On Love and War

Olesya Khromeychuk explores the role of hatred and courage; individuals and humanity in trying to live with the heinous crimes being committed against her country by Vladimir Putin

What better way to disguise a lack of courage than to frame it as the pursuit of peace? We tolerate violence so as not to provoke its potential escalation. Even if all the evidence points to the fact that it is our tolerance of evil that inevitably empowers it, that’s not the story we choose to believe.

Cowardice, camouflaged as pacifism, reigned supreme for the first phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Before they staged their full-scale attack, the Russians called themselves peacekeepers and perpetrated atrocities unobstructed.

The democratic world tolerated Vladimir Putin’s war crimes, while claiming to protect the international order built on the principles of the defence of human rights. There seemed to be only one place where courage could be found: in the trenches of eastern Ukraine.

Poorly armed, and unsupported by international military alliances, the Ukrainian Army lacked all provisions but it was equipped with something else that sustained it nevertheless.

In one of the seminal texts on love – written by a man, about men and, largely, aimed at men – love is portrayed as a source of courage for a warrior. Phaedrus, in Plato’s Symposium, suggests that “if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves … when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world”.

In sharp contrast, the fin-de-siècle feminist Ukrainian writer Larysa Kosach – known by her pen name Lesia Ukrainka – presents a markedly different ethos in her poetic drama Woman Possessed.

Her protagonist, Miriam, identifies a different force that can drive one’s struggle: “In my eyes, I see the glint of weapons, / in my words, I hear the weapons rattle, / yes, I am armed with hatred”.

Miriam’s love was all wrong. It was impatient, unkind, jealous, and proud. It pushed her to hate others, it enraged her, it never forgave wrongs. Her love was lethal.

Miriam was an ordinary woman who loved an extraordinary man: the Messiah – not because he was the Son of God, but mostly because he was the Son of Man. She didn’t want him to die for her sins or anyone else’s. She wanted him to live, so much so that she offered to shed her own blood so he wouldn’t have to shed his. Her sacrifice was rejected by the Messiah. Her love was discarded because it wasn’t the right kind.

The first time I met Miriam was many years ago, when I was in my early twenties and she was a character on stage in a theatre in Lviv, my hometown in western Ukraine.

Dressed in a long black dress, she seemed to be in mourning for the deaths to come, including her own. Looking death in the eye, she was invincible because she was driven by love. Or hatred. Or both. I found it difficult to distinguish between the two, and so did she, it seemed.

The show was based on Ukrainka’s Woman Possessed, a dramatic portrayal of Christ’s final days narrated from the point of view of a woman. Among Ukrainka’s most precious contributions to world literature are texts that retell Western culture’s formative stories, be it from the Bible or Greek mythology, by centring female protagonists.

Lesia Ukrainka’s literary and political voice challenged the cultural erasure imposed on Ukrainians by the Russian empire. Even her chosen pseudonym – ‘Ukrainian woman’ – asserted an unmistakable place for a Ukrainian writer within the literary canon.

Though she did not live to witness the collapse of the empire, the force of her work endured. When she died in 1913, her funeral became a statement in itself: her coffin carried solely by women – a powerful gesture underscoring her role in advancing both national and women’s emancipation. Tsarist authorities forbade any public speeches from mourners, and police on horseback trailed the procession, fearing unrest. The Soviets, too, found her legacy threatening, attempting to co-opt her struggle for Ukraine’s liberation to serve their own ideological ends.

A defiant woman remains dangerous, even in death.

Ukrainka wrote Woman Possessed in 1901. In this text, the personal is inseparable from the political.

Her protagonist defies every norm: as a woman, she refuses to submit to a man or to society; as a believer, she rejects salvation; as a follower of Christ, she chooses not to love in the way that her teacher commands.

Crucially, Miriam does not embrace abstract love for all because it demands sacrificing concrete individuals. To her, loving humanity at large is cowardly; whereas loving a specific person demands true courage.

Ukrainka’s Miriam offers an alternative to love that is patient and kind – she is ready to set the world on fire with her love and let herself be engulfed by the flames. Because why shouldn’t it burn, this world, that passively watches innocent blood being spilled and endorses death in the name of salvation?

If that’s the world we live in, let it end, I thought after watching the show all those years back, my youthful rage ignited by Miriam’s vengeful love. What I didn’t realise at the time was that the end of the world was much closer than I could ever have imagined.

My world ended on 24 February 2022, when it was set ablaze by fire raining down on sleeping homes in a truly apocalyptic scene.

Not everything was destroyed in the initial attacks, but what was killed was the innocence of hope – the kind of hope that makes you believe the worst won’t happen. When the worst does happen, that hope dies, and with it, the world as you knew it.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have frequently worn a black dress and walked on stage to speak about my country to anyone who will listen. I am no Miriam. I lack her courage and her love. I also lack her hatred. But, since my world ended, I too have been in mourning.

Every day, the grief is prolonged by the deaths of relatives, friends, and compatriots – people I love, as well as those I don’t know personally, but whose love for our shared land brings us into communion with one another.

I have also regularly found myself surrounded by those who, in their abstract pacifism, tolerate the killing of concrete people.

Loving one’s enemies, explains Ukrainka’s Miriam, is convenient for those who choose inaction, who prefer peace at any cost, even if this cost is measured in the innocent blood of the few

“You say your country needs more weapons from the West to help you win the war, but let me tell you what you really need: you need to lower your conscription age to 18,” yet another wise old man tells me. “No weapons will resolve your manpower problem.” I listen to the British politician inform me I’m wrong – that my country is wrong in its needs, choices, and experiences. I ask him if he truly believes that throwing more untrained young people into the grinder of war is a better solution than securing more military aid. He struggles to respond with clarity and says “we simply mustn’t escalate this conflict any further. We can’t let it spill into the rest of Europe”. A little innocent blood for the salvation of humanity.

The humanity that deserves to be saved, however, does not consist of bodies on the battlefield. It consists of the sons and daughters of the nations that matter. Nations with wealth, power, and a long tradition of statehood.

People born and raised in countries that are seen as little more than a buffer zone can be sacrificed easily to save ‘humanity’. The buffer zone itself can be sacrificed: its land can be poisoned by landmines, its air can be polluted by toxic substances, and its water can be contaminated by unexploded ordnances.

Our abstract love for humanity allows us to overlook the concrete inhumane suffering of people and nature.

The late Pope Francis said that Ukraine should have “the courage of the white flag”; that it should accept defeat; that it should sacrifice some for the salvation of many.

If it were to fly above Ukraine, the white flag would have to be raised over the growing number of unmarked mass graves in Russian-occupied territories. It would have to be hoisted above each torture chamber. It would become the symbol of the hell on Earth that Russian troops have brought to Ukraine.

The pontiff’s call to negotiate with one’s enemy, if not to love them, was promptly rejected by Ukrainians, who said they would fly no flags other than the blue and yellow standard.

“Why won’t you share the stage with the Russians?” I’m asked again and again. “You need to find allies among them. It’s in your interest. And, in any case, not all of them support the war and those who do, well, they are fooled by the propaganda. They do not know what they are doing.”

A victim, especially if she’s a woman, isn’t meant to hate – even if it is her enemies that she hates. She can hurt, suffer, grieve, but hatred is denied to her by social convention. If she wants to receive the charity of others (after all, caritas is a form of love), she too should show love and gratitude, not hatred and rage.

Loving one’s enemies, explains Ukrainka’s Miriam, is convenient for those who choose inaction, who prefer peace at any cost, even if this cost is measured in the innocent blood of the few. Speaking to one of the Messiah’s followers, she says: “You all allowed it that the Messiah / should give a bloody ransom for your souls. / And you received it with such ease! / Of course, you thanked him, some with tears / And others by sincerely loving his enemies”.

When she’s reminded that the Messiah was the one who said that his followers should love their enemies, she responds: “And you rejoiced! It’s safer thus for you: / the soul is saved, the body will not perish”.

Her refusal to love her enemies makes her a heretic, a sinner, but it is her hatred of those who should be perceived as friends that makes her an outcast.

At the end of the play, the crowd, outraged by Miriam’s disobedience, her heresies, her refusal to love in the ‘right’ way, and her pride in her sins – the same crowd for whose sins the Messiah gave his life – stones Miriam to death.

In the 1980s, when the Cold War seemed to be nearing its end, and much of the West rejoiced that its former enemies in Moscow had embraced reform and could be loved again, Myroslav Marynovych, a Ukrainian dissident and a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group advocating for human rights, was finishing a decade-long sentence in a soviet high-security camp.

Years later, when he visited London, I heard him speak of love. He shared that one of the key lessons he had learned came from a fellow dissident, Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, who had advised him not to strive to love humanity in general but to focus on loving specific people. Kotsiubynska was a literary scholar and I wonder if she, and subsequently Marynovych, were inspired by Lesia Ukrainka’s Woman Possessed.

Marynovych, however, might struggle to agree with Miriam when it comes to hatred. In a more recent interview on Russia’s war in Ukraine, he cautioned against it – describing it as a trap. He acknowledged that experiencing hatred during war is natural, but embracing it fully would ultimately make you similar to your enemy.

During the years he spent in a soviet prison, he was overwhelmed by rage and anger. But his victory over his enemy depended on not succumbing to hatred, and he hopes his nation will follow the same path today.

I try to hear Marynovych’s reasoning.

Few things attest more powerfully to a person’s integrity than enduring years of suffering and humiliation with their dignity intact. I want to believe that the hatred that, at least in part, sustains my people’s struggle against genocidal violence is not the only path to salvation. But, as I focus my energies on love, I am overcome by my compatriots’ unhealed pain – and Miriam’s healing hatred returns to my mind.

When I put on my black mourning dress and take to the stage, I no longer have the luxury of simply being a historian of war. I choose to be its witness. I don’t claim to speak on behalf of the whole nation; I only wish to amplify the voices of concrete people.

Like that of my fellow writer Victoria, who had been collecting testimonies of war crimes, hoping to secure justice for the victims, and was killed in a missile strike.

Or that of my young cousin Ivan, who was the only survivor in his unit. As he was being rescued by medics, he pleaded for a proper burial for his dead comrades.

Or that of my friend Andriana, a servicewoman who came back from the dead after sustaining grave injuries and is determined to keep fighting for what she loves: her child, her comrades, her freedom, and her country.

Or that of my brother Volodya, who joined up because he loved the sight of Venus casting her light over the wounded steppe and the glistening of frozen raindrops on branches near his trench. Just before he was killed in action in 2017, he warned me that the world was about to end.

I am no Miriam. Ukraine is no Messiah. And this is not a drama.

I am, however, a woman possessed by the stories of people who I desperately wish were still alive. We shouldn’t have let them die, even if their deaths were meant to save humanity.

When this war ends, love – which will undoubtedly outlast the destruction – will help us heal. But hatred will also linger.

We don’t need to fall into its trap, but we can channel it well. Lest we be tempted to forget.

Miriam: “And can the past be gone, unnoticed? / … will he now, being resurrected / forget all suffering, betrayal, death? / No, he may forgive, but he will not forget”.

Olesya Khromeychuk is a writer and historian. She is the director of the Ukrainian Institute London. All translations of extracts from Lesia Ukrainka’s Woman Possessed in this article are by her