Kyiv Burning

I watched Kyiv burn on my phone in real time, sometime in 2013. The government didn’t like what was happening in the streets, so they sent in police. The protesters had Molotov cocktails. People died—at least two that first night, more as it went on. The Prime Minister said it was their fault for being criminals. It wasn’t an unusual response, which maybe is the worst part.

What got to me wasn’t parsing the politics of Ukrainian governance. It was the way you follow something like that. Refresh. Check the death count. Watch clips. Refresh again. It’s hypnotic in a way that feels wrong while you’re doing it. You’re simultaneously invested and removed. Checking the news while you make dinner. Halfway through a sentence about something else, then back to the footage. The scale of real violence gets smoothed into content.

I don’t know what actually happened with any of it in the years after—my attention moved on like everyone else’s. But I remember the weird unreality of watching a city you’ll probably never visit get torn open while you’re sitting somewhere safe. The government treating people like enemies. The people not backing down. And you, three thousand miles away, unable to do anything but look.

There’s something about moments like that that stick. Not the politics of it—I’m not qualified to judge that. But the reminder that the stable world you live in could do the same thing tomorrow if people pushed back hard enough. That’s a thought you don’t shake.