The Butcha Diaries

Written by Oleksy Babansky in the shelter of own house in Butcha, Ukraine, during the Russist occupation February 28 — April 3, 2022.

The small window is mostly covered with thick iron grate. The only light coming in sometimes is the flares from explosions and tank reports.

First week we had electricity and even internet. Now I only light candles when I need to move around the dark basement or do something. When I just sit and stare into darkness, I save available light sources.

They must be within reach all the time: lighters (at least one in each pocket), a flashlight (if you need bright light for something). I need to know in the dark where the candle stands, so that I quickly light it if hear someone approaching.

The soldiers roaming about can enter anywhere anytime. And you don’t know what kind of treatment you can count on. Some of them don’t care for civilians at all, are even polite, and (rarely) even regret having been sent here, duped and tricked into this war as they claim themselves to be.

But they are a minority. Most of them are very aggressive, hateful, pumped up to their ears with Moscow propaganda of ‘nazis ruling in Ukraine’ and so the vodka-soaked brain cells of the Rossiyan military is in the constant short-circuit: they claim they’re fighting nazis, but it is themselves who act like nazis. Of course, if you tell them that straight up, they’ll most probably shoot you point blank. Short circuit.

When westerners see or think of Russia, they imagine Moscow or St Petersburgh, the rich, opulent lifestyle of the ‘big russian’. But in fact, what you’re seeing is the facade. The rest of their country, the vast, immense spaces, are the domain of poverty, corruption and population doomed to a meagre existence. That’s because what you call ‘Russia’ is in fact the country ruled by thieves, thievery being their main ideology and agenda. The smoke screens that they’ve learned to pull over this criminal reality are all those false narratives of ‘opposing the West’, or ‘restoring the USSR’. This has all been bullshit to trick you into thinking you’re dealing with bona fide political entity.

So now all those poor little ‘Vanyas’ from countless towns and villages where misery is the chief lifestyle for centuries, where all the rich natural resources are pillaged by a criminal ‘elite’, they now are given a free ride of Ukraine with lethal weapons to help them navigate.

This is not the first attempt to destroy Ukraine that Moscow makes. They hate our guts for that spirit of unity that they don’t have. For two Maidans where Ukrainians organised to fight the criminal vassal Yanukovitch that Moscow tried to install. They hate us simply for a better life in rural areas that we have and they don’t. Their villages are dying in alcoholism and suicide. ‘Who allowed you to live a better life than us?’ — is their sentiment.

I’m writing this on my phone with a USB keyboard attached, so that I can type faster and save more phone charge for later. I only have one powerbank left and I turn my phone on only for an hour per day. We have zero idea for how long we’re going to be stuck down here.

Whenever there’s an opportunity (like the troops leave the house for a couple of hours) I try to sneak upstairs to my apartment on the 10-th floor (technically a penthhouse, but not exactly the kind you might have in mind) in order to go online through encrypted browser and store this text on Zoho. I also call\SMS my wife and some close friends while I can.

Having a mobile phone or computer now is a liability and a chance to get into imminent danger, especially if you didn’t have time to clear your Facebook and browser (the troops can confiscate anything and check your entire device, physically extorting passwords from you, if necessary.

There were 10 days during which the troops installed an electronic warfare system ‘Zhytel’ (‘Resident’) that jams any wireless communication. Those people who attempted to call their families regretted that phone call, because the agressors triangulated the outcoming call location and surprized our neighbor with a 4 hour propaganda pep talk at a gun point.

Men aged 16–60, as were some of our womenfolk warned by the agressors, should better stay out of sight. Obviously all of them are potential manpower for UAF (Ukrainian Armed Forces) and are to be decimated.

I understand that excessive book reading is a form of escapism. But writing and reading does help a lot now, in the bunker. And so does the physical excercise. You gotta keep yourself warm. Getting sick in this sorry predicament sucks so bad nobody has time for it anymore.

We’ll get the fire going and tea in thermo cups. I keep my thermos always close to my body so that it doesn’t lose temperature quickly.

This sheltered existence is an ultimate school of environmental thinking. If you haven’t learned before how not to waste too much stuff, you’ll have to now. You learn to feel the calories of heat you store and spend. Whenever I’m not needed around, I try to conserve my energy and read in the cold (but thankfully dry and clean) darkness of my bunker.

If rossiyans (‘russians’), as they claim, are looking for nazis in Ukraine, then I guess, someone’s gotta live in a nazi bunker. That’s what 6 of us remaining after March 11, were forced into by the invading force of Rossiya (‘Russia’). I’ll deal with than name difference later some time.

It’s still early spring, and it’s cold. After it goes dark, there is no light anywhere, pitch dark throughout the whole town. Only further to the south there is a night glow of Kyiv city lights. That means Kyiv is standing and fighting.

Shelling and explosions all around us have become our daily sound diet for some time now.

The first serious tank battles brought first victories for the UAF (Ukrainian Armed Forces): large convoys of rossiyan tanks and AV’s pummeled to scorched metal and debris. The tank crews were mostly Buryat ethnicity, they collected their dead and wounded and were granted egress with Red Cross.

I remember residents of Bootcha roaming the battle-torn streets, taking in our first impressions on the damage dealt, taking pictures, young men hungrily taking snapshots of ravaged bodies of agressors, yes, the anger, sheer white-hot anger is there, you want to see the scum dead, you want to see their guts hang from trees, that’s how you feel after looking straight into the tank nozzle that spits fire at you.

People were salvaging stuff, trophy weapons. We tried to warn them that some charges are still primed and can explode. Some of those people are dead now, after the troops searched and trashed most of our apartments. Those whose apartments contained caches of trophy weapons, were swiftly killed.

The rest of the residents in our little community of three condominiums standing in a rectangle, were forced into the basement. Or bunker, as we call it.

Oh, the bunker. Here in Butcha we are lucky to have some of the sturdiest houses in our city, with a bomb shelter of thick reinforced concrete. Not too deep, one storey down. Which is where the whole bunch of neighbours both from our condominium, as well as from the small homesteads all around us, rushed on February 25-th, after a sudden and massive military onslaught had begun all over Ukraine.

In the morning on February 25-th me and my wife were in the same city but different district — Forest Butcha, where we lived, recorded and rehearsed for a couple of months. Right next to us in Gostomel, there were explosions and air-defence fire, helicopters crashing, fighter jets flying sorties right above our heads.

Oookay, said we, the shit everybody was saying would happen, happened. Rossiyan Federation (or ‘Russia’, how the West misspells that name) went to war against us.

Which is how the world perceives it. The way we see it, they’ve been at war with us for more than a century now. They obviously hate our guts, because historically we hate the stupidity and barbarity that seems to be their chief philosophy and lifestyle preference.

This phone I will later stash in some deep hidden pocket of my knappsack. The phone in my immediate pocket is a fake one, for the case of inspection. I don’t need them to read my communication.

Who’s them? Well, let’s call them Muscowites for now, I’ll explain later all the confusion with the word ‘russian’.

Woke up, as usual, to an explosion.

My dreams of getting a trophy weapon go poof when after a night of bombing invading forces around a full marine corps still manages to invade our several small towns.

As their tanks and armed vehicles marked with white V’s slowly encroach on our streets, convoyed by foot marines, the whole town goes into blackout.

Tanks shell our house point blank: a scare tactic, along the same lines of what they started doing afterwards: rounding people up, laying them on the floor, verbally and sometimes physically pressuring them.

Small sounds, silence. Intervals between reports and salvos. Pieces of plaster precipitating to the floor.

Occupant on the floor directly over me: shuffling, moving iron stuff around. Nailing iron stuff down. Cling-clang of heavy anti-infantry guns or grenade launchers being installed.

A dream: throngs and throngs of infants, marching in accurate rows, leering as they move their toxic handguns to and fro. Infantry.

had had some foreboding way before it started though.

The very day before the war, on March 23th, I had a certain type of emptiness draw on me. A detachment of sorts. My wife, the lovely Veronica, also being my colleague and fellow band member, took notice of my brooding and detached state of mind, but I couldn’t explain my feelings one bit, because all expressions left me too. I felt as if nothing matters anymore, everything is a theater prop, and the actors are confused because the script ended.

The thrumming in the concrete walls. That’s another thing altogether. I’ve been hearing it since the first night in the bunker 88. Because the whole town was fully de-electrified in one instant during the Bootcha invasion on March 5th. The sight of the night Bootcha is something

Whenever I make a pause in writing, to warm my hands by tuckng them under my back, I blow out the candle and just lay there in dry fresh cold, the kind of healthy cold that makes your head crystal clear, attention sharp, neurons conductive.

The trick is not to get stupid cold. Insulate every surface where your body has prolonged contact with concrete. Exercise.

I’ve always felt this darkness would come. I remember some dreams way back when.

The dark sooty days and nights.

This scrubbing of all the habits accumulated like limestone on our daily world.

I do not cling to hope for a better outcome, I banish the good expectations. Less worry that way.

War is a brutal eraserhead. Like forest fire.

Elon Musk says the biggest existential threat humanity faces is Artificial Intelligene. I find myself thinking that maybe this is the last war where actual people are doing the fighting. For better or worse, some of those people are stationed on floors right above my head, and their intelligence is very much artificial.

The feeling of strange detachment wasn’t the only harbinger of troubles to come that have precipitated upon my brain though. More than 20 years ago I’d had several foreboding lucid dreams of some dark, dark days which I now recognize somewhat, maybe it’s the way deja-vu works. Yes, you simply saw that stuff coming in your dreams, which you then forgot. And now it’s here, and there’s this nagging feeling that pokes that little stub where the memory polyp was severed.

Days and nights hunkered down in our shelter. Residents evacuating in singles, strings and waves of women, men and children. To a mixed success, as we later learn from some returning people. Some families have walked into landmines or war-crazed russians hunting them for sport.

Health matters and measures. I loathe the thought of somebody getting sick now, it’s rather cold in our shelter, it still snows sometimes and gets freezing cold.

Ear protection. Some of our folks got their hearng damaged. I keep reminding them to stuff their ears with folded napkins. Myself, i need my hearing intact, it’s one of my main tools of the trade, therefore I keep my headphone plugs in, at all times, with just silence in them. They protect my ears against loud explosions and tank reports.

A source of fire and light must be always at hand’s reach and your fingers must be able to find it quickly: a lighter, a candle ready to be lighted nearby.

Candles started getting scarce after week two or so.

Everything is microdosed: water, food, heat, movement. You light candles means you also heat water on them.

Some people during the first week or so (while we had electricity) even managed to maintain a steady diet: cooking on an electric stove, later — a makeshift fire stove with salvaged firewood for basic amenities. At least a one course meal they mostly squeezed into the day’s routine.

I was on spartan diet from day one, but I did manage to stash a meagre arsenal of cheap sweet wines to last me a week or whatever. Half of them was later pilfered by passersby tenants of our bomb shelter.

The attitude to alcohol in war times can be more mature, I think. Strong alcohol is dangerous, yes. Some people got hold of brandy and got seriously hammered one evening with some of the women. It got ugly because they started shouting nonsense deep in the night, attracting dangerous unwanted attention from the armed agressors outside.

Therefore I think thick red church wine and herbal liquor in small quantities is the only thing that has to be allowed in war time. When mixed with tea it helps alleviate the cold and keep up the spirit. So I think we need to be less extremist and more discerning when it comes to allowing or banning alcohol.

I saved phone charge and the power bank radically, everything on black screen and minimum brightness, turning phone off when I don’t need it. No idle battery discharghe.

Powerbank was depleted by week 2, now leeching all available juice from my battery of autonomous sound systems for street music, stashed in my apartment. I get a chance to sneak upstairs every once in a while. In my quiet bunker I listen to all the sounds coming from the floors upstairs. When I hear that the soldiers leave the apartments and there’s no sound for an hour, that’s the time to go upstairs, there are good chances to sneak up undetected. Stealth, just like in computer games.

They still haven’t broken our door down.

A quick visit to apartment, get stuff I need, maybe send an SMS or if I’m lucky, make a call. Recharge the phone. Wash myself with water I heat up to some degree using remaining tea candles. Rummage around for scraps of food still not pilfered.

Then it’s back to the basement, before 16.00 when agressors may be coming back. I need to sneak back down before they show up. I leave my apartment

Silent contemplation in darkness, being alert and quiet, avoiding panic and claustrophobic thoughts — all these things can be greatly assisted by reading and good quality herbal Sativa. Which I did stash a bit back in 2018. Sativa tea, leaves soaked in honeylipped Irpin sunshine. You gotta love that shelter, man. So enjoy it while you can, kekeke, I tell myself.

Hearing footsteps down the main corridor, that means armed men are inspecting for saboteurs, which, sadly, I ain’t one. Flashlight in the door:

- Whу didn’t you answer?

- Sdraviya zhelayu (army greeting, “wishing health”, addressed to whomever). Sorry, wearing earplugs with all the bombing going on, didn’t hear you.

- Unarmed?

- Yep. Check if you want.

- Well, not smart, bro, if so. Sucks now to be unarmed, lemme tell ya.

And then he leaves.

March 15.

We’re still hunkered down in the shelter. No info on the situation on the ground. Battles all day long, all around us.

I still have two charges worth of Powerbank, so I’ll treat myself to some Godflesh in my LG G8. It has the sound, man.

Godflesh rumbles in earphones, soothing my delicate palate, mixing smoothly and seamlessly with the back track of gunfire and bombs.

That and ‘Planet X’ album ‘Universe’. The stuff that keeps my spirit going. My spirit is soaring each time I allow to spend another bar of battery charge to listen to their ‘Universe’ and ‘Moonbabies’ and also a live album. There’s nothing like that mighty band capable of truly extraordinary levels of complexity. But complexity is well balanced with powerful, living compositions. The abrasive intricacy and soulfullness of their music felt like the only thing that can really express what we’re experiencing while in active war zone.

Also, extreme band ‘Napalm Death’ and thei 90-s albums, ‘Diatribes’, ‘Inside the Torn Apart’. Those albums provided the screaming maw that vents all our anguish and desperation. The music, sometimes accented by artillery reports outside, crashes my fear and that gray, abrasive feeling of deadly and malicious presence around.

66% charge left. Once that runs out, it’s one more recharge and that’s all. I’ll read some more Barron and Peake, Paul Auster ‘In the Country of Last Things’ , some McCarthy likely too. Then I’ll have to get some power somewhere, somehow, or sit in the dark. Which sucks because you can’t only sit in the dark, you gotta also move in it.

So, it’s March 18th, i checked.

The folks are, as usual, busy in commotion in the first two sections of the bunker. The kettle is usually going on a makeshift fire stove. Warfare is still going all around, with intermittent pauses.

My LG G8 is doing wonders of low power consumption. I manage to listen to music, read Kindle and write this diary for most of the 2 or sometimes 3 days the charge lasts.

If only I had more power banks.

The part of me that hopes this war ends soon, for I only have a tiny sliver of the last e-charge bar remaining, is calmly awaiting the inevitable: the last charge will be depleted.

Which makes me think: once we run out of everything, what am I going to do?

Enemy tanks and personnel vehicles are racing up and down sometimes, as are Red Cross.

Sometimes I have to pause to warm my hands, which I do by sitting on them.

I douse the candle and just stare into the darkness. The visions I sometimes get here are spectacular. I also reminisce on some precise moments in childhood. Why is that? It’s like rewinding the tape recording of your life and slow-playing certain moments.

For the last 5 days or so I’m doing my best variation on ‘Reclusive duke lurking in the bunker’ bit. Reclining for most of the day in a spacious chamber with candles and ebooks (on super low battery consumption mode, dark screen etc). Most folks were spending those first 6 days in the basement, chatting, cooking food or eating what they’ve cooked. I understood that the shelter life has all the potential to go on for weeks and even months, so eating on a normal pace feels just a tad over-optimistic to me. That’s why whenever my help around the shelter was not required, I was reclining back on a thick mattress in my chamber down in a darker nook of the main corridor, reading a Kindle on my smartphone (before I ran out of powerbanks), or walking around excercising.

All the while intermittent tank and artillery battles went on around in our vicinity.

Exodus 2

One day around midday a sudden commotion erupted among our folks: the rossiyans are providing an evacuation convoy (so called ‘green corridor’) for the civillians willing to leave the war zone.

Most men remaining in the basement at that moment decided it’s time to make tracks, fast, while the time is ripe.

I was kind of dumbfounded with what was happening, and I remember feeling strong aversion towards that rossiyan convoy. I didn’t trust them one bit. They’re mind-freaked as if on some drugs (vodka, I presume).

So when most of our folks decided to skiddaddle, I decided to remain. Plus, we were not ready to suddenly pack and move. Everybody was running for a couple of minutes. I saw throngs of people, some holding infant babies wih baby cars, running towards a military personnel truck.

We’re yet to discover what had happened to that ‘green convoy’. Some corridor stories were profoundly horrid.

Several chambers had been vacated, only two men remaining as shelter custodians, so decided to move closer to main hall which served as a sort of ‘mess hall’; there was constant clatter of movement in the dimly lit smoky ‘entrance hall’ with thick pipes, sounds of cooking and general chit-chat.

I really preferred the silence in my remote chamber. If you’re quiet you can hear different things go on inside those apartments above. Doors broken down, furniture moved around, mounted machine guns installed in key places. The bastards know their job, although usually it’s a very sloppy job, whatever it is they’re doing. Maybe because of the systematic vodka soaking.

MARCH 20

Still in the bunker. The occupants are trashing apartments, crash-opening them and then pilfering, over days, obviously going in rounds of marauding over the same places.

Among the rossiyan occupants there is a rare anomaly: a conscientous citizen. Our womenfolk encountered and parlayed with those kind several times. Usually they claimed they were duped by their command, who told them they were going to a training ground, landing in Ukraine instead. Some were even genuine in their regret of the whole bloody predicament. We even witnessed a fistfight among the drunk agressors which broke out precisely on political ground.

They knew we needed candles so they grabbed many of different sizes from those apartments and brought downstairs to us.

I’m on my last candles, although discovered one more fat sermon candle.

If I manage to ahem in this war, I’m going to go into a cult of candles. I’m going to light’em in the evenings sometimes.

I mininised consumpion to bare knuckles, still maintaining proper toiletries and exercise. Mother has been mingling with other people in the main hall so far, but lately she’s been depressed and desperate. She’s ready to brave the unknown and get to the town hall where evac buses are reported to pick refugees up. Honestly, i still do not like the idea of evacuation, primarily because they confiscate equipment from men, and I don;t want my equipment confiscated,.

Tucked underneath my own body I keep my hands and my thermos with tea (sometimes spliced with wine or brandy).

We decided to wait out for another couple of days and then try the evac route with our bare belongings.

It’s been a bitch so far, but tolerable because our double reinforced concrete condominium basement shelter is dry, clean and uninfested. Until March 5th we had electricity and WI-FI over there.

The war has been dragging out because the troops have spread out and stationed their armored vehicles in courtyards and close to residentisl buildings which makes getting rid of them exceptionally difficult.

Maidan was big but it was not enough. It merely moved the battle to a new phase. A big percentage of people were oblivious of what Ukrainian Maidan 2013 was, which has now entered into a yet another — final, we would like to belive — phase of our adversities.

There were some pretty powerful explosions lately.

It’s March 2nd, 2022.

Everything is scarce now: water, food, life.

Battery is almost dead, so I decided to write shorthand for tonight.

One of the ladies in our shelter, Tonya, recently got into an altercation. She said something to the soldiers that they didn’t like. They led her to the basement, put a bag on her head, machine gun point at the back of it. Then they removed the bag, she saw a body on the floor. “I’m thinking to do the same to you now.” — a soldier’s voice said.

She was lucky, they just pressured her for some time and then let go. From what we know already, there are many more people who were less lucky.

So what’s in the name?

Rossiya and Russia are not the same thing.

Rus is a rustic name for a group of Slavic subethnicities, much like ‘Scandinavia’ for Denmark, Sweden, Norway.

Rossiya, on the other hand, is a relatively fresh creation that started out as ‘Rossiyan Empire’ (which, again, is deliberately misspelled as ‘Russia’ in the West), then later as one of the 15 republics of the former USSR, while in fact, the very central one. They spoke Russian (rooski) language (which, again, had been around in different flavors for centuries before them) and for some reason claimed dominion from Moscow over the entire Rosiyan sphere.

Moscow has had many attempts to break us, because they hate the freedom-loving people, this is like anti-matter for them. Their heritage and life philosophy is fully on display in North Korea. That is exactly how Stalin (the country’s sole designer) wanted the world to look like by now, ‘the 3-rd International’ where there’s a hedonistic elite and vast numbers of obedient slaves at their fingertips.

April 3 2022

I am now in Kyiv, where we managed to relocate after the Rossiyan occupants vacated Butcha.

The war continues.

I’m recuperating a bit although I’ve been much, much luckier than many others from our community in this whole occupation and basically managed to pull it through relatively unscathed with rather mild stress (or so it seems to me right now, my friends tell me it may catch up with me later).

Here’s a small post-scriptum, a sort of a side-note about what I’m thinking about this war.

It all makes perfect sense. (Roger Waters)

That powerful low-end sound of artillery blasting through the concrete of our bunker has another meaning, though.

It means that Moscow decided to brutally put a full stop to integration of Ukraine further into the Western civilization. It’s them saying ‘Hey, no, you can’t live better than I. I won’t allow that.”

By ‘better’ they mean country not ruled by the criminal class. The very foundation of Moscowian society resides in deeply entrenched social Darwinist world view: ‘Theft and robbery is ok, and nothing but overwhelming brute force is convincing enough to change my mind’.

Ukraine, as a successor of Kyiv Rus, has systematically refused to condone to this criminal mindset as a governing idea.

But there’s also an economic layer. As usual.

It would be naive to think that only certain ideological mania motivates power-addicts like Putin or Hitler to go to war (uprooting the ‘wrong nations’, restoring USSR, punishing the ‘unruly peasants’ who dared to self-organize and actively oppose ‘the supreme will of the glorious leader’ or other flavors of sick asinine megalomaniac bullshit). The motivation for such wanton destruction has another, even thicker, layer beneath: the cleptomania. In case of Rossiya, it is mostly shadow and criminal economy, because that’s the type of people calling the shots over there in Moscow, St Petersburg and Sotchi.

The rossiyan troops have suffered quite a blow already, and the whole world saw that their army is for the most part used and old equipment, which is exactly the result of raging cleptomania which has historically been the prime Rossiyan export, along with corruption and agressive delusions of grandeur.

The declared reasons behind trashing of Donbass might have been ‘nazis in Kiev and persecution of Russian language’, but if you know about Chevron corporation’s plans to go fracking in Donbass, which started to be actively set on paper somewhere in 2012 and early 2013, the whole new angle in this situation is revealed, and, as Roger Waters once sang:

‘It all makes perfect sense

Expressed in dollars and cents

Pounds, shilling and pence.’

I suspect, Moscow has not been especially happy since Ukrainian electrical grids were being actively prepared for synchronization with ENTSO-E, that worried Moscow quite a lot. I have no doubt about that.

Nothing personal, just business. The white collar, top shelf cologne, very kind and humane people from Gazprom protect their business interests, trashing your land so that competitors won’t capitalize on it.

The current military destruction of much of Ukraine’s infastructure and actual genocide wreaked by rossiyans (‘russians’) against our nation, aside from the ravenous feelings of blood revenge for two Maidans, where ordinary people actually toppled Moscow-installed thug vassals, there is clearly also economic reason. But my own theory is that bloodshed and suffering itself are the main product and desired objective of this war as far as Moscow is concerned. They are having their revenge, and will try to humiliate Ukrainians whenever possible. Rossiyans themselves, though, are also humiliated beyond all measure, but they largely haven’t taken notice yet.

Beyond the absurd

Rossiya (yes, that’s how the name of our enemy really spells, not ‘Russia’ as [‘rasha] but Rossiyah as [ro’siya]) had started an unprecedented war: a war that they thought would not count as a war, if you call it a different name. ‘A special operation to de-nazify and de-militarize Ukraine’. A bona-fide military invasion, under a psychopathic guise of ‘fighting nazis in Ukraine’. A sheer absurdity as, for example, ‘punishing the bees for systematic destruction of honey’ or ‘liberation of Germany from Bolsheviks’ would sound right now.

I believe this sheer absurdity and sordid propaganda concepts they use to brainwash people is in fact a long-term operation to socially engineer a society which would condone and commit the most heinous acts of evil while genuinely believing they are in fact fighting that evil. If there is a Devil somewhere, he probably has tons of fun watching this, leering at his latest trick he played on poor little alcoholics.

Lately (the recent day or two) Rossiyan propaganda changed tone quite a bit. They now lay blame for ‘nazi glorification and condonement’ on the civilians, saying that it is no longer necessary to keep them out of harm’s way. Punish them too, says the Rossiyan TV.

The sordid wind-up toys of Putin cannot resist the criminal programming. The spring must unwind full course.

Unless somebody throws a wrench in it.

April 7

Today is Blagovistya, Eastern Orthodox holiday when nobody works here in the transcarpathian village in the western Ukraine. I left Butcha on April 2-nd with my mother because she could get really sick if we stayed longer. Also I wanted to see my wife who was staying in a Carpathian village. Part of me wanted to stay and see and help the town get restored.

I believe me and my wife will be returning to Butcha pretty soon.

I stll cannot believe incredible luck to make it through relatively unscathed (but safe and sound for now, temporarily out of Butcha) during that past month, and understanding how indebted we are to our soldiers, how all of us together are trying to keep the world from crumbling entirely.

I watch the news. Unbelievable. The world only beginning to come to terms with latest news of carnage and war atrocities committed by rossiyan troops in Ukraine.