“That’s it, mum, goodbye,” he is dying, dead, a Ukrainian soldier in his last moments caught on helmet camera makes his peace. The eight minutes leading up to his death have been shared on social media, a close combat struggle between him and his Russian counterpart. With his left eye stabbed, his own blade turned onto him and pushed into his neck, the Ukrainian soldier talks calmly to his foe who stops the attack.
They share a moment, a break in the absurdity of war.
“The world is so beautiful. Let me leave calmly. Go away, please.”
The Russian soldier bids his enemy farewell and adds, “You fought great.” Then in an act of mercy he ends the Ukrainian soldier with a hand grenade.
A mother lost her son.
Another clip of the Russian soldier sharing his perspective has also emerged, he calmly breaks down the melee with pain behind his eyes. There is regret, but a professional distance lingers. A reminder that human men will kill strangers not out of hatred or any personal self interest, only because they have been ordered to do so.
They fight for survive inside a world created by government and tribalism. A world that strips away the individual and replaces them with collectives. These are neither young individual men, but representatives of their government, their nation. The fight to survive in war that profits local masters and distant foreigners who could not care less about their sacrifice or the terror experienced and inflicted. In fact most on this planet are indifferent to a young man’s death. It’s war, is the mantra of disdain the commoner shrugs along with the political masters.
It is war.
“I Miss you. I miss you. I miss you…” The soldier repeats as he bleeds out, to his mother. Perhaps to a lover or the world itself.
The inhumanity of the clip has come not from the two men engaged in death but the distant digital fingers of voyeurs who remain comfortable with their opinions and perspectives. The children brains who compare what they see to a video game, those who seem confused by the Asiatic appearance of the Russian soldier, a Yakut and then those who break down from the limited visuals what the dead soldier should have done. Life and death on the screen is entertainment to them.
The moment of intimate violence, a microcosm of war itself, shared to the world to go viral in a niche part of the internet for a limited time, the price for such fame, a man’s life. His family will see the clip no doubt, witness his courage, hear words spoken from a clear mind, note his dignity and the respect shown from his enemy. Though none of that is comfort or a replacement for a human being lost to the mechanised madness of policy.
It’s not a movie or a video game.
It’s war.
The pornography of violence in the clip is less present than the futility of war itself. As the Russian proverb goes, If you live next to a cemetery, you can not mourn every body.
The Russian-Ukraine war is a graveyard that has filled the cemeteries of both nations with soldiers and civilians bodies. We should mourn for them all. They died in a war that outsiders mostly view as a bloody piece of the grand chessboard of the great game of world affairs, the sacrifice of a proxy in order to contain a threat. These are not flags on a map, but real people.
“Let me breathe, it hurts a lot. “
“You fought great.”
“Let me leave in peace. Don’t touch me, I’m done. Let me die. “
That’s it, Mum, Goodbye.”
