The first in our #facetoface series is an interview with Olena Herasymyuk.

The conversation was very long, emotional and intense, and we’re proud to share insights about her volunteer path, the beginning of the war, the importance of the language of art in the conversation about the war and the responsibility of European society below.

In fact, it all started with the Maidan, Revolution of Dignity, when on 18 February we were shot at by Berkuts (a police unit within the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine that carried out President Yanukovych’s criminal orders in 2014, ed.) and when I think the whole country realized that it was not just rallies, but the murder of civilians. Later, we all realized that this was the beginning of warfare. So, I started helping the Maidan revolution. Since I was from Kyiv, I just went to the tents there and asked what they needed –  they were volunteering formations called hundreds – and also went to the Kyiv City State Administration, which was one of the main headquarters of activists, and started helping there. Later I used all this experience when the war started in 2014[AH3]  with the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas region, and we had to cover the needs of our boys and girls who were the first to go to war.

I took my first courses (on pre-med first aid – ed.) in 2015. On the Maidan, talking to doctors, I realized that medicine is very important and so is the pre-medical help. That is why in early 2015, I took courses to, so to say, protect myself from what happened with the Heavenly Hundred (here Heavenly Hundred is the collective name of the protesters who were killed during the Maidan, the Revolution of Dignity – ed.), protect me from the phenomenon of death. I tried to protect myself mentally.

And how did it come about that you joined the Hospitallers (Paramedical Volunteer Battalion in Ukraine – ed.)?         Tell us a little more about them.

I volunteered with the UVA (Ukrainian Voluntary Army, a voluntary military formation in Ukraine active since 2015. They participated in particular in fights for Avdiivka in the Donbas region of Ukraine – ed.), and the Hospitallers is a structural unit in UVA. I’m still in this unit but in a different position. I volunteered with these people but did not see myself in the military field, hence paramedic work.

The Hospitallers Battalion was established at the very beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014. We celebrate the creation of the battalion on July 6, although it has functioned before. It was created by Yana Zinkevych, who was 18 at the time. She was a young girl who saw a different need: there are combat units, but there are not enough of those that rescue people, so she created a solution. The slogan of the battalion is “For every life”. The history of the Hospitallers began and continues for the salvation of every life. We had saved more than 3,000 people before the full-scale war (which started in February 2022 – ed.), but I don’t remember the exact year we celebrated this number of saved lives. Now, I think there are many more saved. A full-scale war dictates great losses. And great victories, too.

How important, in your opinion, is the role of public volunteer participation in the war? What is the responsibility of society?

I remember the expression “There are 3 hetmans (leaders of the Ukrainian army) for 2 Ukrainians”, which is used mostly in a humorous context, meaning that Ukrainians tend to be so argumentative among themselves that they always have more bosses than the people themselves. But when studying the history of the Ukrainian army, in particular, the events of 1918, I drew a great parallel with what is happening now. At that time every village used to have their own leaders – hetmans -, they defended the territory in which they lived, and respectively, they were fed, clothed and supported by the “volunteer army”, let’s call it that way, of the territory that they defended. There was even an archival document published somewhere calling on “volunteers” of that time to support the military formations of their land.

We are the descendants of the Hetmanate, Kyiv Rus’ state (a medieval Eastern European feudal monarchical state with its capital in Kyiv that existed during the IX-XIII centuries – ed. ),  so I would interpret that saying in the following way: without the unity of the rear and the front, victory is impossible. This problem is very broad, especially in the 21st century, when we are dealing with hybrid warfare, involving information resources, geopolitical struggles, etc. When it is necessary to defend on all fronts, it is no longer just a problem of the military, it is the life of the whole country. Therefore, society has to respond immediately to such problems and treat them as serious ones.

It seems to me that in 2014 there were still people who infantilely thought that the war was someone else’s problem. In general, the events were described as a problem, not a war. But these are categories of a completely different scale and they need to be addressed differently. War is everyone’s business. If you want to survive wherever you are, in the Zacarpatsky region or in Luhansk, you need to know pre-med first aid, you need to know how to protect yourself if Russia drops nuclear bombs here, etc. It starts with your own security as an individual of the country that was attacked, but as well it’s your participation. Undoubtedly, society must be involved if we want to win.

The answer to this question has already been partially answered, but for clarity, when did the war in Ukraine start and why?

For me, the answer is clear: the war began when the Berkut unit opened fire on civilians. This was the first sign that the authorities violated all possible laws and gave a criminal order to kill civilians who came with absolutely adequate demands, who did not want to live in shit and simply demanded betterment when young people were maimed. The story of a girl whose eye was pierced and a fragment of the projectile stuck in her hypothalamus is horrible – at the age of 18 to suffer such an injury because you helped other people. What I saw then, in 2014, on the first bloody day of the revolution and on my rotations in the war (in Donbas – ed.) was the same. This was the beginning of the war.

You are one of those who have been preparing for a full-scale war for a long time, but it is probably impossible to fully prepare for it, so did you believe in such a scale of war, what did you do on the first day?

Thanks to our commander Yana Zinkevych, we started preparing a few months prior to the war. We understood that this country would not drive so many resources and equipment to the border just to yet again scare us. But I thought something would happen after the Olympics. It seemed to me that Putin would not take such a brazen step on a global scale.

We started preparing, as usual, in a few months. We were also one of the first to react to the declaration of martial law in 2018, and then the Ukrainians chose to ignore the arrests of sailors (In 2018, Russia seized Ukrainian sailors in the Kerch Strait, resulting in the same day in Ukraine declared martial law – ed. ). We reacted seriously to it back then, and so we did now, because Russia is already killing us. How can you believe or not believe this country? They (the Russian government – ed.) will always say, “We are killing you, but we are not killing you,” which is direct political gaslighting. They will never tell the truth. But all the actions near the border and all these military exercises showed that sooner or later Russia will escalate.

As a citizen of Kyiv, I did not believe until the last moment that Kyiv would fall into this siege. Everyone probably thinks that their land is the most protected, that their house will be whole. The night before the full-scale attack, I was talking to my friend, and I said that Kyiv could be a strategic point because they (the Russian government – ed.) want to cut off our head, and the head is Kyiv. But I didn’t think it would be one of the first targets they would hit from the air. And in an hour I heard the first explosions of air defence systems.

You are a paramedic, obviously, you have seen a lot in these 8 years. What impressed you the most during this long war?

I was probably more impressed by my return (from the field – ed.).

In war, everything is simple: here is your enemy, here is your friend, here is your task and the range of your responsibilities, orders that you can rely on. This is a very simplified world, it is very obvious. When you get such psychological trauma in war, and I say that no one comes back from the war either adequate or healthy enough, it takes away one’s resources in one way or another. I was struck by this contrast between the war and the civilian world, and the change that took place in me.

When I returned after a long rotation and started treatment as I had to come back because of a disease, I was most impressed, I should probably say it directly, by the bestiality and humiliation that Ukrainians forced me to go through because I’m a veteran. First of all, I would like to mention doctors. When I was treated for 8 months during the acute phase (of Tuberculosis (TB)), there were very few specialists who treated me adequately. The first doctor, a TB doctor, asked me to remove my fleece. There was no heating in the hospital and I wore my military fleece to keep me warm. The doctor insisted that if I wouldn’t remove it, she would falsely note that I didn’t want to be treated, and she would throw me out of the hospital, as she told me to be treated, I quote, together with the inadequate like me. She also said that people like us, who returned from (the field – ed.), should be first checked in a madhouse, and then allowed to be among normal people. That is, she did not even use the specific words “war”, or “veterans”, she bypassed them. Either because she is a bad person, or because she is not aware of her fears.

When I went to a neurology clinic after chemotherapy, a psychiatrist who did pre-tests told me the same thing. She didn’t want to take me in, she just stuffed me with unknown medicines for three days. For three days I did not know what to do, just lay in the ward and cried. And on the last day there, when I was taken away because I couldn’t get out of there myself, she said that all the veterans were douches, that we had no right to normal life because we were murderers. Although I have never taken arms in my hands, and although all my crews did not have a single 200th (army coding which means transportation of a body of the dead soldier – ed.), I brought alive to the hospital every single injured person. When I wrote a statement about this incident, this doctor made it look as if I had never been treated there at all, and all my documents from the hospital had been destroyed.

I wonder if the war in Kyiv will change these people. Now it is popular to shout that we are all veterans, we are all volunteers, we are all presidents. Well, no, not all of us. The war in Ukraine existed even before February 24, but, unfortunately, volunteers and veterans were not appreciated before. This is what struck me most in a negative way.

What do you attribute this reaction to, will we see a more responsible society, more conscious people?

Well, now yes. Those who behaved in such cruel ways simply transferred their irrational fear and hurled it at those people who had already gone through something terrible. It’s one thing to just spit on a veteran because you’re feeling some unfamiliar emotion and not understanding how to deal with such a shock. Of course, in this case, the veteran is guilty of everything from the small salaries of doctors to the fact that the veteran went (to the army – ed.), and you didn’t.

But now, we are all witnesses of the war, which has spilled out of the two regions, unfortunately. Now, no one can be safe in any part of the country because all regions are under fire. It will change us one way or another. We are in a state of acute trauma now, but later on, we will have such problems, the solutions of which we will be obliged to seek as widely as possible. Of course, all this will change us, and I hope for the better.

There are still a lot of Soviet ideas left in our lives. I hope they will disappear because they are not needed. As the monuments to Lenin were disappearing, so will all these imprints, including the psychological ones that we still have, disappear from our lives. The worst thing we have left is the fear of the invisible Soviet Union, and now I have high hopes that this fear, which is very strong in some people, will be overcome.

We are now seeing a very powerful surge of patriotic sentiment, probably the first time it has permeated all social circles. We are now in poster times, if speaking in the language of the arts, when everything is clear, everything is obvious, everything is in black and white. Please tell us, are there any risks of getting stuck in this state, is there a danger that this will create a basis for an authoritarian regime in our country?

This is an interesting question and it is difficult for me to answer it, because I do not have a degree in political science, and this is a field that probably concerns the political science and sociology of large groups.

By the way, I do not agree with the unity part that you said. If we remember the referendum of 1991, when Ukraine said “Bye!” to the Soviet Union, I remember more than 90% voted for independence. That is, we actually had this potential. Reading the memoirs of sailors who were then trying to separate from the Black Sea Fleet, I see that this wave was suppressed politically. Politicians, according to the people whose memoirs I read, were very amoebic. They could not accept this separation from the USSR personally or for any other reason.

The revolutions (Orange Revolution and Revolution of Dignity known as Maidan – ed.) raised hopes that the political elite would think in the same way as the people do, now that these movements have affected everyone. Of course, we have had presidents on whose decisions we still rely when proving that Russia has been committing genocide against us for more than a century. In particular, Yushchenko’s decision to recognize the Holodomor (the period of famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933 which lead to the starvation of 10,5 million Ukrainians and which had been deliberately caused by Stalin – ed.) as genocide. We can rely on this official recognition to explain that this whole bloody story has been going on for 100 years.

But now we see a truly unprecedented unity. I do not know what will happen next, but in any case, it is a people’s war, it is a war for our land and we ourselves will maintain the value of our native land. We have felt our roots, and this is the most important thing. It seems to me that there will be no future totalitarian history for us, Ukrainians are very sensitive to such things. But there must be something like one line we will follow. Because the existence of a phenomenon such as OPZZH (The Opposition Platform – For Life, a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine – ed.) or the Communist Party is no longer possible.

Does propaganda absolve from responsibility?

Nothing absolves from responsibility. There is a well-known phrase, ignorance of the law does not absolve from responsibility. For example, Berkut, the one unit that crippled an entire nation, was influenced by the propaganda of commanders who convinced them that they were almost supermen. They said that “the Berkut was created to do good,” although by law they shouldn’t exist at all. Here is such a paradox. But this does not absolve them from responsibility. They will experience the consequences of their actions.

Everyone can believe in a Spaghetti Monster but will be held accountable by the law of the people among whom they live. And propaganda does not exempt from this either, because the law does not structure the causes, it structures the consequences. If these consequences were criminal, it does not matter whether the propaganda led you to this or personal intent. You still must answer to the law.

What is it like to be a woman in the army, a woman in war?

This is a broad issue on which we conducted a survey with the Invisible Battalion (a global advocacy project whose mission is to strengthen the position of women in the Ukrainian army – ed.), of which I was part both before I left for the war rotation and after.

It was easy for me. I think it was the most difficult for those girls who went (to fight – ed.) first, who were the first to experience these problems when a woman is, say, an attacker, and is registered in the military unit she serves in as a seamstress and told not to interfere with soldiers’ work. But once one woman works like 10 men, one becomes a combat officer in the battle itself. Fortunately, my experience has not been very traumatic. There were some unpleasant events when I was told “Why do we need a woman here” and then I was invited to continue working in this unit. I can say that humanity prevailed. In some places, they were easy on me, and in some places, they gave me more tasks to prove myself in practice.

In any case, compared to what we heard and observed in 2014, now the situation is radically different. Now, every woman can be herself in the army if she wants to master this type of work. In particular, these changes in the army have affected the civilian world. We have already talked about the connection between the civilian world and the military, but together with the opening of positions in the army, when women were finally allowed to work at the positions in army they officially had, 400 more civilian positions were opened. The funniest of them is the red fish butcher. That is, women were forbidden to carve red fish, for white fish it was allowed, but for red fish it was not. So absurd were these laws that allegedly protected someone, although we know that the Soviet Union never issued laws that would protect anyone there, except the ruling elite and the propaganda line.

How powerful is the language of art in the dialogue about the war between Ukraine and Europe?

Of course, grassroots art will not influence Europeans, it will never be translated and it will not perform any function abroad.

But, for example, among our projects, there are associative cards. We interviewed veterans and made a set of cards called MAK450 in two versions and now distribute them outside of Ukraine just to play with people in association games, for example, what do you associate with this card, and what is my, Ukrainian, vision?

Sometimes these are impressive dialogues with those to whom we show this work. This is the only way people understand that we see this world differently. We have a card that depicts the sky in a cell in a metaphorical sense. And when someone sees the Louvre there, and we say that the reference to this card was the basement of the Isolation torture chamber (a prison set up by the self-proclaimed DNR in Donetsk, where Ukrainians have been illegally detained and tortured since 2014 – ed.), everyone is speechless. It breaks down all patterns and creates an understanding that life is not just the way individuals see it around them. Where one sees beauty, we see death and try to overcome it. Visual art does not need translation, so it is powerful.

What do you think the European community should know about this war and what should it do?

If we consider Ukraine as the front, then Europe is our rear. And, going back to the beginning of our conversation, there is no victory without the unity of the rear and the front. Therefore, all those things like land-lease, arms supplies, and voting for adequate presidents. And the understanding that our country is so destroyed that the cities like Kharkiv are destroyed, where millions of people live. This is a trauma of such a scale that even a Ukrainian, a Kharkiv resident, cannot fully realize it. This is something that should not have happened at all.

And Europe needs to accept that as a fact. Because war is a very corporeal phenomenon. You have to either go through it and understand it in your own skin, but I would not recommend it to anyone, or take the word of those who have already gone through it. Unfortunately, there is no third option. The war simplifies such things as well. You either choose the side of justice, or war comes to you.

Therefore, in my personal opinion, Europe must identify itself as the rear. If we do not hold back, then geography and basic logic show us that the next may be Poland, then it may be Germany, then it may be another country.

How did the environment in which you grew up affect your worldview?

My grandfather raised me since birth. My parents took me in only when I was 7 years old, and all this period of forming me as a person, forming the psychological aspects of personality at that age, is all the efforts of my grandfather.

He was madly proud of his students, he was an excellent teacher and a man who was attacked by the Russians for his work. At least I know of 3 cases. First one – my grandfather was taken to the forest – and they had already killed the school principal from a neighbouring village -, and he was told that he was next. Another case was when my grandfather was drafted into the army and won against some Russian in a swimming competition. While preparing for the next stage of the competition, he was hit on the head with a stone. The idea was for my grandfather to drown, but he got out. The third moment was when my grandfather was directly threatened, but he somehow got out of this situation too.

And my grandmother survived the Holodomor, whose first word as a child was “bread”. Not even “mother”, “bread”… In fact, after going through this, she and my grandfather put the idea into my head that Russians are those who despise you simply because you were born Ukrainian. Not that they told me something like “Hate them”, no. They just shared what they went through themselves, and I comprehended it.

When I was under the first mortar fire, I went numb, although for me this is an unusual reaction to such moments. Thanks to the person who pushed me, nothing happened. But I was numb because I had flashbacks from my grandmother’s tales. She told me about her first mortar shelling during World War II as a child. She described it literally as it was, so powerfully, correctly, the way the 120 caliber whistles, the way the bullet or 80 caliber whistles. She reproduced the sound to me, and when I experienced it for the first time in my life, I was stunned by the fact that so many years have passed, and this is happening to us again. It was a great revelation and I think it is the most powerful moment through which I can illustrate how upbringing affects your future life. We have been oppressed for 300 years, this is not a metaphor from literature, this is a fact. Finally, we are fully aware of this now. It is very powerful, and we will never get into the Gulag again, at the very least because we will not be able to live in it.

To conclude, I read a few of your interviews, and in one of them, you said that faith is very important. Not necessarily in God, but faith in everything. So, what do you believe in now?

I probably wouldn’t call myself a very religious person. I have a specific attitude to religion because my great-grandfather was one of those who built a church in his village with the blessing of Sheptytsky (rector of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the early twentieth century – ed.). My grandfather was the one who figured out how to preserve it during the Soviet Union, and how to preserve the frescoes and paintings of that time. His sister invested in restoring this church and creating unity around it. I treat religion more from the point of view of these routine church workers, that is, I treat religion as an element of unity. I don’t know if there is a God or not, no one knows. But when I see the unity of people around an idea, around a church, around a victory, I call it faith.

This animalistic desire to live normally, to live a human life, which I saw at the front, when you cry, pray, don’t want to die under fire, but you go into battle. When I saw such people in such a state, I called it faith. If there was anything divine in my life, it was probably the actions of these people that took place right in front of my eyes. People who were ready to destroy themselves for the sake of others, if necessary, are of absolute faith. This belief that there is life left after you and nothing more. If I believe in something, then I believe in this.

This interview was conducted and translated into English by Anna Proskurina.

Translated into German by Nele König.