A Ukrainian Poet's Message to the World: 'Open your eyes. The war has already started.'

A TFP conversation with Kateryna Babkina—award-winning Ukrainian poet, fiction writer and journalist—on life in Kyiv, her country's unpreparedness, and Russia's propaganda machine.

A Ukrainian soldier guards armored vehicles in Kyiv before transport to eastern Ukraine where Russian-backed militants seized large swaths of land in 2014, March 13, 2015. (iStock.com/Oleksandr Khomenko)

By Michael Judge

I spoke with the internationally acclaimed Ukrainian writer Kateryna Babkina from her home in Kyiv on Saturday, the same day the Ukrainian government recorded more than 130 Russian ceasefire violations, and Ukraine’s interior minister and 25 foreign journalists came under mortar fire in the eastern region of Donbas.

Yet Babkina, the 36-year-old “independent mother” of a 14-month-old daughter and award-winning writer of everything from journalism to novels, poetry, short stories, screenplays and children’s books, is—if not undaunted—focused on practical matters in the way only a mother of a young child can be.

“I have a baby toddler daughter,” she says on a video call. “So my everyday life hasn’t changed much here in Kyiv. You have to remember that we’ve lived in a state of war with Russia for the past eight years. Back in 2014 [when Russia invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea] I used to keep my car with a full tank—always. I would keep all my documents in a safe place and a bag always packed for emergencies. That lasted for three or four months, maybe half of a year. Some people left, went abroad for an extended stay. And then they extended and extended. But if you haven’t decided to move away entirely, you come back. And one day you are too tired or too lazy to go to the gas station after work and fill up the tank. You get used to it.”

“I’ve got a 10-year-old,” I tell her, trying to empathize with her concerns as a parent.

“Ten,” she replies with a smile, “that seems a little easier than a toddler.”

“All ages have their own challenges,” I laugh. “But isn’t the growing tension and talk of a wider war affecting your work, your family?” I ask.

“Of course, there is anxiety,” she says. “There is this feeling of tension. But does it really affect us? I wouldn’t say so. What it does is reveal how lame our state—I mean the national government and local governments—how lame they are. Even the president hasn’t made any official statement or announced a plan about what will happen or how people will be protected if the war spreads. Where are we going to get water? Where are we going to get electricity? In the U.S., you get public-service announcements: ‘OK, there are going to be tornadoes. So you do this, this, this, and that.’ We have nothing like that.”

That Babkina is most concerned about the daily workings of life, and the suffering of everyday people, isn’t surprising. Her poetry and stories are populated with the victims of history as it played out in Ukraine in the 20th and early 21st centuries, and the grace that helped them survive. As she recently told NewsNet, a newsletter of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, “The inspiration for my work comes from life, comes from people, and from how they transform their experiences, their past, their feelings, their traumas, their everything into something new that they carry on in the future. This is the most exciting thing about life, I would say: how people change and how they change the world. I don’t think this creative approach shifts based on different genres, because in different forms you can still talk about the same things and about the same ideas, so this is what I do, whatever it is, be it a film screen or a book for children. I’m really, really fascinated by people—different people—their stories, their experiences, and their emotions, and this is what I want to talk about and to show to other people as my stories, as many different experiences and as many different outcomes as I can so people understand each other more.”

“There is always someone whose husband or whose wife was killed in the east, and that person is struggling to overcome that trauma. All Ukrainians know someone who lost all their property in the east, who lost their business or home, their dog, their children . . . someone who had to leave during the night, and lost everything.”

There’s no doubt that Babkina, a prolific writer who’s been translated into English, Polish, Hebrew and German, among other languages, has helped the world better understand Ukraine and its people. Her 2019 collection of short stories, My Grandfather Danced Better than Anyone Else, won the prestigious 2021 Angelus Central European Literature Award. A series of 12 interconnected stories, the book tells the story of five families whose children meet on the first day of school in the first year (1991) of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.

Chytomo, a leading Ukrainian literary magazine, explains how the book spans more than 100 years of struggle and endurance. “From the 1920s in Kharkiv and the destruction of the Les Kurbas Theater, through the Holodomor [the 1932-3 famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians], World War II, the 1990s and several waves of emigration due to the war in Donbas; this book is primarily about accepting the past. It’s about how events and circumstances affect us regardless of whether we know about them or not. It’s about the longevity and connection of generations, the desire for love and acceptance, loneliness as a consequence or as a cause.”