Russian attack on Kyiv: Shevchenko Park calls for revenge!

      On October 10, 2022, Russia attacked my city, my Kyiv. Russian missiles targeted to destroy not so much military targets, infrastructure facilities, but our history.

      Monument to Saint Volodymyr the Baptist of Ukraine.

      Monument to Taras Shevchenko, the father of the Ukrainian political nation.

      Monument to Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, the founder of modern Ukrainian statehood.

      Putin's bandits targeted not water supply, heating system or power lines, but our sacred past, the national pride of the modern generation, which is fighting for the freedom and independence of Ukraine at the front.

      They did not hit any of these symbols, they missed, but they blew up a playground in Taras Shevchenko Park opposite the red building of the Kyiv National University....

      When we returned from evacuation to our native Kyiv in 1944, Shevchenko Park became the center of my childhood for me, where I played football with my classmates on an old, patched-over tire, which seemed to us to be a real ball. Here I gave my brother's notes to a stranger boy who, like Mykola, was later arrested by the MGB as member of the OUN. Here I arranged dates with girls, here I rested and invented the plots of my books... Here I came up with a novel called "Shevchenko Park" - about the life of a Keivan in the 20th and 21st centuries. The novel will now be written by someone else.

      Looking at the austere monument to Taras Shevchenko opposite the red university building, I always wondered why the German occupiers, cannibals and enemies of the Slavs, left this monument untouched, as well as ancient cathedrals, churches and other symbols of our history. I did not know that this dirty work, unfinished by the Hitlerites, would be tried to be done by the "elder brothers", the rashists, led by the new crazy Führer of neo-fascist Russia.

      Next to the monument to Taras Shevchenko there is a playground, my post-war childhood, later my children grew up here and more recently my grandchildren played here.

      Targeting our past, Russian bandits try to destroy our future - a playground, so that sonorous voices of young Kyivans do not sound on it.

      ***

      We, Ukrainians, found ourselves in the very center of the bloody storm of the 20th century and are paying an exorbitantly high price for the honor of being the object of attention of the entire humanity, listening to compliments of members of the UN Security Council, powerless to overcome the veto of a stupid russian idiot, the veto of a terrorist country.

      The corpses of peaceful defenseless people killed in Shevchenko Park are calling for revenge. Taras Shevchenko is calling for revenge.

      May the Ukrainian freedom be sprinkled with enemy's evil russian blood.

      Death to russian abomination!Putin must die on a pole!

      Yuriy Shcherbak, writer and diplomat, Chairman of the Council of the Independent Media Forum

      Photo: Morning on Volodymyrska Street on October 10, 2022, in Kyiv, glavcom.ua.