This past Thursday, I woke Polina as usual for her online class. That day it was a European-based all girl comics class taught in Russian.  Most of Polina’s classes are taught this way. Each week the teacher presents a theme and the girls use software to illustrate the theme in a comic strip, which they read to the group at the end of class. The other two girls in the class live in Europe. For them, it’s an after school activity. Since their afternoon is our morning, as a homeschooling family, that arrangement works well for us.

Polina, a night owl like her father, stayed up past her bedtime the night before with… her father.

“What were you doing?” I asked Peter.

“Discussing 3D modeling.”

Together, they stayed up until 10:30 pm.  My conveyances to Polina that she needs to go to bed earlier or suffer the consequences the following morning have often proved futile. She is so much like her parents- working late into the night to accomplish her dreams, in this case her arts and crafts projects. Not wanting to stifle her creativity, I let her stay up, within reason.

On Thursday morning, I let her sleep until I couldn’t forestall time any longer.

“Class starts in 15 minutes,” I said, shoving her in bed.  

She got up and got ready. A few minutes after she sat down, she called my name the length of the rambler. Wearily, I got up, because I stayed up late too.

“There’s no one in class,” she said, staring at the computer screen.

“What do you mean there’s no one in class?” I asked, walking to the dining room table.  

Sure enough, no one had logged in.  I checked the class messages on Facebook.  There was a message from the teacher.

“Hello everyone! I can’t get my tongue to say “good afternoon”….  I would like to cancel the lesson today, as I feel bad physically and even more mentally. I don’t want to work with children in this state. I hope for your understanding. See you next week!”

I keep reading.  There is a comment from a parent on vacation in Belgrade.

“Take care of yourself! I hope that you will be able to return to France as soon as possible,” writes the teacher.

What’s going on in Belgrade? I think angrily.  And what does this have to do with cancelling our class? I’m frustrated because this is the third time the class was cancelled at the last minute.  With the knowledge that the teacher recently contracted COVID, I start typing, “Are you feeling badly because of COVID?  I kindly request that you let us know in advance. Your class starts at 8:30 am for us.  I wake Polina so she is ready, and when you cancel the class at the last minute, I feel sorry for the child.”  I reread my message and removed some harsher rhetoric that more sharply betrayed my annoyance, then clicked send.

I gave Polina the option of going back to sleep or working on her homework.  She chose the latter.  I head back to bed and start scrolling the news.  

And that’s when I learned that Ukraine, where I was born, was in a state of war.

I reread the message chain.  It wasn’t Belgrade the parent was talking about, it was Belgorod, a Russian city near the border with Ukraine. I hadn’t read the name properly. She was stuck there with her family, not knowing if there would be air transportation back to France. I was glad I deleted the harsher rhetoric.

That day and almost every day since then I have been glued to the news about Ukraine. I have felt anger, sadness and helpless, as many of my Russian friends and acquaintances. Many Russians oppose the war. Putin’s pretenses for invasion are false. The Ukrainian president himself is from Russian speaking eastern Ukraine and learned Ukrainian as an adult when he moved to the capital, Kyiv. Accusations of persecution of Russian-speakers don’t make sense. In interviews inside Ukraine, I hear both Russian and Ukrainian spoken. There is no sense of persecution of Russian speakers. In one interview, I hear one man answering the reporter’s questions in Russian while his neighbor responds in Ukrainian. His Ukrainian neighbor bought food for his Russian neighbor. What persecution? What denazification? The president had family members killed by the Nazis.

The last week has felt raw to me. I’ve cried over good and bad news. I am moved by the outpouring of support in the international community, brought to grief by the destruction happening in the Ukraine, angered that someone would insert racism into a humanitarian crisis. Unlike other people’s suffering, the US has difficulty getting involved because Russia has nuclear weapons. By imposing sanctions, the US and Europe are fighting a proxy war with the Russian people instead of the Russian military. Unfortunately, I think Putin and the oligarchs will be just fine while ordinary Russians will suffer. The goal is to get Russians to topple their government, as they did in 1990, since NATO can’t.

I decided to not hide the conflict from Polina. It is an important moment in Ukraine’s history, one she can tell her own children. Most of Polina’s classes are in Russian, and she is also studying Ukrainian.

“Why did Russia invade Ukraine?” she asked simply.

I explained that Russia is like the glutton named Zhora in a famous Russian nursery rhyme. He was big and fat and decided to eat Ukraine, in the shape of a hot dog.

“Why?” she asked again.

Because Putin is crazy? I thought to myself. Because he’s a paranoid dictator that represses and kills his own people. I decided to not go that route.

“Because he’s fat and he wants more,” I said.

I’m afraid of Putin getting away with ruthless killing and oppression, not just in his own country, but in another country that did not elect him. The US, broadcasting to the world for weeks before the invasion that they would not intervene, effectively made the decision easier for Putin. NATO voted against closing the air space to prevent Russians from bombing the sh** out of Ukraine. They haven’t supplied Ukraine with planes so Ukraine can do it themselves. Ukraine relied on the west by relinquishing their nuclear weapons in 1994. They fought with NATO in Afghanistan. This is the end nuclear non-proliferation and trust.

Ukraine is fighting with a patchwork army. All men ages 18-60 have been forbidden to leave Ukraine. There have been no complaints. The trains of refugees are filled entirely by women, children, and the very elderly. The government of Ukraine has handed out assault weapons to people to defend their homes. In the city of Odessa and Lviv, residents prepared hundreds if not thousands of Molotov cocktails to defend their city. American veterans are heading to Ukraine since the official government of the US can’t.

I ask Polina’s teacher to please let me know through WhatsApp if the class is cancelled again.

“Now my heart hurts,” I added.