Opinion: I grew up in Russia and Ukraine.When people ask me where I’m from, I say

Editor’s note: Sasha Vasilyuk He is a journalist and author of a debut novel. “your attendance is required,” It spans 70 years, leading up to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. She grew up between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States. The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own.read more opinions On CNN.

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In most parts of the world, the war in Ukraine has been going on for two years, but for my family it has been going on for 10 years. In the spring of 2014, my family in Donbas watched from our window as separatist fighting erupted and then turned into shelling. It never completely stopped.

As a journalist and writer who was born in Ukraine, spent half of her childhood in Russia, and has relatives in both countries, witnessing that conflict has shaped the way I understand my identity, my two homelands, and their complex pasts. It has been changed. At that time, I wrote an essay about the Donbass war: “Don’t worry, grandma, this war will last forever.” But I had no idea how prophetic my title would become.

The Donbas conflict killed an estimated 14,000 people and caused major disasters. Between 2014 and 2022, there will be 1.7 million internally displaced people, including my cousin and little nephew. But months after grabbing international headlines, the outside world forgot about it and the story was left to smolder in Ukraine’s eastern corner.

That was until February 24, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unbridled ambitions turned from the Donbas to all of Ukraine. For me and my family, what’s happening today feels like deja vu. The war effort stagnates, international interest wanes, hundreds of thousands of lives are lost, and millions of families will never be the same.

In a speech before the full-scale invasion, President Putin made paranoid references to denazification of Ukraine in order to rally Russians to support the war, distorting history to serve his purpose. Putin’s history lesson seemed strange to many observers, but for a man who grew up in the shadow of World War II and came of age during the Cold War, this is the latest and most radical attempt to take us all back. To the past version of him that was just a step.

If there’s anything useful to be gleaned from President Putin’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson, it’s that the past plays a leading role in how the Russian president decides the future.

Since coming to power in 2000, President Putin has invested significant resources in glorifying Russia and the Soviet Union’s past, choosing what to exclude from history and criticizing the past, especially World War II. A number of laws were enacted that stipulated how things should be drawn. The results are not just words from history textbooks. It’s on the ground right now, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.

I first noticed the dangerous manifestation of his strange obsession with reviving a bygone Soviet era when I visited family in Donbass in 2016, two years after the troubles began. In the once booming, modernizing city of Donetsk, I found empty buildings, air raid shelter signs, and shuttered newsagents riddled with bullet holes. However, what shocked me the most was the signboard.

They were all designed in the exact same style as Soviet propaganda posters and used the same cheap patriotic language praising the defenders of the Motherland. One popular person said: “I’ve arrived in Berlin. If necessary, I’ll do it again.” As he walked through the city, he could understandably imagine that he had entered the Stalinist era.

After that trip, I started writing a novel called Your Presence is Obligatory, which covers the period from World War II to the Donbas War. The film centers on the story of a Ukrainian-Jewish grandfather who kept his traumatic experiences in World War II a secret throughout his life due to fear of persecution by the Soviet government. I wanted to explore the role that fear and silence play in authoritarian societies then and now.

Having grown up reading Russian history books that promoted patriotic stories, I learned from researching my own novel that there were many hidden dark sides to Soviet history. My grandfather’s story is unique and at the same time his was one of millions of similar stories that could have fought against historical revisionists, but instead died out along with historical revisionists. It’s gone. I dreamed of one day publishing this book in Russia and Ukraine because I felt that most families in Russia and Ukraine continued to keep similar secrets created by the Soviet culture of repression.

I was editing the final chapter when Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022, which added an eerie weight to my novel.

As Russian tanks rolled through Ukraine, life was quickly turned upside down. Most of my relatives (both in Russia and Ukraine) became refugees (some for the second time in just 10 years), while my novels were purchased in several countries. Ironically, however, this novel will not be published in Ukraine or Russia. Because Ukraine is busy with war and doesn’t want to read about it. And in Russia, this novel is against some of Putin’s laws.

In light of all this, this invasion has forced me to reconsider my relationship with my two homelands. I am not ethnically Russian, but before the invasion I called myself a Russian-American. It was a collective term for Soviet exiles, many of them Jews, many of them Ukrainians, who had been using it since arriving in the United States in 2015. 1990s.

But unlike Putin, I can no longer cling to the past. The world in which Russia plays the role of big sister to Ukraine has collapsed. To call yourself Russian now means to be deeply ashamed that you aim to destroy a place that has every right to exist. It also means fear of what will happen if we step into Putin’s version of backward Russia.

For the past two years, I have sometimes referred to myself as “post-Soviet.” It is far from ideal for an identity that stems from the same past that Putin is trying to recreate. So now when people ask me where I’m from, I say I’m from Ukraine and Russia. He said he had family in both countries, but they are now separated.

I say this war will last forever unless we realize where Putin is leading us and stop him before it’s too late.