It is only a few months since my friend, the frontline medic Iryna Tsybukh, wrote: “If a new day comes, it must be lived.” In late May, a landmine exploded beneath her vehicle and she was killed, along with her paramedic comrades. There will be no new days for Iryna.
She seemed certain that she would die, as so many others had died around her. She had experienced so many near-misses that it seemed just a matter of time, Knowing this, she wrote a final letter to be opened in the event of her death. She was just 25 years old. The explosion denied her a 26th birthday on June 1.
We’re in the heart of Kyiv. Hundreds of people gather on the main square, the Square of Independence, to say goodbye to Ira, who is returning home to Lviv one last time. It’s always hard to believe in the death of these friends. Of the great ones. But it’s even harder when the coffin is closed. That happens only when a body is damaged too badly to be displayed. Ira’s coffin is closed and covered with a flag, so we all can hope that she is not inside. She’s not lying in this wooden box, instead, she’s gone somewhere she belongs.
She belonged in a lot of places. In newsrooms, where she was a bright young journalist. In school classes in the East of Ukraine, where she told children about the Revolution of Dignity of 2014 and the war. In the fields of Donbas, where she saved wounded soldiers’ lives as a combat medic.
Especially there. In one of her last interviews, Ira said that her parents hadn’t liked it when she joked about death. But she had to because that was how she prepared them for her goodbye. Because death happens. Death happens in war, she says. It’s normal.
“Please accept my condolences” — the first line of the letter Ira wrote and sent to a few people she trusted, quite some while ago.
“Please accept my condolences, I don’t like it when you are sad. But time will pass and this despair will dissipate, you will have to continue living your lives. So don’t waste time on suffering, live on,” she writes.
She writes that her frontline experiences taught her that there is no sadness in her death because had done exactly what she needed to: “My life is over and it was important for me to pass it with dignity: to be an honest, kind, loving person.”
Ira thanks everyone for their love and support. She states that freedom has the greatest value and she adds: “To have the strength to be a free person, one must be brave. Because only the brave have happiness . . . ”
One by one, the mourners approach the coffin, kneel, and lean their foreheads against the draped flag. People cry. Ira’s parents, both standing behind the coffin, are crying. Ira’s young brother covers his face with his hands. Some bring flowers, even though Ira asked them not to. Ira asked that they donate to the army instead.
And everyone sings. Because she asked us to gather, to recall the good moments, to sing Ukrainian songs — and so we sing.
We often say goodbye to soldiers here, on this square. We do now. We did 10 years ago, in 2014.
“People around us are getting younger”, a friend says to me. Now there are those, who were schoolchildren when the war started 10 years ago — already in military uniform. Now there are those, who were born during the war — like my son, who puts his stuffed dog next to the coffin. Living with air raids, power outages, and goodbyes on the square is his “normal”, just like Ira’s “normal” was the possibility of dying at 25.
It’s not normal, of course.
It’s just that any horror eventually becomes your routine if it continues, year after year.
But, let’s be honest, it’s still a horror.
Lera Burlakova is 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.
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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