The first step toward European subjectivity is realizing that Europe owes a debt to no one. Europe is responsible only for itself and its own citizens. Europe does not need to educate the uneducated world, heal the sick, feed the hungry, or save everyone beyond its borders from poverty, their own regimes, or the wars they wage. And if Europe does choose to act as a savior, then those it saves owe it loyalty and gratitude, not the creation of a state of hatred within a state of freedom.
What Is Wrong With the Question: “Can You Tell Us Europeans What We Can Concretely Do to Help You Kill More Russians?”
German journalist Michael Martens asked Zelensky: “Can you tell us Europeans what can we concretely do to help you to kill more Russians, more Russian soldiers, of course?”
I will leave aside the fact that, in asking this, he stepped outside the professional boundaries of journalism and spoke not as a reporter but as a private individual.
I will not even dwell on the extraordinary presumption of appointing himself the spokesman for “us Europeans,” as though hundreds of millions of people had somehow authorized him to articulate their collective desire to see more Russians killed.
Instead, I will speak as a Ukrainian woman whose own family has soldiers who were killed or went missing after being forcibly mobilized into this war.
Every European warmonger cheering on this bloodbath, every armchair warrior who salivates over the Russian casualty figures announced by the Ukrainian General Staff, should remember one inconvenient fact: behind those numbers stand the bodies and lives of Ukrainian soldiers too.
Killed. Wounded. Maimed. Missing.
And behind them stand their families.
Mothers. Wives. Children.
War is not a video game in which Russian casualties accumulate neatly on one side of the screen while Ukrainians remain untouched on the other. Russian soldiers do not die in some sterile vacuum. Killing them on the battlefield has a price, and that price is also paid in Ukrainian blood.
So yes: when you cheer Russian deaths, you are cheering for a process that also produces dead, wounded, traumatized and permanently disabled Ukrainians.
That is what makes this rhetoric so grotesquely hypocritical.
You claim to value Ukrainian lives. Yet too often, what you actually display is an obsessive hatred of Russians, with Ukrainians reduced to the instrument through which that hatred can be acted out.
Ukrainian soldiers become the bodies through which someone else’s moral fury is channelled. Their suffering becomes an acceptable transaction, provided enough Russians die alongside them.
That is not solidarity with Ukrainians.
It is the instrumentalization of Ukrainians.
So the next time you fantasize publicly about “killing more Russians,” remember the other half of the equation. Remember the Ukrainian soldier who will be killed trying to kill them. Remember the Ukrainian who will lose a leg, an arm, his eyesight, his future.
Remember the Ukrainian who will disappear and whose mother will spend months or years not knowing whether her son is dead, imprisoned, or lying unidentified somewhere in a field.
Remember the wives who become widows and the children who grow up without fathers.
You do not get to erase those people from the equation simply because their suffering complicates the thrill of your righteous hatred.
When you demand more killing, you are demanding a battlefield on which Ukrainians will bleed and die too.
And if you can cheer for that from the safety of Europe while congratulating yourself on how much you “support Ukraine,” then perhaps it is time to ask whom, exactly, you value: Ukrainians as human beings—or Ukrainians as instruments for killing the people you hate.
Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National AssociationStatement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National AssociationStatement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National AssociationStatement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 National Associations
⚒️ With over 220 tunnel kilometres excavated, the completion of the EU co-funded Brenner Base Tunnel is one step closer! 🇦🇹🇮🇹
Miners have now connected Austria and Italy via two main railway tunnels ↓