Damien Soitout
A war you are not in still asks you to speak carefully. Use the public record. Do not pretend you were there, and do not decorate the harm.
From far away, the honest object is the public record. It is not a story in which you were in the room.
The week of 24 February 2022 changed the map for people who were nowhere near it. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began that week. I am not in that war. What follows stays with the public record. This site is read in Ukrainian as well as in other languages. That is a reason to be plain. The people who are living the war do not need a distant voice performing closeness. They need the rest of us to speak in a way that does not lie, does not thrill itself, and does not steal their experience to make a point about our feelings.
If you are far away, your job is the job of any reader who is not in the war. Say what the public record supports. Say what you do not know. Do not invent aid you did not give. Do not invent a street you did not stand on. Do not pass on a picture you cannot place. The news page is where this kind of public week belongs on the site. The page is a shelf. It is not a permission to speak louder than your knowledge.
A pledge is not a tree you planted was an earlier distinction between a sentence and an act. War makes the same distinction harsher. A sentence of sympathy is not food, and it is not shelter, and it is not a position you held. It can still be a decent sentence if it stays inside the truth. “I am far away, and this is what a public source says” is a decent sentence. “I can almost see it” is a theft. Do not steal.
The page I want you to read is the United Nations account, in French, of the emergency Security Council meeting held as Russia announced an offensive: ONU Info, on that emergency meeting. I use that page because its title and its report were checked, not because French is a magic language. The report says the Council met in emergency session, the second time in two days, while reports said a Russian offensive against Ukraine was imminent. During the meeting, President Putin announced a military operation in Ukraine and called on Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms. The Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, told the press afterward that he had begun the meeting by asking Putin, from the heart, to stop his troops from attacking Ukraine. When the announcement came during the meeting, Guterres changed the appeal. He asked President Putin, in the name of humanity, to bring the troops back to Russia. He said the conflict had to stop now. He named the risk of a war in Europe with consequences for Ukraine, for the Russian Federation, and for a world economy still coming out of COVID, including oil, wheat, and the room poorer countries need to recover.
Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN political affairs chief, briefed the Council. The report says she described requests for Russian military assistance from the so-called authorities in Donetsk and Luhansk, a nationwide state of emergency declared by the Ukrainian authorities, and worrying reports from across the contact line. She also said the UN could not verify all of that information, and that if it were confirmed it would worsen an already extremely dangerous situation. She said President Zelensky had called for diplomacy to continue, and that the cost of escalation, in human suffering and in destruction, was unacceptably high. Those sentences are a record of what was said in a public room, by named officials, on the night the week turned. They are enough to speak from. The page itself is there if you want the briefing in full. Repeat the appeal and the caution. Leave the rest of the night to the people who were in it.
The United Nations page on peace and security is the standing frame around that night. The institution exists, among other reasons, to keep peace and to give states a room that is not a battlefield. A room can fail. The failure does not make rumor a better source than the room's own transcript. The International Committee of the Red Cross, on law and policy, is where the rules that apply in war are explained for people who are not lawyers. You do not have to pretend those rules are a comfort. You should know they exist, so that speech from far away does not invent a world in which anything said, and anything done, is equally fog. Law is not fog. Distance is not expertise. Both sentences can be true.
You may say that a war has started, because the public record says so. You may say who announced it, because the record names him. You may say that the Secretary-General asked for it to stop, because that appeal is quoted. You may say that you are afraid for people, if you are afraid, and you should say it as your fear, not as their experience. You may give money or time to an organization whose work you have actually read, and if you do, you may say that you did. You may be quiet. Quiet is an honorable option when your only other option is a performance.
You may not say “we” in a way that puts you on a street you are not on. You may not describe a wound, a building, or a night you saw only in a clip you cannot verify. You may not pass a clip because it is intense. Intensity is not confirmation. DiCarlo's caution on that night is a model: reports can be serious and still be unverified, and a serious person says so. You may not announce aid you intend, as if intention were a convoy. A pledge is not a tree. A promise of help is not help until the help has moved.
You may not use the war as a ladder for an unrelated opinion you already held. People will try. They will pull the week toward their market view, their party, their theory of history, within hours. Some of those arguments may be worth having later, with evidence, when you can tell a fact from a use. In the first week, the use is the thing to resist. If you notice that a sentence makes you feel clever, delete it and return to the record. Cleverness is a luxury of safety. Spend it on something else.
How to stop negative thinking, how to stay positive in negative situations, how to improve your resilience to adversity, and negativity is contagious are about a mind under pressure. They are real subjects. They are the wrong tools if you use them to tidy a war into a personal growth exercise. Your sleeplessness, if you are far away, is a human response. It is not the event. Do not ask people who are closer to comfort you for having watched. Do not ask them to perform hope so your feed feels bearable. How to overcome failure is also about a life you are in. A war you are not in is not your failure and not your test of character. Treating it as your test is another way of moving yourself to the center.
One practice beats a January performance is a small private subject, and I mention it only to mark the contrast. A practice is yours. A war is not a content calendar. If you need a practice in a week like this, make it a practice of checking one serious source before you forward, and of stopping when you do not know. That practice will not make you important. It will make you less of a hazard. Being less of a hazard is a decent ambition for a person at a safe distance.
If your own mind is not holding, get help from a person who is qualified, in the place where you actually are. Do not use the news as a way to punish your sleep into a proof of solidarity. Solidarity that breaks you does not travel. A clear sentence in the morning travels farther than a night of clips. Speak from the record. Leave the rest where it belongs.
