“I was struck by the number of red flags with the hammer and sickle on them,” Natalya said. “I had to question what year it was because Lenin was standing there, red flags were flying — you don’t really understand where you are at all.”
As a proudly Ukrainian journalist who has worked on the frontlines since the beginning of Russia’s aggression in 2014, Natalya thought she would feel some kind of “revenge mentality” about the incursion of Ukrainian troops into Russia.
She expected to feel a sense of “aha, now you’re experiencing what we felt,” but she didn’t. “I was uncomfortable the entire time hearing the explosions, and I thought how foolish do you have to be to attack us and then drop bombs on your own territory? On people who are just as Russian as you?” she said. “You’ve forced them into basements, and now there are dirty children sitting there, afraid to go outside.”
Residents in the Ukrainian-occupied zone are oblivious to the Kremlin’s responsibility for their plight and appear to genuinely believe that President Vladimir Putin is unaware of what is happening in Kursk.
“He hasn’t been informed. Putin doesn’t know anything at all,” one told her. “They lie to him. They just don’t report it to him.” So where does responsibility lie? With the governor of Kursk (who in the opinion of at least one Russian civilian, should be executed for his failings.)
And yet what surprised her most was the ignorance of the Russian population about the war just over the border in Ukraine after 10 years of relentless aggression.
“They still said we were brotherly nations, living very well together, and asked, ‘Why did you do this?’ as if Ukraine started it,” Natalya said. “And you think: ‘What is wrong with you? Really? Shells are landing, drones are being launched. Everything is crashing down.’”
She had wondered: “Wouldn’t it have been better for you if all that money had been spent on giving your children, who are now sitting in basements, a better education? Or improving your roads? All of this left a very oppressive impression.”
Natalya, along with other Ukrainian and Western journalists, has been accused by the Russian FSB of illegally crossing the border to report on areas controlled by Ukraine. Needless to say, this is a predictably myopic Kremlin interpretation of legality, not least because Russia has spent 10 years sending armed forces across the border of a state whose existence it has long recognized.
She doesn’t care about the charges, she said but worries about possible consequences elsewhere.
“I only hope other countries will not act on any decisions from a terrorist state, because I still travel around the world,” she said. “Primarily, I do it to speak on behalf of Ukraine and its people. I have been to Canada, the US, and Italy to remind them there is a war in Ukraine.”
She wants to be sure that “the world will not be searching for me if Russia hands this case over to Interpol,” she said. “We didn’t just go as journalists to see what was happening there, we went to accompany humanitarian aid for the residents of those areas. We ensured that Ukraine adhered to the Geneva Conventions.”
In any case, “a criminal case in Russia against someone in Ukraine, it can only be seen as a compliment, not a threat,” she added.
As for the fighting in Kursk, she says that Ukrainians “don’t have an occupying gene.” She adds: “This is a forced measure imposed on us by Russia. If Russia hadn’t been terrorizing our state for more than 10 years, if there had been no military aggression against us, we would have never gone there.”
Lera Burlakova was a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary ‘Life P.S.’ received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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