of the chaos in which the country sank since 2014, and even more so since February 24th, 2022? Since the beginning of the full scale invasion of Ukraine, dozens of cultural institutions, historic sites and religious buildings have had to close or displace their collections, so as to shelter a heritage that is also targeted and destroyed by bombs and by the Russian occupier.
Opening a museum’s doors is thus an act of resilience, but one that can’t be done without including in the collections the very contemporary history of the country. It is the purpose of the museum itself, at a time when the identity of Ukraine is threatened to its core, and it is clear from the very start, in the entrance hall, where exhibits of the violence of the Russian agression and occupation of the Kyiv region line up in a very concrete display of what we have heard of, or seen.
Shrapnels, rocket shells, bloodied stretchers, street signs pierced with bullet holes, and damaged plaques commemorating the « Heavenly hundred », the fallen protesters killed in Kyiv’s street during the Maidan Revolution in February 2014. Belongings of ennemy soldiers reveal many things: they used road atlases from the 1970s to invade Ukraine, they wrote in diaries about their crimes and shared them with their relatives with no remorse, they also were sometimes quadruply vaccinated against Covid-19 with Sputnik shots.
Around this chaotic and chilling display from the get-go, the museum’s aisles are another display of the contemporary. Next to mosaics and painting replicas of the Tithe and St Sophia churches, exhibitions show Ukraine interrupted in its identity quest. Because “in a museum as in life, ugliness and beauty coexist side by side”, dresses from acclaimed fashion designer Serhiy Yermakov are on show just next to a retrospective on weaponry used by Ukraine to defend its territory. Next to javelins from the 5th century BCE, cossack mases and spears from the 16th-17th centuries, and small weaponry used by nationalist groups of the beginning of the 20th century, a window reminds the visitor that blood continues to flow in what historian Timothy Snyder called a bloodland: there, pictures of the museum’s employees who joined the Ukrainian army last year are displayed. All pictures show men and women in their fatigues, and short biographies attest that this war is very much that of civilians having taken up the arms. Like in 1914, they too fight in muddy trenches, and witness the butchery.
There is Volodymyr Kolybenko, director of the Ancient History department, and Oleksandr Khomenko, director of the section devoted to the short-lived Ukrainian Republic of 1917-1921. His broken glasses are exhibited too. Anatolii Barannik and Karine Kotova, senior researchers, technician Volodymyr Kruchok, engineer Hryhorii Buhaiets, and the museum’s janitor, Viktor Vovk, is also there. Those are no longer the keepers of a history displayed behind glasses. They are the safeguard of their country’s independence.
In the upper floors, the presence of war overflows even the staircase, where suspended shrapnels and explosive devices overlook a map drawn on the floor.
One floor up and the metallic grey is replaced by a flow of blue and yellow colours. Here, the Ukrainian flag is on display. That flag represents the fertile soil and the glorious sky, symbols of independence and freedom. Washed out but majestuous, there are two giant flags flown over public buildings in Kyiv and Lviv in 1990, during the fall of the USSR, next to a mosaic of pictures showing the flag in all its states, and during various events that shaped Ukraine’s history. To those of polar expeditions and Eurovision song contexts, are added the flag soaked in the blood of Nazaziy Voitovych, a 17 year olf student from Ternopil killed in February 2014 when he came to Kyiv to protest against the corrupt pro-Russian regime, and the flag signed by the mythical brigade 93, who defended Donetsk Airport for months during the Second Battle there, despite being under siege and attack until the beginning of 2015 and the fall of Donetsk.
The colours of the flag stand in sharp contrast with the darkness that engulfs the museum’s last floor. There, it is time for contemplation. This is where the fight and resistance of the Azov Bataillon in Mariupol are recollected. Right at the entrance, the sight is dizzying: on four walls, lines upon lines of names and pictures remind ad infinitum the price paid by Ukrainians in the war. Mostly men, mostly young, in any case too young to not live. Candles and flowers show the grief of the hundreds of families mourning one of theirs.
Finally, in the shadows, the history of the Azovstal factory is punctuated by lightshafts, in which belongings of fallen soldiers remind the humanity of those who died for their land. A set of figurine knights belonging to Denys Dudinov, namecode “Ghost”, the second of two brothers who died on the frontline, in his native Donetsk region, a drawing from Stanislas Kovshar, namecode “Bard”, the smashed phone of Dmytro Hubraiev, namecode “Slender”. Medals, boxing gloves, pairs of shoes…all are signs of lives interrupted by the Russian agression.
While the Ukrainian governement refuses, and will likely continue to do so for the duration of the war, to communicate on the number of dead on the frontline, the Museum of History displays, without any figure being necessary, the very grave significance of the human losses for generations to come. Walking through the exhibitions, the visitor can only try and understand, through past and present events, the current cycle of events. In the museum as in everyday life in Ukraine, there is no way to escape war.
En plein coeur du vieux-Kyiv, juste à côté des ruines de l’Eglise de la Dîme, le premier édifice religieux en pierre du monde slave, datant du Xe siècle, se dresse le monumental musée national de l’histoire de l’Ukraine. Ses fenêtres souterraines sont comblées par des sacs de sable et des panneaux de bois, mais celles des étages ne sont même plus recouvertes d’adhésif, précaution utilisée en temps de guerre lors des bombardements. Malgré la guerre, le musée est ouvert, mais comment parler de l’histoire d’un pays lorsque l’un de ses chapitres les plus sanglants est en train de s’écrire ? Comment faire sens du chaos dans lequel le pays a été douloureusement plongé depuis 2014, et plus encore depuis le 24 février 2022 ? Depuis le début de l’invasion à grande échelle du pays des dizaines d’institutions culturelles, musées et bâtiments historiques, ont dû fermer ou déplacer leurs collections afin de préserver un patrimoine lui aussi visé et détruit par les bombes et par l’occupant russe.
Ouvrir ses portes est donc un acte de résilience, mais un acte qui ne saurait se penser sans inclure dans les collections l’histoire actuelle du pays. C’est la raison même de l’existence du musée de l’histoire de l’Ukraine. Au moment où l’identité même de l’Ukraine est menacée, dès l’entrée, le hall monumental témoigne de la violence de l’attaque russe et de l’occupation de la région de Kyiv jusqu’à début avril 2022.
Des obus, des brancards ensanglantés, des panneaux de rue mitraillés, tout comme des plaques commémorant les « Heavenly hundred », la centaine d’opposants au régime pro-russe massacrée par les milices à la solde du Kremlin lors de la Révolution de Maidan en février 2014, grevées d’impacts de balles échangées pendant les combats autour de Kyiv. Des effets personnels des soldats ennemis, attestant de la vétusté (atlas des routes ukrainiennes datant des années 1970, utilisé pour planifier l’invasion totale de 2022), de la brutalité de l’occupation (transcriptions d’extraits de conversations de soldats russes et de leurs proches, légitimant le viol des femmes ukrainiennes), et une bonne dose d’incongruité (l’invasion, oui, mais seulement avec des soldats à jour de leurs vaccinations, quadruplement vaccinés contre le Covid à l’aide du vaccin Sputnik).
Autour de ce chaos d’entrée de jeu, les ailes du musée témoignent de la contemporanéité de la violence, dans un pays attaqué alors qu’il était en pleine renaissance identitaire. Dans l’aile gauche, deux expositions : celle de robes choisies d’un grand nom de la mode ukrainienne Serhiy Yermakov, car “au musée comme dans la vie, la laideur et la beauté coexistent », et juste à côté, une rétrospective d’armes, de la préhistoire à nos jours, utilisées par l’Ukraine pour défendre son territoire. A côté des javelins du 5e siècle avant J.-C., masses et lances cosaques des 16e et 17e siècles, en passant par les armes utilisées par les groupes nationalistes du début du 20e siècles, une vitrine rappelle que le sang continue de couler pour l’indépendance de l’Ukraine. Y sont représentés ceux du personnel du musée ayant rejoint l’armée ukrainienne après février 2022. Les photos se ressemblent : des hommes et des femmes en uniforme kaki, et de courtes biographies qui témoignent de cette foule de civils venus grossir les rangs de ceux qui se battent, comme en 1914, dans des tranchées boueuses depuis 22 mois.
Il y a Volodymyr Kolybenko, directeur du département d’histoire ancienne, et Oleksandr Khomenko, directeur de la section du musée consacrée à l’éphémère rêve d’une république ukrainienne des années 1917 à 1921. Ses lunettes aux verres cassés dans les combats sont également exposées. Anatolii Barannik et Karine Kotova, tous deux chercheurs, un technicien, Volodymyr Kruchok, un ingénieur, Hryhorii Buhaiets, et le concierge des lieux, Viktor Vovk. Ceux-là ne sont plus les gardiens d’une histoire présentée en vitrine aux visiteurs. Ils sont garants de l’indépendance de leur pays.
Dans les étages, le poids de l’agression déborde jusque dans la cage d’escalier, où des mobiles composés de toutes sortes d’obus et roquettes récupérées depuis 2014 sont suspendus, dans les airs et dans le temps, au-dessus d’une carte de l’Ukraine dessinée en ligne noire sur le sol blanc.
A l’étage, le gris du métal des obus laisse place à des éclats de bleu et de jaune : il est question ici du drapeau ukrainien, celui qui représente la terre fertile et le ciel bleu éclatant, symbole d’indépendance et de liberté. Délavés mais monumentaux, les deux drapeaux géants affichés sur les édifices publics de Kyiv et de Lviv en 1990, bordent une mosaïque de photos du drapeau, tour à tour flamboyant ou déchiré, au gré des événements de l’histoire du pays. A ceux des expéditions polaires et de l’Eurovision remporté en 2004 par la chanteuse Ruslana, s’ajoutent un drapeau maculé de sang, utilisé pour recouvrir le corps de Nazariy Voitovych, un étudiant de 17 ans tué lors de la révolution de Maidan en février 2014, et le drapeau signé par la mythique brigade 93, celle qui a résisté des mois durant au siège de l’aéroport de Donetsk avant la prise de la ville par l’agresseur russe début 2015.
Les couleurs du drapeau contrastent avec l’obscurité du dernier étage, transformé en espace de recueillement : c’est ici que le combat du bataillon Azov à Mariupol, dans les entrailles de l’usine Azovstal, est retracé. D’entrée, on a le vertige : sur quatre murs, des rangées de photos et de courtes biographies s’étalent, à l’infini. Des hommes, souvent jeunes, quelques femmes : le bataillon a payé un lourd tribu en vies humaines à Mariupol. Des bougies et quelques bouquets rappellent les familles éplorées que ces soldats ont laissé derrière eux.
Enfin, dans la pénombre, l’histoire de l’usine Azovstal se mêlent à quelques puits de lumière, dans lesquels quelques effets personnels de soldats décédés viennent rappeler l’humanité de ceux morts pour leur patrie : il y a la collection de figurines de chevaliers d’un certain Denys Dudinov, nom de code « Fantôme », le second de deux frères à mourir au front, dans sa région natale de Donetsk, en mars 2022, un dessin du père de Stanislas Kovshar, nom de code « Barde », le téléphone en miettes de Dmytro Hubariev, nom de code « Mince », tous deux morts en avril 2022. Des médailles, des gants de boxes, des paires de chaussures, sont autant de témoins des vies interrompues par l’invasion russe. Alors que le gouvernement ukrainien refuse, et refusera sans doute jusqu’à la fin de la guerre, de dévoiler le nombre de morts dans les rangs de l’armée, le musée d’histoire de l’Ukraine rend compte, sans que des chiffres soient nécessaires, de la gravité de ces pertes en vies humaines pour des générations à venir. Au gré des expositions, reste à ceux qui vivent de tenter de comprendre, par le passé et le présent, le cycle des événements actuels. Au musée comme au quotidien en Ukraine, il n’y a pas d’échappatoire à la guerre.
