Ukraine is not a movie

And this is a real war

Over the weekend, it was easy (for me, anyway) to get lost on Twitter as I added Ukrainian accounts to my feed so I could better understand what was happening.

It was daunting, reading that someone was hearing bombs and someone else was in the metro stations, which are now serving as bomb shelters. A friend of mine who lived in Ukraine and Russia sent me videos of his friends who are still in Kyiv, huddled underground on a dirt floor with two teenagers. Watching those videos removed the other-world quality from the coverage.

I mean, it’s not all that complicated, is it? Vladimir Putin sent troops to invade Ukraine in a blighted attempt to become a modern-day czar. Problem is, the world doesn’t need a czar, and the people of Ukraine — soldiers, grandmothers, and teenagers — have been fighting back with a ferocity Putin did not expect and for which he apparently did not plan.

• Men between the ages of 18 and 60 were conscripted to fight, and regular, everyday citizens picked up guns for urban warfare.

• One woman told Russian soldiers to put sunflowers seeds (the country’s flower) in their pockets, so that when they die in her country, their rotting bodies will make the sunflowers grow.

• An unnamed soldier told a Russian military ship to go fuck itself (and then, according to Ukraine Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that soldier was killed along with 12 others), but then again, they may have survived. God, I hope so.

• And everywhere, there were videos of fathers saying goodbye, of mothers saying hello to their children.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? This isn’t riveting theater. This is a war zone, and in the end, wars are always about the children.

I have cautiously given money to some charities, but I won’t make suggestions here. I leave that to you, what you feel you should and could do to ease the burden there.

As the bombs started, the defense reporter for “The Kyiv Independent” became my spirit animal when he tweeted, as bombs dropped, that he would see us in victorious Ukraine. The Independent is doing incredible journalism under conditions I can’t even imagine. If you want to help: