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mariacallous · 2 years

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LVIV, Ukraine—One of the most profound images to come from the siege of Sarajevo was the stark image of the cellist Vedran Smailovic playing Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor every day at noon, sitting elegantly and defiantly in black tie in the midst of the wreckage of Bosnia’s National and University Library.

The library had been bombed by Bosnian Serbs on Aug. 25, 1992, destroying 90 percent of its 1.5 million volumes of precious books, including rare Ottoman editions. A 32-year-old librarian was killed that night as she desperately tried to save books. The scene of book pages burning and ashes rising in the air was an indelible image of the cruelty of war and a symbol of cultural destruction.

The beautiful, Moorish-inspired City Hall building, called Vijecnica, which housed the library, was more than a place to find books—it was a potent symbol of multicultural ethnicity. That, above all, is what the Serbs tried to destroy: the cultural ethos of what made up Bosnia.

A similar phenomenon is happening now in Ukraine. Russia seeks to destroy Ukrainian identity, and that includes monuments, libraries, theaters, art, and literature.

In the many conflicts I have covered, art and literature are essential to morale—to civilians struggling to live moment by moment through the attempted destruction of their country, as well as to the soldiers fighting on the front lines to defend their culture and history. It is also the basis of historical memory: what is remembered, what is forever kept.

Early this month, shortly before Russia began its latest wave of terror in Ukraine—featuring missile and Iranian-made kamikaze drone attacks on civilians in Kyiv, missile strikes on civilian infrastructure in Lviv, and other assaults elsewhere in the country—I went to one of the most remarkable literary festivals I have ever attended: the three-day Lviv BookForum.

Lviv, in western Ukraine, is a glorious baroque city that over the years has been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, and the Soviet Union, as well as having been besieged by the Nazis. Throughout it all, this wondrous city has endured.

The idea to have a literary festival in the midst of a vicious war is representative of Ukrainians’ defiance. Among the many who gathered in Lviv to attend in solidarity were Ukrainian writers such as the former political prisoner Stanislav Aseyev and Diana Berg, who lost her home twice in Mariupol; the Ukrainian novelist and human rights activist Victoria Amelina; and the British barrister and author Philippe Sands, who wrote one of the most powerful books on the origins of genocide, East West Street.

Also attending were the historian Misha Glenny; the disinformation expert Peter Pomerantsev and his father, Igor Pomerantsev, a dissident Soviet poet; the French American novelist Jonathan Littell; the award-winning nonfiction writer Nataliya Gumenyuk; and two extraordinary British doctors, Henry Marsh and Rachel Clarke, who came to Ukraine to bear witness to the atrocities. There were many others: philosophers, bloggers, activists.

It was an interesting mix of cultures, but the stars of the event were by far the Ukrainian writers, who read and told stories with courage and brutal honesty. The literary scholar Oleksandr Mykhed told the audience that on Feb. 24, the day of the Russian invasion, he realized: “You could not protect your family from a rifle with your poems. You could not hit someone with a book—you could try, but it won’t work with the crazy occupiers from Moscow. I lost belief in the power of culture, lost interest in reading.”

Shortly after that realization, Mykhed enrolled in the army; a week later, he lost his family home to a bomb.

But even in Lviv—relatively peaceful until the recent attacks—the war was not far away. In between sessions, we wandered the cobblestoned streets, passing the historic Garrison Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, honoring the fallen soldiers. One night, on my way home from dinner, I saw a crowd of young people gathered around a guitar player, who was belting out the Ukrainian national anthem. It was powerfully emotional. Everyone stood with their hands on their hearts, under an enormous full moon, singing at the top of their lungs in Ukrainian: “Ukraine’s freedom has not perished, nor has her glory. … Upon us, fellow Ukrainians, fate shall smile on us once more.”

The next day, one of my fellow panelists was Amelina, the Ukrainian novelist and author of the books Fall Syndrome and Dom’s Dream Kingdom. I first met Amelina in Berlin at a conference for human rights monitors. Since the war started, she stopped writing novels and started investigating war crimes. In her backpack, she carries tourniquets—her work often takes her to front lines throughout the country.

“While Russian occupiers try to destroy the Ukrainian elite, including writers, artists, and civil society leaders, the free world needs to hear and amplify the Ukrainian voices,” she said. “Then we have a chance not only to defend Ukraine’s independence this time in history but also truly implement the ‘never again’ slogan for the continent.”

Amelina told me of a recent visit to Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, after the Ukrainian Armed Forces had liberated it. She met with the parents of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian children’s book author who was abducted from his house during the Russian occupation.

Volodymyr’s father mentioned to Amelina that before being abducted, his son hid his war diary under the cherry tree in the garden. Amelina helped the grieving father dig the diary up and later brought it to the Kharkiv Literary Museum.

“I chose the museum because it holds the first editions and manuscripts of my favorite writers executed by the Soviet regime in the 1930s,” she said. “I hope Volodymyr Vakulenko is still alive and his diary [doesn’t] start the collection of manuscripts of another generation of Ukrainian writers murdered by the empire.”

During one of our panels, we were joined on Zoom by a 27-year-old poet named Yaryna Chornohuz, who called in from the front line. As well as being a gifted writer, Chornohuz is a reconnaissance soldier and combatant in the 140th Reconnaissance Battalion of the Ukrainian Marine Corps.

“My position now is a combat medic of the reconnaissance combat group,” she said. “I’ve been on the front line since 2019. Now it’s my 14th month of rotation in [the] Luhansk and Donetsk region.”

She proudly told us that her unit took part in the defense of Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, and Popasna. In March, she took part in engagements in villages north of Mariupol. Now she’s participating in a counteroffensive on Lyman and Yampil.

Listening to her, I thought of how when I first went to cover a war, long ago in Bosnia, I carried with me a pocket-sized book of poems by the World War I poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. Somehow, the poignancy and pain of the poetry helped me understand the brutality of war in a more profound way.

In Lviv, I felt an intense solidarity among the writers who had gathered. “Intellectuals from all over the world coming together in Ukraine to discuss how justice and truth can prevail is already part of the solution,” Amelina told me.

That night, some of us boarded an overnight train to Kyiv in high spirits, carrying bags of fruit and bottles of whiskey. We arrived after dawn in the capital, unaware that we would soon witness Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wrath: missile attacks on Lviv, Kyiv, and other Ukrainian cities. We were sent to bomb shelters, waiting it out with locals along with their children and pets. Plates of cookies and tea were brought out; people pulled out books and computers. A seminar that was meant to take place in the hotel upstairs carried on in a corner of the parking garage that was our new home for the time being.

And I kept thinking of something that Mykhed had told listeners only a few days before in Lviv. “More talented writers of the next generations will take this raw material and make a beautiful novel about it,” he said. “But being in the center of the hurricane, you just try to grab the tiniest moments of your grief, the tiniest moments of your scream.”

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brunomindcast · 2 years

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deadpanwalking · 2 years

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Edited to add:

#my friend and i are working on two of them—if you can read ukrainian this is a wonderful way to help #resources #🇺🇦

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thelittleukrainianwell-armedgirl · 5 years

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Journalist Stanislav Aseyev spends 3rd birthday in Russian-controlled Donetsk ‘concentration camp’ for writing the truth

What do you give a journalist friend for his 30th birthday when he’s been imprisoned in the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk republic’ for well over two years with his only ‘outside’ contact being a forced ‘interview’ to a Russian propaganda channel? Stanislav Aseyev’s colleagues from the Radio Svoboda Donbas.Realii project have given him their voice and are seeking to have that voice heard in the hope that it can help secure Aseyev’s release.

They have released a powerful video clip in which well-known Ukrainian writer and President of PEN Ukraine, Andriy Kurkov reads an excerpt from one of Aseyev’s articles. In it, Aseyev expresses his belief that “only a real civil force with a local registration, represented by over one thousand people who are against the so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ in the central square of Donetsk will be able to radically change the situation showing that Donetsk is capable of more than just a disgraceful parade of prisoners, but showing that once there were those who walked under the Ukrainian flag…” “Something tells me that that number is quite real, that these people just have to recollect who they are and what they are fleeing from. That is why I am still here in Makiivka, not sharing the tears spilled over the ruins of Donetsk from a warm and cosy apartment in Kyiv.”

Aseyev was one of very few journalists who remained in areas of Donbas under militant control. Writing under the pseudonym Stanislav Vasin, he wrote articles about life in occupied Donetsk for a number of Ukrainian media.

Aseyev was born in Donetsk on 1 October 1989 and all his school and higher education were In Makiivka (a city very close to Donetsk) and Donetsk itself. Although he began writing fiction while still studying, it was only after the seizure of Donetsk by Russian and Russian-backed militants in 2014, that he began working as a freelance journalist and blogger.

Until the end of May 2017, his articles provided invaluable insight into life in the so-called ‘DPR’. A mere pseudonym, however, was clearly not enough to prevent his identity being discovered. In conditions where all Ukrainian television and radio stations had long been replaced by Russian or pro-Russian media, and where it was dangerous to voice any independent views and / or pro-Ukrainian sentiments, it was probably always just a matter of time before they came for Aseyev.

Two separate dates are now mentioned, however Aseyev’s disappearance was first reported by Yehor Firsov in early June 2017. He wrote then that Aseyev had failed to come to his mother’s home of June 3, as agreed and that she and friends had gone to his flat, finding the door broken in and a lot of things missing, including his laptop. There was a particularly sinister note, since his Facebook page was still active, with somebody sending letters from this account, trying to get information about his contacts.

It was six months after he first vanished that the ‘DPR ministry’ first admitted they were holding Aseyev prisoner, and said that he was suspected of ‘spying’.

He is believed to still be held at ‘Izolyatsia’, the former factory and then arts and cultural centre which the militants seized in the middle of 2014. The word means ‘isolation’, and is bitterly appropriate since this has become a secret prison which former hostages like Dmytro Potekhin describe as a concentration camp.

Although Firsov did report that Aseyev’s mother had been allowed, at least once, to see her son, it was only in August 2018, that Aseyev was shown publicly. This was, typically, on the Russian state-controlled Rossiya 24 channel, with Aseyev ‘confessing’ to having worked for Ukrainian military intelligence. All international bodies had, until then, been prevented from seeing him for 15 months, and there have long been fears that his nearly total isolation in appalling conditions and without necessary medication was aimed at forcing precisely such a propaganda stunt. The fact that this was for Russian television, in a program overtly trying to present Ukraine as responsible for the suffering of the last four years, only confirmed the suspicion that Aseyev’s fate lies in the hands of people “close to Moscow”. While it is extremely likely that physical torture has been applied, the militants have another lever against Aseyev – they can threaten to arrest or even torture his mother (see: Imprisoned Donetsk journalist Aseyev tortured for Russian propaganda TV ‘confession’ .)

There have been repeated calls from the OSCE, EU, Amnesty International and numerous media organizations for Aseyev’s release. In early July 2018, PEN Ukraine issued a statement in which they called on both the Ukrainian government and international colleagues “to intensify their pressure on the Russian government, which controls the puppet authorities of the “DPR”, to immediately release Stanislav Aseyev, as well as all other Ukrainian political prisoners.”

Like in all occupied territories, Russia or its proxies have made any form of independent journalism a dangerous occupation and Aseyev is not the only journalist / blogger to have been or be held hostage for his articles. At least one other journalist / blogger is currently held hostage, with Oleh Halaziuk having also dared to write truthful texts about life in DPR (details here). The fact that both men, and some others released in the exchange of 27 December 2017, have paid with their liberty and been torture for writing truthful reports about life in occupied Donbas and / or for expressing pro-Ukrainian views that makes the very suggestion that local elections “in accordance with Ukrainian legislation and international norms” could soon be held in Donbas seem so preposterous.

Please share both the video and information about Stanislav Aseyev It is very clear that any order for his release will come solely from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and only under our pressure.

Source: Human Rights in Ukraine. Website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

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oddiblogg · 5 years

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Sett Stanislav Aseyev fri!

I July 2017 ble journalist og forfatter Stanislav Aseyev arrestert i Donetsk øst i Ukraina av de pro Russiske opprørerne. Ledere i den såkalte “Donetsk folkerepublikk” bekreftet at Aseyev er arrestert. En rekke internasjonale organisasjoner har krev og krever umiddelbar løslatelse.

Over to år etterpå er han etter alt å dømme fremdeles i fengsel. Rettsikkerheten i de områdene som er kontrollert…

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#menneskerettigheter #Stanislav Aseyev #Ukraina

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libertyvigil · 1 year

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In Isolation by Stanislav Aseev (The Torture Camp on Paradise Street in English)

You can download this book here.

In order to read it in English (I havent seen it out in English yet) you can copy and paste in Google translate or convert pdf to Word and translate by selecting a section and pressing "translate" (there may be better ways)

Description:

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation). Aseyev also reflects on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the world to share his story.

Since February 2022, numerous cases of illegal detainment and extreme mistreatment have been reported in the Ukrainian towns and villages occupied by Russian forces during the full-scale invasion. These and other war crimes committed by Russian troops speak to the genocidal nature of Russia’s war on Ukraine and reveal the horrors wreaked upon Ukrainians forced to live in Russian-occupied zones. It is important to remember, however, that the torture and killing of Ukrainians by Russian security and military forces began long before 2022. Rendered deftly into English, Aseyev’s compelling account offers a critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

#ukraine #war #russia #isolyatsia #prison #stanislav aseev #torture #donetsk #illegal prisons

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yasmin-bashirova-brand · 2 years

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For Ukrainian Writer, War Evokes Scars of Time in Captivity

By BY VALERIE HOPKINS Stanislav Aseyev, a 32-year-old journalist, had documented his abuse in a prison run by Russian-backed separatists. Now, the war reminds him of why Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. Published: April 8, 2022 at 05:00AM from NYT World https://ift.tt/bjaitX4 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #NYT

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mariacallous · 2 years

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Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian journalist and writer born in Donetsk, which at present remains occupied by Russia-backed militants. Sometime after the beginning of the occupation, he was captured for his political views by the militants of the occupied parts of the Donbas and sentenced to 15 years. On the eve of 2020, Aseyev was released in a prisoner exchange. Currently Stanislav Aseyev lives in Kyiv. Aseyev received a number of awards recognizing his active social and political position (including the Free Media Award (2020), the National Freedom of Expression Award (2020). He is also a recipient of the Shevchenko National Prize, the highest state prize of Ukraine for works of culture and arts.

Stanislav Aseyev’s In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022; translated into English by Lidia Wolanskyj) helps understand a highly entangled and complicated background of the current Russo-Ukrainian war. This book—a chronological account of the events that started in November of 2013, on the one hand, and a collection of journalistic reflections that attempt to explain almost surreal and absurd developments, on the other—documents how the Donbas turned into another flashpoint, following Crimea, whose emergence is directly connected to the Russian Federation and provides commentaries on Russia’s role in sustaining the current war. In Isolation is written from within the zone of conflict; it emerges from the very epicenter of the war that signals not only interstate rifts but also splits that tear apart families and cause uneasiness in long-term friendships.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University.

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