Hey everyone.
The following text is a slightly edited version of this Instagram post by Natasha Konfetova. She was introduced to me by a filmmaker Mike Bruggink - I told you about him before too, btw.
Natasha is one of the people behind CookForUA - a cooking booklet of famous Ukrainian dishes.
“Dear civilized world, I was in your shoes when russia started the war in Ukraine in 2014. Some people from the east moved to central Ukraine. At the time it was not named "war".
I was at home when the refugees came to Ukraine from Belarus after unsuccessful protests to find a home in Kyiv.
Both found a new life here. It's hard to start from scratch.
With some people we became friends. We’d walk around the city together, visit Kyiv’s restaurants, drink wine, eat delicious food, and live a normal life. But at the same time, the war was there the whole time - close and distant at the same time.
Both said: “I could never believe that I would lose my home and live traveling the world searching for it."
It was scary and seemed like a world that will never happen to you. Communicating about such things in a peaceful environment is surreal.
You see photos, you listen to interviews, you feel horrified, you feel the need to help people, you act, but you have no instructions on how to stop all this.
Seeing the war in a photo and in life are very different things.
When the war reached my home, I understood every choice made by an individual who was at war.
When the war reached my home, I realized that these destructions, deaths, and horrors are just symptoms.
It is a disease that spreads quickly. And as with any disease, it is necessary to treat not only the symptoms but also the cause at the same time.
My civilized world stopped existing on 24.02.22.
I don't want people to run all their lives. There must be a vaccine that can stop the cause of these events.
I do not know of a vaccine so it is not a post that will tell you how to act but just a topic to think about.
Everyone constantly says "History repeats itself" but why don’t we learn from it?”
⠀