Dispatches from Ukraine: Karolina's story.
Odesa, January 2023
Odesa, the Ukrainian Black Sea port, was recently recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site – over the objections of the Russians who still want to level it and “annex” it. After the decision, Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UNESCO, said, “Odesa, a free city, a world city, a legendary port that has left its mark on cinema, literature and the arts, is thus placed under the reinforced protection of the international community.” I would add that it also has some of the best 18th- and 19th-century European architecture in Ukraine – and some of the best food.
Odesa has only felt the peripheral effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine, but the beaches and swimming areas have been mined to slow down a Russian assault from the sea, and the rationing of electricity means the city is pitch-black at night, especially during the curfew between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Daily life is interrupted by the occasional, mostly ignored air-raid siren or the much rarer explosion of a rocket hitting a building. Still, as in any country at war where active combat is unseen and unheard, it is only human for people to want to carry on their lives as normally as possible. Being a seaport brings access to fisheries and to the goods imported and exported from here. Factor in the gastronomic benefits from the influx of so many different cultures over the millennia – Ukrainians, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Romanians, Turks, Tatars and many more – and, even in this war, this is still a great place to visit.
I had been to various restaurants throughout the old center of the city with Violetta Diduk, a university professor, local historian and guide. Those restaurants that are still open (many are not) have generators parked outside – mainly on the sidewalks in front. When there is no electricity, these all hum in unison – a noise that would only make a yoga “om”-er happy – and leave a foul smell in the air. On my last night in Odesa, Violetta and I were sitting at a Crimean Tatar restaurant. After salad and hummus, we ordered Crimean Tatar “yantuki” – very similar to Mexican flour quesadillas, but with more herbs and more than a smidgeon of garlic. Then the lights went out and after a few long seconds, the generator on the street kicked in. Often, when the electricity turns off, the people in restaurants respond by spontaneously belting out “Chervona Kalyna,” the Ukrainian resistance anthem.
As we were pondering the main course, a lithe, well-dressed ‘dívchina” (young lady) appeared and sat down at the table, pecking Violetta on the cheek and greeting me with a quick “hi” in perfect American English. This was Karolina – whom I had interviewed a few hours before. Violetta asked Karolina how things had gone with her therapist. “Fine” she said, “but look at the list of pills he gave me to take!” Karolina, knowing exactly what she wanted, then ordered a huge plate of “shasliki” (kebabs) – something I should have ordered. Seeing me enviously eyeing it, she offered me some. And I downed the last one! Delicious!
She and I had spoken that day at noon. I had wanted to know what made an attractive, intelligent and educated young woman – who could have gone anywhere she wanted – brave the rocketing and shelling, living in trenches and dugouts of the front lines of the war in Ukraine for several months.
Karolina: the Interview
The café where met was a small, dark place with a surfboard mounted California-style on the wall. The place was packed. Both Odesans and tourists (yes, there still are some tourists) like to spend their time inside coffee shops in the winter and, in other seasons, at small tables on the sidewalk. But now the sidewalk was humming with the sound of a large, wheeled generator, noisily spewing noxious fumes into the air. Luckily, we were seated far away from the noise – which was occasionally amplified by someone opening the door. After choosing among the many herbal teas, I pulled out one of my cellphones and attached a mike receiver to it and asked her to clip on a lavalier mike. Karolina had picked a seat close to a very active espresso machine and pop music played in the background. Not so good for an interview, but there was nowhere else to sit. So I set the second mike down on the table right in front of her.
What makes this young woman tick? I started with the usual general questions about age, where she had lived and studied. She explained that she was 22 and like so many Ukrainians with strong ties to the West, she had grown up in both Ukraine and another European country, Italy in her case. In 2021 she was studying at a small university there, majoring in political science and international relations. During the two years of COVID, her courses were all online, and she realized she could study anywhere she had good internet access. So she returned to her village near Odesa, Ukraine – just three months before the war started.
Storm clouds had been gathering that dark December and Karolina was quite aware of it. She told her best friend, whom she was now living with, that she thought that the Russians were planning an invasion. Like so many of us all over the world, her friend responded, “You are crazy; there is no possibility that Russia will invade us.”
Just four days before the invasion started, on February 20th, Karolina participated in a huge anti-Russian “United Ukraine” march held by Odesans attempting to rebuke the Russian propaganda line that just because Odesa was mainly Russian-speaking, it wanted to be reunited with Russia. Wrong! That was a common misperception that still sways people outside Ukraine today. Karolina was emphatic: “People here in Odesa overwhelmingly wanted to stay with Ukraine.”
I had to stop her and ask, What is the difference between Russians and Ukrainians? “The problem with Russia – the Russian people – is that they have never been free for real,” she said. “Russians have never known what freedom is because they have always had one dictatorial regime after another.”
“In contrast, we Ukrainians have always fought for our freedom – in spite of the fact that we have been under the Russian tsarist and Soviet regimes for so many centuries. Russians have never fought for their freedom, and they are used to being ruled by dictators and told what to do.”
That winter, the clock was ticking. “The day after the United Ukraine march, on February 21st, Putin recognized the Donbass and LNR republics,” she said, a reference to the parts of Eastern Ukraine that Putin’s “little green men” – mercenaries and regular Russian troops “on vacation” – had “liberated.” “And I told my friend that Putin had essentially declared war, but she still didn’t want to believe it.”
Rather than helplessly watch events unfold on her home turf, Karolina wanted to do something. She tried to volunteer in Odesa with the local Territorial Defense. “On the 22nd [of February] they told me that I needed to go to the recruiting office in my village and then come back to Odesa, so on the 23rd of February I returned to my village where I registered to get my military card. On the 24th of February, I was going to go to the military office and ask to join them but that day I woke up and the war had started.”
And the runaround continued. “The territorial defense refused my request the first time – two weeks after the war started. They said that there was no space for me. I tried again to join in March. It was really funny: a soldier asked me, ‘What can you do, what you know how to do?’ I responded, ‘I don't know what I can do’ and he asked me what I'm studying. I said ‘political science and international relations’ and he said ‘what can we do with your political science?’” Feelings of rejection and impotence plagued Karolina as she went back to her village. “I was also really sad, upset and stressed about the war, especially the news about Bucha and so on, and I had a lot of anger inside me towards the Russians.”
But then she started taking the initiative: “It was the period when I started working on an Instagram page that we created with Ukrainian friends who live in Italy…to update the Italians about the war in Ukraine. We translated the news from here in Ukraine and published it in Italy.”
On a Zoom call with her Italian friends, she noticed there was a journalist in attendance. He had already been covering the war in Ukraine since it began. After the call, she wrote him and asked if he needed a “translator” when he returned to Ukraine. He replied a solid “yes.” She now had a small but essential role to play.
But first, the Italian journalists wanted to test her – a real baptism by fire, and one that turned into a double whammy. “It was really funny because he said to me that he would take me for three days to the Mikolayiv front [a city actively being assaulted by the Russians] to see if I was able to stand all of the stress of the shelling and rocketing…” Up until then she had been in her quiet village and hadn’t heard a single explosion, but on her first day of working she was in an extremely conflict-ridden area where dozens of casualties per day were recorded, mainly from artillery barrages.
“My first day working with the journalists there was a constant ‘boom, boom, boom’ and it was nuts,” she recalled. But she kept calm. It wasn’t just the explosions that were stressful: “There was a captain who was very angry with me – that we had gone there in a red-colored car – and because I was the ‘fixer,’ I was responsible for this! He was extremely pissed at me, yelling at me in Ukrainian. I was like this…like ‘OK, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry!’ Meanwhile there were artillery explosions all around us.”
Still, she stayed composed. “I found a certain equilibrium between the fear of the war and the adrenaline surging through me, so I was pretty quiet. I understand that if you are too jittery with adrenaline you can do something wrong…and if you are too afraid you will also do something wrong. So it's really important to be balanced.” The Italian journalists saw that she could be calm in combat and while being yelled at, and they proposed bringing her to even more dangerous places.
“And so, the Italian journalist asked me if I would go with them to the Zaporizhian region.” Zaporizhia is a part of southeast Ukraine where the Russians were making steady advances – culminating in the capture of Europe’s largest nuclear plant. From there, Karolina and the journalists went to the Donbass, which had been at war since 2014, when the region was annexed by Russia’s “little green men.”
“It was my first time in Donbass and I was really scared because since 2014 I had heard that the war in Donbass was out of control,” Karolina said. “For me it was like something unbelievable to go there! That was the period of the battles of Lysichansk and Severodonetsk and we went to Lysichansk and it was crazy and now I have a post-traumatic stress about it because the Russians were trying to fire at our car with a fury and there were bombs falling 50 meters away so it was frigging crazy. I was sitting in the car and saying ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!’ I was really scared there.”
I asked about her experience on the front lines – was she with the soldiers or with the press? “I'm always with the press,” she replied, “but, as with any journalists covering a war, we have also worked with military staff and, of course, with civilians. For example, in August I lived for a month with soldiers in a secret underground base in the front lines of Kherson. It was stressful and I was really tired and feeling bad because it really, really wasn't a safe place. There was always Russian artillery fire. We were maybe eight kilometers from the Russian positions there. There wasn’t any possibility of taking a shower, so it was very difficult…”
And how were the relations between men and women? “They regarded me as their little sister to protect. It was really cool, and I felt their love and protection. Also when the Russians bombed I never felt like I was in a really dangerous situation because I knew that if anything were to happen, they would protect me. I'm really young and not so ugly, but there weren’t any sexual proposals or anything like that from them at any time. I was the little sister everybody loved.”
And how did Karolina characterize the makeup of the Ukrainian army? “Our army is made up of everyday people, people between 18 and 65 and sometimes older. These are people who only a few months ago were in the office working at an IT company – and now they are fighting. Maybe only two percent are professional military staff and all the other people are common people who before the war had dreams and plans for the future, just like I did.
“The fact is that there were so many times that I could have died on the front lines that I don’t have enough fingers on my hands to count them. And it's really difficult, but I am not afraid of death anymore. Like, OK, everyone dies anyway; I'm just trying to do my best of whatever I can do while I’m alive.
“I lost several friends my age. They died for the country – for Ukraine – and I really appreciate it. Sometimes I feel sad about them and I cry silent tears, but while I have a memory of them, they continue living in my heart. If and when I have some children in the future I will tell them about them and their stories. I am able to sit here and drink my tea – thanks to them.”
“I will return soon to the front line because I have a mission,” she said. “I want to tell the truth, the truth about this war, and to give a voice to those who don't have a voice. So, for me it's more important than my life.”
I kept finding myself thinking that this is a woman who maybe could better serve her country in a foreign ministry position, not the path that the war appears to have chosen for her. On the other hand, a physical country, a language and a culture cannot survive unless their people are willing to fight and die for those things in the face of a hostile aggressor, whether that be a Hitler or a Putin. It is precisely that fighting spirit that Karolina embodies – and I came away thinking that Ukraine can win because of people like her. She was adamant: “Ukraine for me is my second mother. I can’t imagine my life without this country. I am willing to die for Ukraine.”
This article was superbly edited by Cynthia Rubin.
The title was changed on February 2, 2023. It was: “Karolina and the last Crimean Tatar shaslik.”
