SOME THOUGHTS ON UKRAINE

Apologies to anyone who is a friend of mine on Facebook - as I'm copying and adapting a post that I wrote a few days ago, dedicated to all my friends in Ukraine, and to the countless numbers of men, women and children who want nothing more than to live out their lives in peace not only in Ukraine but in Russia and every other country on this earth - but who are prevented from doing so mostly by men hell bent on bringing wars.

  I feel that I cannot truly co-create a project called POWER while ignoring the unfolding threat of nuclear war and the general events that are overshadowing all of us as I write.. that feeling of being threatened and being unable to really even know how to protect my children isn't one of the most powerful feelings I've ever experienced..

I want to tell you a story first, which is a true first-hand experience which took place in north eastern Ukraine about 8 years ago.. as I think it has a real baring on where we are now.

I know first hand the terrible nature of the "clan" who came out of the Donetsk region, and who bullied and marauded their way through Ukraine, as I had direct exposure to this at the tail end of Vodka Empire, the five year documentary film/vodka experience that left scars and helped form so much of what has come since (and if you're in Europe you can watch that on Netflix - this isn't an ad for that of course, it's just sharing it if you want to stream it).

As I think back to the last time I visited my great grandfather's vodka distillery in the village of Douboviasovka, everything had changed. They had thrown the director, Andrei Alexandrovich into prison, and the neighbouring distillery director had been found hanged. In his place was a stocky man with a neck so wide it hard to tell where it ended and the rest of his body began.

We first met him while we were in the hotel in Konotop, the little town that was as close to the distillery as it was possible to get lodgings in. He arrived at around 8.30 in the morning, while we were having breakfast, strode through the front door, totally ignoring us and reaching across the small bar, grabbing a glass and filling it up with beer from the tap. He felt he owned everything there.

He hated us. Right from the start. He sneered, he talked about us as jokers, worthless idiots, despite the fact we were crammed into his car and had our Russian speaking translator right there. He called us "space men" - and spat violently from the window. He told us "God is great - you - your vodka - you are nothing."

André Alexandrovich - the director of the distillery we did business with before it was taken by the Russians in 2012

Everyone in the distillery we had worked with to launch the project, all the staff were trampled on. They were still there, but only as shells of themselves. They couldn't look us in the eye. Such was the violence of the thing. You see at that point, Yanukovich, who was a puppet of Putin had seized the reins. He was a gangster. There was talk of pro-Ukrainian politicians landing and being gunned down as they walked off their airplanes by Donestsk gangs. The violence was something beyond what I could understand. I just knew that I could never go back there. It was like a poison.

There was me, Christophe, one of my closest friends and director of photography, and then there was Oleksandr Bobrovskyy. To be honest we were all just relieved to make it through that day in tact, the violence was there, the hatred, the desire to crush us, extinguish everything. That was the last time I would ever go back the distillery and that was the day I knew all the work we had been doing there, all the love and care, had met with a brutal end. My ancestors had left Ukraine in 1918 - what in the hell was I doing there?

So for all my friends on the left, who who may have some sympathy with arguments that Putin should be left to Ukraine, that somehow the gang that he runs is in some way legitimate, and that Russia is simply trying to redress the balance of power in Europe, I would say simply to be very careful. I'll be the first to stand with you and to point my finger at the colonialism of America and I too can see the eastward drift of investments and expansion of Wall Street towards those Eastern countries. And I know that western capitalism is in deep crisis, and has many issues which it can no longer delay attending to.

But to me, all I can remember is how I felt that day. How much destruction and violence there was in that little, thick-set Russian man who had taken over the distillery at the supposed behest of the "Ukrainian State" (spirits distilleries like my great grandfather's had been taken over in 1917 and were still run by the state, but remember the government had been hijacked by Russians)

As I have been reading the news, and speaking to my friends who are still in Ukraine, I have done so with a sense of deep dread. I have felt that tiny taste of poison I had that day, flowing through me and I have felt afraid of what Putin might now do.

This isn't any clear cut ideological war. This is a man who has come up through the culture of just taking and taking. That's what post-Perestroika Ukraine was - it was the flagrant, daylight theft of public infrastructure. And Putin's rise to power has been the active repression of all freedoms of speech, the most grotesque repression of all who do not conform or obey.

The violent and crazy centralisation of power, so that now the entire fate of Europe is resting in the hands (and in the nuclear suitcase) of one of the most repulsive creatures I have ever seen. But perhaps there is a tiny difference in ideology, thinking about it. Putin and cronies believe only in brute power. The western leaders still believe in some shred of responsibility.

I would be hugely surprised if he stops his mission at Kiev. This thing has been building up, and it feels like a boil that is now bursting and will continue to spew out the festering hate.

So what do we do? For now, my only feeling is that we need to be strong and unified and keep doing our best in our own lives to be kind and open among ourselves.

 
This is really hard - particularly when you feel the stress of it all. Violence begets violence. You might find yourself shouting at the absurdity of it all and accidentally being cruel to the ones who need you the most. Our own children are being told in the playground that "nuclear war shouldn't start for another month or so.." What are we supposed to tell them?

So let's just try to be especially non-violent, and to spend as much time with our loved ones as we can.

From my study of history, and particularly 20th century Russian and Nazi history, I have to agree that standing up to a tyrant seems the only avenue, but I am certain the costs of doing this will be high. 

And what else do we do?

I think we must continue to lead lives as absolutely full of meaning as we can.

Following our purpose and our values.

We must be aware of the threat, and not run from it - but try not to focus directly on it and feel diminished by it.

To me the answer lies in continuing to build community and working towards the world we want, not in some far-removed future, but in the here and now.

Let's not let anyone, be they a far off tyrant, or some closer agent of repression, define to us what we should be worrying about or doing. Let's stand up for what is right.