By Iya Kiva
Ukrainian poet, translator and member of PEN Ukraine
Translated by Helena Kernan
On 12 July 2025, Russian drones bombarded Lviv, where I live, in the largest attack on the city since the Russo-Ukrainian war began. In Ukraine, we say that Lviv is a relatively safe city as a way of showing empathy and respect for the experience of people living in places under greater threat, where Russian air strikes have become a daily occurrence, such as Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Nikopol and Orikhiv. But on this midsummer night, the Russians once again reminded us that, in their bloodthirsty hunt for Ukrainians, each one of us is a legitimate target, a trophy to embellish their imperial might.
Sometimes I imagine these trophies literally, as if ordinary Russians decorate the walls of their homes with the body parts of Ukrainians that they’ve killed and visit each other to boast about who has the biggest collection or the best pieces. When I say ‘they’, I don’t just mean Russian political leaders or soldiers. I’m talking about Russian society as a whole – ordinary people who tacitly approve of the war and adorn the safe haven of their own indifference with Ukrainian corpses. After all, an atrocity is not solely defined by the actions of the perpetrator. There are always passive participants who pretend that they are not involved and look away. Ultimately, it is witnesses who make an atrocity an atrocity, whether they intervene or stand by and watch.
As a child, I often pondered the idea of hunting and was shocked by people who decorated their homes with antlers, hides and other body parts from animals they’d killed. They killed animals not for the sake of survival within the food chain, but for pleasure, a sense of power and, ultimately, fun. I could never imagine myself as that kind of hunter, because killing any living creature is dubious proof of one’s own superiority. But 24 February 2022 posed a new challenge for my imagination – to picture myself, my friends and Ukrainians in general as an endangered species, hunted night and day by Russians. Most species end up on the endangered list as a result of human activity, and Russians act like poachers who periodically invade other people’s forests, destroying all life in their path.
By contrast, I remember how, in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, people across the globe were astonished that Ukrainians not only saved themselves, but insisted they would only leave active combat zones and the occupied territories with their pets (dogs, cats and other small animals), or else refused outright to leave frontline towns and villages because they had cows, horses, pigs and other farm animals there – their whole lives, in short. I also remember how the entire country bought tickets for the Mykolaiv zoo to allow its residents to survive. I bought a ticket, too – several, in fact – even though to this day I’ve never set foot in Mykolaiv zoo.
Reflecting on this, I know for a fact that the Russians, whose predatory bloodlust is increasingly fuelled by their impunity, may kill me and my friends, destroy Ukrainian forests and animals, grind Ukrainian cities to dust and commit yet another act of ecocide, as they did when they blew up the Kakhovka dam. But there is one thing that they cannot destroy – humanity. Even with backing from Belarus, Iran, China, North Korea and other states, the Russian military-industrial complex is incapable of producing a weapon that will kill Ukrainians’ humanity. Because this humanity, which endures both in spite of the war and as a reaction to it, allows Ukrainians to remain on the threshold between life and death and even reclaim life amid death. If the Russian world is a space of radical hatred (self-hatred, above all), the Ukrainian world is a space of radical humanity, where every living being has value and meaning and the lives of a human and a cat are not weighed against each other, because we want to save both.
According to official reports there were no casualties of the Russian attack on Lviv on 12 July. No human casualties, at least. It’s difficult to count how many Ukrainian mammals, insects and birds were killed by the Russians. Not to mention trees and other plants. If we are to believe the headlines, nothing happened that night in Lviv, although the emotionless arithmetic of Russian annihilation tells a different story: 12 people injured, including two children, 51 residential buildings damaged, 15 flats destroyed and 522 windows blown out. The residents of these buildings survived, but in a single night their entire world, and they themselves, changed forever.
On 13 July I go out to run a few errands and am immediately struck by the aftermath of the night’s shelling. I don’t see it in the streets or the rubble, but on people’s faces. At least half of Lviv’s inhabitants, myself included, have the same expression, as though we’ve been tossed around in a concrete mixer all night and, the next morning, instead of a face, we are all wearing masks of Russian death. It will take a lot of time and love to tear off these masks and reveal our true faces. Ukrainians have a lot of love to give, but, in order to bring victory over the existential threat of Russian evil closer, we need people to stand up for humanity – in every corner of the world, every country and every heart.
