Russians Are Worse Than Nazis

I woke up this morning to a dramatic conversation with Veronika, a woman living in the Kyiv region, who over 30 minutes told me — over a constantly cracking connection in Zoom — about the atrocities that the Russian army commits in Ukraine.

“They just enter the civilians’ homes and start living there,” she said. “If you say a word, they’ll shoot you. My friend’s husband was murdered last week…

“I saw some civilians trying to escape by car, and they [the Russian army] shot through the cars, killing a 4-year-old child…”

“My friend told me a story of how a Russian soldier wanted to rape their 15-year-old daughter…Only after the mother begged with tears for half an hour did they let her free…”

“Dead bodies are lying on the streets…they rot and just lie there, people and kids walking over them…”

“A fourteen-year-old came up to me the other day and said, ‘I put the corpse in a plastic bag. What should I do with it?’…”

I closed my eyes, trying to absorb what I’d just heard.

It was too much for me.

Veronika, on the other hand, seemed so calm, so reserved. It was as if she was telling me about what kind of cereal she had for breakfast — not about corpses and war crimes that my country’s army is committing against theirs. This is how our psyche protects us from terrible things: it gets used to them.