Victoria Amelina (1986–2023), Ukrainian writer who left her literary career to document war crimes and was killed in a missile strike in Kramatorsk in June 2023, wrote words that now belong to the irreversible archive of this war:«Я документую воєнні злочини і слухаю звук обстрілів, а не поезію.» / “Ya  dokumentuiyu voenni zlochyny i slukhayu zvuk obstriliv, a ne poeziyu.”“I document war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poetry.”

In this sentence, poetry does not disappear. It changes function. The writer becomes witness. Language ceases to interpret and begins to preserve. What is at stake is no longer expression, but truth itself. The poet does not renounce poetry; poetry is displaced, deferred, waiting for a future in which words may again emerge from life rather than from its destruction.

Four years have now passed since the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Much has been said in the vocabulary of geopolitics: sovereignty, security, alliance, deterrence. These terms describe necessary realities. Yet they do not fully reach the anthropological depth of what began.

For what returned on that winter morning was not only war. It was, it remains fratricide.

For more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many believed that Europe had crossed a threshold beyond which such events had become improbable. The Cold War had ended without a final battle. Ideological confrontation dissolved into administrative transition. A new era appeared possible, governed less by existential struggle than by economic integration and institutional stability. Borders remained, but they seemed to have lost their fatal character.

Yet this apparent stability rested on a fragile foundation. The Cold War had frozen tensions without resolving them. It had preserved trauma without healing it. Beneath the surface remained famine and deportation, compromise and survival, silence and adaptation. Entire populations had learned to live in conditions where language itself was often separated from truth, where public speech and private knowledge followed different laws.

What freezes does not disappear. It waits.

When frozen ground thaws, it reveals what had remained intact beneath the surface.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought “local-styled liberation”, but it also brought disorientation that corresponds to the recurrent internal of the immense Russian Empire territories. Structures that had governed life for generations disappeared rapidly. New political and religious realities emerged, often under intense internal and external pressure. Identities that had coexisted uneasily within imperial frameworks were suddenly required to redefine themselves in absolute terms. What had once been ambiguous became categorical.

On the first days of the invasion, Metropolitan Onuphryi, head........

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