Kiev is a very large and very beautiful city, tidy, and clean, with churches, ancient buildings, others of clear Soviet imprint, and finally very modern skyscrapers.
I arrived on Saturday 17 August at 5.30 in the morning, after the driver, unable to arrive before the curfew, made a long night stop at the gates of the city and reached the bus station, which is located next to the train station, exactly at the end of the curfew. The station was already in full operation, with many buses and minibuses arriving or departing.
Few speak English, but we have all learned to use mobile phone applications to translate, if the signs are not enough.
I can’t find my little hotel; A gentleman accompanies me and when he realizes that my phone is now almost empty he would like to go and get his to lend it to me. I dissuade him by thanking him warmly because there is a bar opposite, where I stop for several hours to charge my phone and PowerBank now empty. Two very kind young people run the bar with an adjoining shop of oriental products such as New Age. Prices are about a third or a little more than ours.
Life flows in absolute normality: sustained private traffic, regular trams and buses, electric bikes and scooters for hire, riders on bicycles, the gigantic crowded train station. Everything appears absolutely, and for me irreally, quiet: markets, shops and supermarkets stocked, people shopping, eating ice cream, going for a walk in the park where children play in the equipped area. A flyer announces the disappearance of a cat, three tattooed girls with colored hair go for a picnic on the lawn… The war is there, but it is not seen.
Paradoxically, in Rome you can see around the monuments, the palaces of power and the embassies many more soldiers in camouflage with weapons of war, moreover absolutely useless and unusable in the city.
Here we remember the war because, unlike what happened during the journey, the men are seen, but the majority are dressed in camouflage and perhaps are on leave, because it is full of shops where many about to leave or already enlisted prefer to stock up privately for their military equipment and finally for the propaganda posters that often replace the advertising ones. In addition to the military, you can see workers in uniform (policemen, waste collectors, etc.), or children and the elderly, too young or too old to be enlisted.
To this, I must add that a couple of times I heard the sound of the siren in the distance and briefly. Maybe it was a false alarm, but anyway no one cared and before I could decide anything it was already over.
Of course, even in Rome and in Italy life flows normally and quietly, as if the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza did not concern us, as if the degeneration, even by mistake, of this war fought in Ukraine between NATO, which supplies the weapons, and the Russian Federation does not also expose our European cities to be possible targets of reprisals and as if the slaughter of Gaza did not take place with the our support, since we do not vote at the UN for a ceasefire and instead receive the Israeli president, a war criminal, with all honors.
This is why I too “hate the indifferent” as Antonio Gramsci taught us. Then, let’s be clear, you have to live, and the mind must also think about something else, because fortunately beauty, music, the laughter of the boys and kindness are an antidote to horror and a challenge to death.
So welcome the desire to live always and in any case that in a thousand ways imposes itself, but possibly with the awareness of the challenge against death and war, without removing anything, but to recharge and do, or at least try to do, something not to be accomplices.
Mauro Carlo Zanella, has been living in Rome for over thirty years, an elementary school teacher at the Trullo, a historic suburb of Rome and now one of the most multi-ethnic neighborhoods in the capital. I am part of the Anpi “Franco Bartolini” section and of the choir and theater group connected to it. He has always been a member of the Communist Refoundation Party and the first of Proletarian Democracy. Conscientious objector with Pax Chisti in the early eighties I participated in the struggles against the installation of Euromissiles in Comiso and in the protests against the leaders of capitalist globalization, from Genoa 2001 to Fasano 2024. I am committed to fostering a culture of Peace and the full integration of pupils with parents from other countries and/or Roma. For six years I have been part of the Mani Rosse Antirazziste group promoted by Enrico Calamai, former vice-consul in Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires, which since July 2018 has been denouncing the complicity of Italy and Western countries in the migranticide of the New Desaparecidos by parading every Thursday afternoon in front of the Viminale.
