Avdiivka, before the war, was 30,000 people living in a comfy bedroom community on the outskirts of Donetsk, Ukraine. Then came the invasion of February 2022 and Avdiivka ended up on the frontlines. It was bombed and then bombed some more. Donetsk was occupied - the Russian army just a few miles away. Now, a year later, it’s pretty much been reduced to rubble. They’re under threat of attack every day from the 152 mm howitzers, sometimes a missile or a bomb dropped from an airplane. Quite a nice selection there.
Human beings are something else, man. We love to build stuff and then blow it the f#%k up. It’s a form of creativity. It’s beautiful. Trajectory! Line it up! Fire that cannon!
Jump in your supersonic jet airplane and jet over to the target area, release your payload, laser guided bombs, they glide right in there.
Launch that long range missile and watch it fly! Over the horizon and into enemy territory, blow up their house, burn it down.
Drop some 152 mm artillery shells tipped with 24 lb. of high explosives right on top of their downtown plaza just to see what kind of shrapnel patterns it makes on the faces of the buildings. Interesting. I think I see a pattern.
In the above photo Serhiy Albertovych is standing outside his apartment building somewhere in Avdiivka where he lives with his two dogs. It has been bombed twice but Mr. Albertovych refuses to leave. “I’m here alone and I’ll be here until the end, until the end of my life,” he says.
Maybe he grew up there, maybe this is his city, his hometown and he would rather die with those memories intact rather than be shuttled out to some unknown destination as a refugee. The NY Times article doesn’t say what his inner story is but I see him looking around for his friends, his compatriots and for a vibrant downtown Avdiivka. He denies the devastation of his city and remembers what Avdiivka once was. That’s how he survives.
Avdiivka is pretty much dysfunctional. There’s no water, no electricity, no food except what the volunteers bring in for the 1700 people still living there, camped out in the what’s left of the city, refusing to leave. There are centers where you can go and charge your phone, get food or water or warmth. And where you can find company and conversation, which might be just as important as food and water.
Gods are created by human beings to give causality to the world. This is how it happened because God did it, we say. God is powerful, we affirm, he created the whole universe.
And are we not gods too? Look at what we can create, and what we can destroy. Would you like to see me blow up an entire city?
It’ll be beautiful. A giant hole in the ground where the city used to be, surrounded by poisoned air.
I wrote about the very first hydrogen bomb explosion last November. ‘a great big giant fireball in the sky’ It was the the seventieth anniversary of that event out there on the tiny South Pacific island of Elugelab.
The fireball was monumentous, the heat wave was stupendous, the witnesses who saw the island cremated recount the thunder verberating and reverberating between the earth and the stratosphere like it was the choir of God in full vibrato fortissimo.
Reminds me of the famous quote from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, upon the detonation of the first nuclear bomb at White Sands, New Mexico on July 16, 1945: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'.
It was of course his opportunity to make a historic remark and he didn’t want to blow it with some lame quote so he came up with ‘Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds’. That’s memorable.
Actually the quote is from the Bhagvad Gita, one of the most popular Hindu scriptures, and Krishna has taken on his cosmic form - the brightness of 10,000 suns -to try to persuade Arjuna to do his duty and fight. Must have scared the bejesus out of poor Arjuna. Anyways, that’s where the quote comes from - Krishna turns into 10,000 suns and then tells Arjuna ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’ just to make sure he gets his point across.
Thanks to the New York Times for letting me blatantly rip off their photos but not their story except for one small quote.
Photos by Tyler Hicks from the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/world/europe/russia-war-avdiivka-ukraine.html
beautiful destruction