Hearts and Bullets: The Woman In The Book Cover

Chapter 6

Chapter 6
His alarm went off, waking him up from a deep slumber.
Maxim lazily opened his eyes and reached out for his phone to turn the alarm off. He was about to go back to sleep when he saw he had a notification. It was from the dating app saying he had a match.
Squinting, he checked who he matched with. And his sleepiness disappeared when he saw the photo of a beautiful woman.
It was her. They finally matched!
Excited, he propped up in his bed, naked.
He checked the time. 11:45 in the morning.
Hi. How are u?
He sent his match a message. Then, he jumped off from his bed and opened the fridge. He had a few cans of beer left. He had to replenish it.
He grabbed a can of beer and popped it open. Then, he drank the content in one, long shot.
Working on a ship wasn't easy. He had been a sailor for ten years now, but sometimes, loneliness still got him. Booze and cigarettes were his distraction.
And since the war broke out in his country, he wasn't only fighting with loneliness, but also worried about what future awaited his beloved motherland.
Ukraine used to be a beautiful country, but with missiles flying more than a dozen a day, its continued existence was threatened. Ukraine, as a state post 1990 when it gained independence after the dissolution of the USSR, may no longer exist when the conflict ended.
In fact, theories abound that Ukraine would disintegrate into smaller states that would be absorbed as territories by other neighboring countries - with Russia annexing Novorossiya, Hungary taking Transcarpathia, and Poland seizing Western Ukraine.
He hated how this ugly war was all political in nature. The Ukrainians, Russians and Belarussians were all one people, once upon a time. They were brother Slavs who spoke one language. Now, the hate between the Ukrainians and Russians ran deep, and it may take a generation or more for the wounds to heal, especially now that more than half a million Ukrainians were unofficially counted as KIA on the battlefield.
The Ukrainian government was trying its best to hide the real numbers of Ukrainian casualties (KIA and WIA) as the war between Ukraine and Russia raged on, but the large cemeteries that sprouted like mushrooms all over the country revealed the ugly truth.
The recent survey showed that every Ukrainian family knew more than two to three friends or relatives who died in the battlefield.
He had some friends and relatives who died, too. His brother was one of them. In fact, if he was not working abroad, he knew he would be damned conscripted, too, and be forced to fight in the frontline. And more or less, he would be part of the sad statistics.
It had been more than two years since Russia intervened in the Donbass, and his hope that the conflict would end sooner was slipping away.
Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government, with the backing of NATO and EU, planned to fight the Russians until the last Ukrainian.
He hated Putin for his political decision to invade Ukraine, but he hated Zelensky, too, for his tunnel vision to agree to his Western masters' wishes to weaken Russia at the expense of precious Ukrainian blood.
Every ordinary Ukrainian citizen just wanted to live in peace, not embroiled in a senseless war, but the elites in his country wanted bloodshed. It was easy to pursue such destructive foreign policy when it wasn't them or their relatives who were being sent to the battlefield to fight and die.
Those who had the money and the means to flee Ukraine had avoided conscription, but those who didn't have the capacity to do so were stuck and forcefully conscripted. And the future that awaited those people who didn't want to fight and were forcefully conscripted was grim.
They never had any choice. They had to fight an enemy with sheer firepower and artillery. That was just it. Surrender was not even an option. And if they did surrender to the Russians, or even just thought of surrendering, they would be considered traitors and would be liquidated by their own.
The real victims of the senseless violence were the ordinary Ukrainians who were trapped between two crushing rocks.
Of course, he loved his country, and having another country invade it was despicable. But having a leader who callously wasted the lives of its people, without pursuing other peaceful options, was equally revolting.
They had relied so much from the promised help by their Western allies, but despite the unprecedented sanctions imposed against Russia, financial and military support from more than 30 countries, Ukraine was still struggling to drive the Russians out of every square meter of Ukrainian territory.
And then they had the audacity to undertake a delusional plan to seize Crimea back, which Russia considered a vital part of its territory since 2014, and attacking it may invoke nuclear retaliation.
Knock on wood, but he never envisioned any part of Ukraine to be another Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia had the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world, and Ukraine had none, except its powerful allies. But even the mighty United States was reluctant to corner Russia and bend its knees, because it might trigger an all-out nuclear war.
The world would come to an end should nuclear winter happen. There would be no winner. That was for sure.
War was ugly. It bred violence after violence.
Right now there were many issues Ukraine was facing aside from the direct consequences of war. It also faced other issues such as the imminent collapse of its population, human trafficking, organ harvesting, exploitation of children, and the deeply-rooted corruption in the government. And then there was the polarizing issue of Nazism that the government was trying so hard to sweep under the rug.
He just wanted the war to end, fuck politics, but sometimes the world wasn't just black and white. It was a complex layer of different shades of gray.

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Sharon Rose