*
Repurposed Arsenal
Svitlana Libet
*
L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other
*
I am writing this on Saturday, August 29th, 2026. School has already started in the US, but not in Ukraine. Many children will experience lessons stopped at half-sentence, with teachers leading their students to shelters, while explosions following the air raid alarms take over the classrooms.
There have been over sixty air raid alerts in Kyiv alone over these past six days. Rescuers are trying to get people out of the rubble, stuck under the walls of their own houses, and the death toll is still rising. Every day, the city is covered in opaque grey smoke that leaves a mark on every surface, ground, and lung. My family tells me they wake up suffocating, tired of nights in shelters, rushing for the news. If you weren’t killed today, you might be in forthcoming attacks.
These lines are especially hard to write sitting in a warm, perhaps even too warm, classroom in Flagstaff, Arizona, while my friends and family are facing death every day. Last year, I was there with them, waking up from explosions and making jokes in the morning that we would die another day. After years of war, I have learned that Russians do indeed strike twice or three, four, ten times in the same place—where civilians live.
The Russian army would “double tap” a strike site: hit a building or facility right after the initial one, that way eliminating the ongoing rescue missions and killing or wounding rescuers. Today, it is common among civilians, me included, to distinguish the type of missiles Russia is using against Ukraine, even just by their sound.
After twelve years of war, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, I am well aware of the types of ammunition the Russian forces use to attack civilian areas and how many of them are forbidden by International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions: toxic gases, phosphorus, cluster munitions, and various ballistic missiles that don’t have precise targeting.
During its invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military has fired at least six different types of cluster munitions. These include rockets fired from the Uragan, Smerch, and Tornado-S multiple launch rocket systems, payload deliveries from Tochka and Iskander-M missile systems, and RBC-500 cluster bombs equipped with PTAB-1M submunitions. One of the biggest attacks on civilian infrastructure using cluster munitions happened at the railway station in Kramatorsk on April 8, 2022. That day, 63 civilians, including children, were killed and 121 to 150 people were wounded while waiting for a train.
That attack on a railway station in the middle of the day came as a shock. Kramatorsk was a city close to the frontline but still far away from it back then. Today, Kramatorsk looks like Mariupol during its occupation in 2022, a friend from the Armed Forces of Ukraine told me recently. Back then, watching the news from Mariupol, talking to friends and family there, brought up a shadowing feeling of “how could this be happening?” followed by a definite crush of any kind of optimistic outlook on the current situation. Now, the war doesn’t surprise me.
Russia is continuing to commit atrocities. The ballistic missiles that the Russian Army uses against civilians were never manufactured with that aim back in the 1960s. For example, Ukrainian civilian cities are being attacked with anti-ship missiles X-22—one of the most destructive, heavy, and deadly explosives in their non-nuclear arsenal. That type of missile was designed to strike giant, stadium-sized aircraft carriers at sea, where precise targeting doesn’t really matter—not like in a highly populated civilian area. Same thing with S-300 and S-400 missiles fired at cities. These are air defence missiles packed with small shrapnel elements designed to shoot down aircraft in the sky. They are meant to explode near the target, filling the surrounding space with a cloud of fragments.
I am 31 years old, born in Kyiv, lived for ten years in Lviv as a child, one summer in Odesa, and more than anywhere else, for now —in Kyiv. I have been to the east, south, west, and central Ukraine. I feel at home anywhere in the country. I’m watching my home lose one limb at a time through the news and photos from my friends and family. Places that used to fill my body with joy are now blown to pieces, resting deep in the soil and the Black Sea.
The Russians have polluted the environment not only with their weapons but with their propaganda, too. One of the ideas, simply, is that war is a glorious and rightful venture. Through war, justice will be brought into the world, and everyone who doesn’t agree deserves to be killed. There is only room for one meaningful culture, they say, and that one is not Ukrainian. Over the last half of August 2026, attacks have been happening every day all over Ukraine. People have been killed and injured, civilian buildings have been hit, and storage facilities have been destroyed. According to the Ministry of Culture, one-third of newly printed Ukrainian books have been burned.
I didn’t understand it then, but my high school Ukrainian literature teacher Vira Yakivna, one of the only teachers who spoke Ukrainian in a school and city dominated by the Russian language, had tried to warn and prepare us for the war. She understood, as it had done during the previous 300 years, that the empire would continue to diminish Ukrainian culture, heritage, and people. And with every strike on a school, university, or book storage with a heavy anti-ship missile, the Russian Army proves once again that their righteous fight is a fight against another nation, for their land and resources, and not for the good of the world.
*
While writing this piece, school had already begun in Ukraine—September 1st. The attack continues, with every day becoming darker than the last. There was no celebration for the beginning of the school year. Russian Geran drones, taken from the infamous Iranian Shahed-136 drones, are flying over Kyiv day and night. On September 2-3 in the middle of the day, newly deployed Russian Geran-5—jet-powered cruise missile drones—struck residential areas. One hit a 9-storey building, the other flew into traffic on the Southern Bridge.
Svitlana Libet is a journalist and writer from Kyiv, Ukraine. Her creative work mainly includes interviews, art critiques, and essays, widely published in various Ukrainian cultural magazines. She was a producer at BBC News, covering the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Currently, Svitlana is an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University, where she is working on her debut novel. She is also the Nonfiction Editor of Thin Air Magazine and an assistant fiction editor at DIAGRAM.
No comments:
Post a Comment