I’m Dying

A paramedic named Olesia Zhukovskaia was working the Maidan in Kyiv when the snipers started. This was 2014, during the Euromaidan protests—the square was full of people, and the government had positioned sharpshooters on rooftops around the city. They were shooting whoever they could: demonstrators, journalists, first responders. Just shooting.

Olesia got hit in the neck. While bleeding out, she tweeted: I’m dying. Then someone got her to surgery fast enough and she made it. She’s alive. But there’s this moment in between—the moment between being shot and being saved—where she just narrated it into the void.

I think about that a lot now. The reflex to document your own death. It’s not brave or noble, not a moral statement or anything performative. It’s just the habit now—something happens, you post it. Pain, fear, mortality, same as everything else. You reach for your phone like breathing.

The Euromaidan exists in my head mostly as fragments. Video clips, photographs, things people managed to record while everything was happening. Olesia’s tweet is part of that record. It’s evidence that this was real, that it happened to someone who had a phone in her pocket and a habit of talking about her life in public. Not a symbol or a cause. Just a girl saying what was happening.