Russia’s assaults on Krywyj Rih and Sumy | EUROtoday

First the kids have been buried, then the artist Margarita. Maybe you possibly can write about it in Holy Week. A Russian rocket hits a playground within the vibrant day. Nine kids are useless. I’m wondering how dad and mom really feel in Ukraine? The horror hangs over everybody. The air protection shouldn’t be sufficient. Each of us is aware of that too. It can occur in every single place, this time in Krywyj Rih on Palm Sunday in Sumy. I see the compiled arms of a kid within the coffin, the face of a person who leans over this little one, distorted from ache and love – and my thoughts stops.

The fourth conflict spring. I drive by way of Berlin and, on the sting of notion, I register just a few yellowed Ukrainian flags on the balconies. The occasions in Ukraine are solely perceived within the edge, fades by way of the length, the hopelessness and, sure, it’s going to quickly be again. The vibrant colours from Krywyj Rih break by way of the uninteresting. A spontaneous memorial was created on this playground: tons of toys on the swings, on the carousel, within the sandpit. Colorful, like Easter eggs.

The day after the assault on the playground: Margarita Polovinko’s dying, dozens of photographs of her on Instagram. A younger fairly girl: trendy coiffure, a self -made cigarette in her hand. Somewhat gambled, she stops by the digital camera. Grief, outrage, fainting. She was accumulating cash for her unit! Friends publish photos from totally different occasions, many studied along with her on the artwork academy in Kiev. She was a little bit older than my kids. Then somebody posts a photograph of her diploma thesis: a papier maker on skinny legs – skinny like Margarita, extra of a horse’s soul than his physique – rises throughout everybody and appears by way of the window as if it have been flying out.

I did not know Margarita personally, however adopted her, like many Ukrainian artists on social networks. Some described them because the capturing star of Ukrainian artwork. She additionally got here from the Krywyj Rih industrial metropolis, like the kids simply killed. In her artwork she was thinking about publish -industrial landscapes, for the individuals on the facet. She painted fabulous beings and gardens, massive oil work. With the conflict she switched to sketches with ballpoint pen, to routinely register the ache. To Butsha, after all the pieces you had seen there, she painted a screaming kids’s angel in a tough shade with the pencil – as if she wished to over -paint dying: a lady from Irpin, “that fly over the ugliness of the world”.

Perhaps this cry of Margarita known as to conflict, and with braveness and readability, she gave her deeper and deeper to conflict like in a funnel. First she helped constructing destroyed homes between Cherson and Mykolajiw, then she was a paramedic within the evacuation of accidents from the entrance line. At the top of 2024 she volunteered to the entrance – and now she has fallen as a soldier. I as soon as noticed her conflict photos in an exhibition in Kiev: landscapes, mutilated physique, painted homes painted along with her personal blood as if she was manifested along with her physique the wounded world as if it have been the metabolism of conflict. Blood coloured all the pieces: two figures are sitting underneath the tree in hug “Lovers Before Death”. Her blood was not a cry for assist, she mentioned, however a fabric that corresponded to the conflict.

Her artist associates drove from Kyiv to Krywyj Rih to the funeral. There they met Margaritas comrades from their unit, and they also stood collectively on the grave. Hardly any photos have been taken. After that, the artists pulled by way of the publish -industrial panorama and photographed the sparse vegetation, paths that grow to be crimson within the rain of the ore, and a pond within the quarry. “Margarita’s Paradise”, somebody wrote. I consider her skinny horse and the playground memorial in Kryvyj Rih, a three-year-old named Zwitok, Blume, which can by no means develop, and take a word between the toys with a toddler script: “Letter to the sky”.