I awoke to the sound of a violent explosion earlier than I had wanted that morning. The walls, windows, and furniture vibrated. A cruise missile had s

I Feel Unsafe

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2024-11-15 18:30:16

I awoke to the sound of a violent explosion earlier than I had wanted that morning. The walls, windows, and furniture vibrated. A cruise missile had struck a warehouse owned by a national supermarket chain, roughly a kilometre from the hotel I was staying in. The russians had fired it – targeting civilian infrastructure as they regularly do – perhaps a dozen minutes earlier. It was June 24th, 2024. The time was 07:03.

This was hardly my first rodeo. Cruise missiles regularly flew over the apartment I was renting in Odesa. The local air defence would light up the sky when attacks came at night; as they often did. One attack in 2022 saw an apartment building struck a few streets behind mine, killing a young woman and her two children. Her husband wasn’t in the building at the time, and distraught by the slaughter of his entire family, he joined his country’s defence on the front line. Ultimately, he died too.

With my British passport, I have the luxury of leaving any time living in an active war zone begins to take its toll. My closest friends however, enjoy no such luxury. The russians came to rape, torture, and kill. Neither women nor children are spared. Countless invaders have admitted to the brutality, at times recounting that even small children are executed with a bullet in the brain at point blank range. The Ukrainians have no choice but to stay and fight.

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