About two months ago, the messages started to arrive.
They were not the usual ones. I am used to Russia defenders and to people telling me Ukraine will lose. These were specific.
They told me I had crossed a line by writing about the United States, and that I was being watched. That I had no right to speak about a country where I do not vote, do not live, do not belong…
They told me what “could happen” to me if I kept writing here. Honestly, I did not take it seriously, people who can really do something rarely announce it first.
I knew the language and I knew the posture. Men far from danger, trying to sound dangerous.
But one of them mentioned they had “a way” to shut me down from the internet.
I wish I could write that I laughed and kept going as if nothing had happened. It would make a better story, but it would not be true.
I stopped because the threat touched the one place I am most afraid to lose:
My voice.
How would I survive a situation where my voice was taken from me?
For a long time now, writing is how I remain a person inside the pressure of this war. If someone could take that away, what would be left?
I carried that question for weeks like a stone in my pocket.
And then the answer became a little embarrassing, because it was so clear all the time and I took weeks to realize.
I have spent almost four years writing from a country at war. I have written about men walking toward fire because someone had to go. About people returning to work after funerals, about cities the world had already prepared to mourn but are still standing on the map.
Every word of it came from inside the country where it happened, and I was going to stop because of strangers throwing threats online from somewhere safe?
No.
The Freedom Line does not have the word love in its name. My other journal does. This place was born from something different.
It is my letter to my friends in the United States. It is Ukraine reaching across the ocean with the only thing we can give from experience, which is how people keep standing when the ground is taken from them.
What is happening in your country is not separate from what is happening in mine.
When the government of the United States moves closer to the country trying to erase Ukraine, that is not American internal politics anymore. It reaches my street and everything around me.
So yes, I will write about it.
I write as Ukrainian, and that is the only credential I need.
The same forces that want Ukraine erased want Americans too tired to resist and too ashamed to trust their own decency.
Putin in Moscow, his admirers in Washington.
Your fight against authoritarianism and our fight against invasion belong to the same line across two continents.
That is the line this journal is named for.
The place where freedom is defended by people who do not accept to be told it has already been lost.
The threats made me afraid at first, then they reminded me why this place has to exist.
The line was shaken. I will not pretend it wasn’t.
But I am writing to you again here.
Which means it held.
—Viktor
🇺🇦🇺🇸
This line and these words live only if they’re carried. Share them with someone who matters to you, and subscribe to keep them alive.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.