[Note: This interview took place whilst volunteering in a kitchen in Kyiv]
Vic: So that’s recording now. Hopefully it’ll pick you up, there’s definitely background noise here! But yeah, if you could tell me the characters that you’ve just mentioned?
Jason: Yeah. I’m definitely not as immersed in this as the volunteers who have been here for a longer time or the Ukrainians, but from just watching from over in the States the initial invasion there are definitely some iconic moments that made headlines and got a lot of traction. Maybe the biggest one was the Snake Island, Russian warship go fuck yourself incident where the, it was the Moskva, was coming up on Snake Island and told the Ukrainian border guards to surrender, and that was their response.
I think initially when that came out the story that went along with it of what had happened to the defenders is that they had been killed in the Russian attack, and it made that line a little more poignant. Then it turned out that they had been captured I think and they were later released or something. There’s a little bit of a fog of war element to that story, but one of the ones where there’s actually a recording of the radio transmission. Definitely rooted in something that happened.
And the other one I mentioned was the video of the Ukrainian grandmother going up to the invading Russian soldiers and telling them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that when they die, the sunflowers will grow over their graves. Which, uh, that video definitely made the rounds in the States during the initial days of the invasion, just as another encapsulation of the resistance of the Ukrainian people to the Russian invasion, both militarily and then sort of in these little interpersonal moments that didn’t have anything to do with combat, but- these little moments of Ukrainian resistance in various forms.
Vic: So were these like on the TV in America, or was it more social media you were seeing it?
Jason: I don’t spend a lot of time on social media. I don’t really have- I don’t have an Instagram or anything. I don’t watch a lot of TV news either. TV news and social media in the US are pretty um, kinda cesspools. But, they were definitely being traded on print media and online news media. I forget exactly where I saw those particular stories, but if you asked an American who was sort of paying moderate attention to the war in March of 2022- which a lot of Americans were- I think they’d be familiar with both of those stories.
Vic: Did you end up discussing them with people in America?
Jason: Um, I don’t remember any specific discussions, but I do- I mean, I think the- I’m an army veteran, and a lot of my friends are ex-military, and I think we were all very impressed with the Ukrainian defense in the initial days of the invasion, and the Snake Island Russian warship go fuck yourself incident, I think it was a pretty representative of the sort of the pluck and the defiance to the Russian military in the early days of the war. I remember having discussions about just the- how impressed we were generally with the way they were managing to fend off this much larger Russian military, which that story is sort of part of.
Vic: So did that kind of thing contribute to you wanting to come here to volunteer?
Jason: Um, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I’ve always been pretty sympathetic to what the Ukrainian people have suffered over the course of the full-scale invasion and wanted to do something small to help out. It’s, you know, less to do with the, you know, being impressed by the pluck and the resilience of the Ukrainian military than just empathy for the suffering, I think, that brought me out here, but- I think those sorts of incidents did galvanize a lot of the support for Ukraine in the US. Both because they’re just sort of good stories. They’re good underdog stories and everybody loves an underdog and they’re funny in their own way, and entertaining whilst also being a good representation of the Ukrainian will to exist. And also because the um, I think you want to support people that are, um- it’s, you sort of want to help people that are helping themselves, and they, I think, sort of communicated the Ukrainian will to defend their own country in a way that, you know, like a lot of American allies haven’t necessarily displayed in other conflicts that we’ve supported in the past. So I think the fact that these very clear representations of how determined the Ukrainians were to fight for their independence and sovereignty definitely helped, I think, engender support for the Ukrainians in the US. That probably didn’t make a lot of sense, but-
Vic: No, it’s good, thank you! While you’ve been out here, have you done much like souvenir shopping, like bring things back from the US?
Jason: <laughs> No, I haven’t. I think the only thing I’ve bought is a little shirt for my nephew. Other than that, I’m not much of a souvenir guy.
Vic: Thank you for that.
Jason: Yeah, no problem.
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