The Arc №1

At the cost of the lives of the newest Ukrainian heroes, who burn in the atmosphere for the sake of Ukraine, we leave the orbit of forgotten empires and finally establish ourselves in our own. Mass shelling of Ukrainian territories, with which the terrorist state in the neighborhood tests our power, brings not only death, but also liberation. Today's "dungeon children" who spend hundreds of hours in shelters - either sculpting plasticine airplanes with a teacher, or building function graphs with a math teacher, or watching a night's sleep interrupted by the howling of the air alarm in the arms of mom and dad - are the first generation that does not you will need to burn yourself out.

In their free time, these Ukrainian children sing in the streets, play musical instruments and play games of chess, organize charity fairs of their own handiwork and print parts for drones on 3D printers — they join the approach of Ukrainian victory as much as they can within their childish powers, and sometimes even more devoted than adults. They do not suspect the existence of the Ruska writer Vladimir Korolenko, whom Mykola Mikhnovsky refused to shake his hand upon meeting, saying: "I will not shake hands with the traitors of my people!"; it is unlikely that there will ever be queues for tickets to the concert of the CIS singer Vera Brezhneva, who finally recorded a song in Ukrainian... in the fall of 2022; and, most likely, they will incinerate the interlocutor with a mocking and contemptuous look, who suddenly wants to add to the conversation a pitiful-nostalgic remark: "Ah, what a filth this is your pond fish!".

These and similar contexts for children of war are unknown, incomprehensible, unimportant, and therefore have lost their meaning, power of influence and attraction. Today's children and teenagers are tabula rasa and our chance, chosen by Ukrainian titans on the front line and suffered by them in Russian prisons, to build an Arch between Ukraine stuck in the past and Ukraine of the future.