When Ihor Sumliennyi, a young environmental activist, arrived at the site of a recent missile strike, the rubble had barely stopped smoking.
Police officers guarded the street. People who had lived in the smashed apartment building stared in disbelief, some making the sign of the cross next to him. He started poking around.
And then, bam! His eyes lit up. Right in front of him, lying near the sidewalk, was exactly what he was looking for: a mangled chunk of shrapnel, a piece of the actual Russian cruise missile that had slammed into the building.
He scooped it up, pricking himself in the process on the jagged steel edges, stuffed it in his backpack and briskly walked the hour home — “I didn’t want the police to stop me and think I was a terrorist.”
That ugly chunk of steel has now become the star of his “war trophies” collection, which spans everything from ammunition tins and a used rocket-propelled grenade shaft to a pair of black Russian boots he found in Bucha, a battered suburb of Kyiv.
“Those have really bad energy,” he said.
It might seem eccentric, even macabre, to collect war debris like this. But Sumliennyi isn’t the only one. Across Ukraine, many civilians and soldiers are foraging for shrapnel pieces, mortar fins, spent bullet casings and bits of bombs.
Ukrainian artists are weaving them into their work. Auction houses are moving discarded pieces of weapons and other battlefield finds, raising thousands of dollars for Ukrainian soldiers. One woman is even making sculptures from the uniforms of dead Russians.
It clearly speaks to something bigger. So many Ukrainians want to be on the front lines — or to somehow feel connected to the cause even if they are far from the fighting or don’t see themselves as cut out for combat. With patriotism cresting and their country’s existence at stake, they are seeking out something tangible they can hold in their hands that represents this enormous, overwhelming moment. They crave their own little piece of history.
“Each piece has a story,” said Serhii Petrov, a well-known artist working in Lviv, in western Ukraine. He’s now incorporating spent bullet cartridges into the masks he makes.
As he handled one, he mused, “Maybe it was someone’s last bullet.”
At a charity auction in Lviv on Sunday, Valentyn Lapotkov, a computer programmer, paid more than $500 for an empty missile tube that had been used, the auctioneers said, to blow up a Russian armoured personnel carrier. He said that when he touched it he felt “close to our heroes.”
Memorialising the war, even when it’s likely far from over, is a way to show solidarity with the soldiers and those who have suffered. One of Kyiv’s biggest museums recently staged an exhibition of war artefacts collected since the Russians attacked in February. The rooms are full of gas masks, missile tubes and charred debris. The message is clear: See, this is what real war really looks like.
-- New York Times
The writer is an American Pulitzer prize-winning journalist
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