Member-only story
What I Learnt when I Entered Ukraine in March 2022
My experience defending Ukraine
Actually it took me a while to write here. Living and writing are different, and life was getting priority, which means no diary for my own perusal, and since I had decided to put all in book form, it did not seem like I had much left over anyway. But then I thought there were plenty of things, little things, that did not fit into the grand scheme of my planned book on Ukraine, of which a bit more later.
The first thing that got to me was that salute: was a cold night and I gazed down from the bus window, A solitary border guard stood with an AK-47, watching buses, cars, trucks, big trucks with sealed doors go by. And he removed his finger from the trigger to salute me.
I was wearing an old green army jacket and was about the only male on the bus. I guess I looked like a foreigner. But at that moment I knew I was there to defend Ukraine, that I would.
Arriving in Uzhhorod, I stood by the river on a very fresh bright morning, a scrolled address in my pocket. I walked up to Pushkin square, and saw that the plinth was bare: Pushkin’s head had been sliced off. There…
