Sometimes it’s just a few hastily written words, a name, a date, a place. Or they are stories of ten or twenty lines which try to summarize a life, a commitment, a fight, or on the contrary an accident. They are stories of encounters between a person and a war. Of the “drops of memory”, whispers Oksana, her eyes misty with emotion, who has just written a brief tribute to her son Oleksander, who died in battle at Boutcha.
kyiv celebrates, Tuesday August 23 and Wednesday August 24, the day of the flag then the day of the independence. This year, the commemoration of the 1991 independence corresponds to the six months of the war launched on February 24 by Moscow to seize Ukraine.
Banned from public gatherings by the government, which fears that on this occasion Russia will order missiles against Ukrainian cities, Kievans stroll along Khreschatyk Avenue, where destroyed or captured Russian tanks have been placed in recent months, to the famous Maidan Nezalejnosti (“Independence Square”), the geographical heart of the Ukrainian uprisings of 2004 (“Orange revolution”) and 2014 (“Maidan revolution”, or “revolution of Dignity “).
On a lawn in Maidan, the Ukrainians come to plant flags each bearing the name of a missing person, “a memorial for the citizens who died because of this stupid war”as well as the announcement on a sign.
Hundreds of flags bloom
A temporary stele mentions “10,789 Ukrainians killed by Putin”. The initiative having been relayed by all the Ukrainian media, hundreds of flags are flying. No one has however announced that, in front of the memorial, a “Book of the Dead” has been opened. It rests in a metal box. Everyone is invited to “write the story of a lost loved one”.
The “Book of the Dead” of kyiv thus becomes, over the hours, the mirror of six months of war. A few well-known names appear among the hundreds of anonymous ones. Soldiers, volunteers and civilians intermingle over the pages. As often in war, the vast majority of tributes are written by women who evoke men who will not return.
“On March 10, while defending Mariupol and Ukraine, Petro Korol, born in 1997 in Crimea, fell on the battlefield, moved to kyiv after the occupation of the peninsula. Enlisted in the army in 2018, in the Azov Battalion in 2021, under the nom de guerre “Kit Kat”. He dreamed of the liberation of Crimea. » Then another hand added: “Petro was the best of us. We will avenge him. » One of the testimonial authors pasted a photograph of the soldier at the bottom of the page.
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