Issue 5. The Future

Russia’s war against Ukraine is not only a physical onslaught but an attempt to erase temporal continuity, to sever the threads connecting past, present, and what might come next. For Ukrainians, the future is not promised, it must be claimed. This essay explores how the very grammar of war transforms existence – how, in the crucible of invasion and resistance, life becomes verb-like, active, restless, and rooted in the necessity of keeping time moving forward. In Ukraine today, to live is to fight not only for freedom, land and sovereignty – but for time.

On December 31st, 2021, the writer Victoria Amelina wrote on Facebook: “I believe that the New York Literary Festival of 2022 will take place. I believe that all of us – not only our defenders – will hold this invisible line together in New York until the Fall. And then until the next Fall – and so on until victory.”

Victoria founded the festival in October of 2021 to knit together the experiences and identities of Ukrainians from the East and the West, to make them visible to one another and bring them together to think about the future. Yet only a few months later, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The village of New York, in Donetsk region, came under constant fire from Russian forces. The literary festival of 2022 didn’t happen there after all. On June 27th, 2023, Victoria was wounded during a Russian rocket attack on the Ria pizzeria in Kramatorsk. On July 1st, she died in the Mechnykov Hospital in Dnipro. At the end of August 2024, the Russians took New York. Now the village is an occupied ruin.

There’s the future and there is Russia’s genocidal war, destroying Ukraine’s present and past moment by moment, tearing away the connections of time, and ruining the continuity of things, phenomena, spaces, ideas, human connections, and social and natural ecosystems. If you put these concepts side by side, they look like an oxymoron that sits at the intersection of divergent lines of thought – about the future of the war, the future without the war, and the future after the war. This oxymoron is first and foremost a challenge to the imagination. Amid the conflict between life tomorrow and its destruction today, when existence is squeezed between the two margins of survival and tunnel vision, it’s an attempt to find a place for victory over death. A victory that’s physical as well as metaphorical, symbolic, and discursive.

This notion of the future as a metaphor for long-term endurance echoes the etymology of the Ukrainian word for victory – “перемога” (peremoha). A literal translation of the word, broken down into its parts, might be “out-abling,” “overcoming,” or “powering through.” It’s about being able – to do more, to focus on possibilities, to seek them out, and to create without accepting imposed limits. It’s the idea of movement and change and recognizing the efforts they entail. It’s about dignity and respect. On the other hand, we can say that the Russian word for victory, “победа” (pobeda), takes misfortune (беда, beda) as its starting point; it’s about being stuck in the role of victim, a dangerous ressentiment, an eternal Karpman drama triangle, and an avoidance of agency.

The Russo-Ukrainian war, essentially, is a war not so much for space but for time – something that Russia wants if not to destroy, for the sake of returning to its good old imperial glory, then at least to occupy, to freeze. It’s no coincidence then that Russians occupying Ukrainian towns put up large banners there that say “Russia is Here Forever.” This Russian “forever” sounds like a life sentence, an expanse of dismal hopelessness, Dante’s Inferno. This is a bit how I imagined hell as a child: a place where time stops and nothing happens.

The “Русский мир” (Russian World) is about fear of modernity, a kind of anti-Faustian stopping of time, not so that we can take joy in the moment, but to preclude joy as such. Let’s remember that famous refrain from Russian forces throughout the occupied territories: “Who gave you permission to live so well?” These words of theirs amount to a Cain complex in action. The very existence of Ukrainians is almost a personal offense to Russians.

On March 19th, 2022, Victoria Amelina, recalling the plans for the New York Literary Festival that year, wrote on Facebook: “We were planning, and still plan to discuss the topic ‘Deoccupying the Future’ in September. This was meant to be a big, intersectional discussion about how we Ukrainians can reclaim our long-term outlook, our dreams for the future, and our courage to start big projects in the line of fire and despite the constant dangers of the full-scale invasion. Now we’re all in the line of fire and consumed with survival, and therefore with the present. But I want to believe that in September the theme ‘Deoccupying the Future’ will be more than relevant. After all, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are working on that at this very moment, on the deoccupation of our future.”

Victoria, who had a sharp writerly intuition, was correct. The topic is more than relevant—in terms of resistance, and decolonizing the past and the past-in-the-present, and discovering space for life amid mere survival. Her metaphor of deoccupying the future, like Ariadne’s thread, takes us back time after time to the thought that the future is not so much a dream as it is a place of power, a support and a cornerstone for action here and now. This metaphor aligns with how Ukrainians – soldiers first and foremost, but also those in the rear – explain why Ukraine is continuing to resist Russian military aggression: to have a future. Not even a different future, just a future. This isn’t about devaluing our own lives – as in, better times await off in the distance, and at least our children will see them – but rather about a sharpened sense of our subjectivity and of the value of human life.

Resisting Russian aggression means fighting for the right to imagine a Ukrainian future for ourselves, in all its diversity and unpredictability.

Of course, unpredictability is not only one of the basic forms of freedom according to Timothy Snyder, but is also a source of endless frustration and exhaustion. The war assigns us new ways of measuring time-as-future: waiting for curfew to end, for the end of another Russian attack, for the all-clear of the air-raid siren, for information about how many were rescued or killed after the rocket or drone strike, for a call from a loved one at the front, for someone’s return from captivity, for news about the fate of a missing person, for the liberation of your home town, for the new shipment of military aid, for the fundraiser to get enough donations to buy the pickup, to see relatives who were forced to become refugees, to see war criminals and collaborators punished, and, finally, to see victory. (I won’t write about how soldiers measure the future, so as not to appropriate their experience.)

There’s a lot of future-as-waiting in war. Yet this doesn’t mean only that time slows down, or that people freeze up, held hostage to the deeds of others. It can also mean choosing to remain active in defiance and spite of everything; choosing to focus our attention, which in turn directs vision and movement.

When the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war had just started, some Ukrainians counted how many days the invasion had lasted, while others wrote, “Today we are one day closer to victory.” Both formulations were about the impossibility of returning to the world before February 24th, 2022 – i.e. about the theft of the future. On the other hand, they were both about a refusal to normalize the war; the demand for a new normality – something that encompasses the need to alter city infrastructure in Ukraine to accommodate those returning from the front, but also the formation of a new security architecture in Europe.

It’s hard to map the hours of a single person’s life onto time in war, which is the sum of many people’s actions. It isn’t possible to view war holistically while it’s still going on. War is whole, total, and unrelenting. To live in war (yet another oxymoron) is to exist in the middle of a drama where the author is history itself.

All that a person in the vortex of war can do is acknowledge the extent of their own will and take on the responsibility of lessening the chaos of the unknown with each choice they make, to give the next plot turn a chance to turn toward good – at least a bit. At least a chance.

This is also a form of everyday work on the future. One that gets harder the longer the Russo-Ukrainian war lasts, as the external threat not only unites Ukrainians as a society but also fragments human experiences, knocks them out of rhythm. On the front, there’s one set of routines for reacting to the challenges and dangers of the war; in the rear, there’s another. Soldier time doesn’t coincide with civilian time, and civilian time behaves differently depending on how near or far one is from the ever-moving front line. 

Time-space and time-flow undergo radical renewal in conditions of war, but also annulment. The end of the world comes every day, rearranging our sense of reality. And every time it’s new. And every time it’s unexpected. And every time it’s (im)possible. Every time space is ruined, time gets ruined as well; its rhythm, cyclicity, and continuity is violated. There’s a destruction of the past. The future in these territories of space-time rupture isn’t about sequential forward movement and progress, but about running in place – first to preserve and renew them, then to set in motion a new cycle of life there.

Still the end of the world that happens every day in Ukraine sends out ripples, like an earthquake, that reach far beyond the epicenter and change the whole world every day. As has happened before in history, a military conflict that in 2014 seemed local and insignificant, for outside observers at least, set the clock running on a new historical era. February 24th, 2022 was the start not only of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but of the actual rather than nominal 21st century, in which Ukrainians are at the very center of a new cosmogony.

Here again I want to recall the words of Victoria Amelina. On July 6th, 2022, she wrote on Facebook: “All of the salt, all of the pain, all of the meaning, all of the future – it’s all in Ukraine. Brussels and London, with all due respect and gratitude, are now the periphery that needs to support the center. They’re the rear without which the front can’t hold. But the future of the world isn’t there. Whatever it may be. Do people in Brussels and London feel where the future’s center is? Most don’t, of course.”

Some parts of the world can hardly feel where the future’s center lies. Others – like Poland on the night of September 9th and 10th, 2025, when Russia attacked the country with drones – feel it more. What will Ukraine’s future be like after this attack? Poland’s? The world’s? Is this just the latest bit of news that time will grind to dust, or an event that will remain in history? The answers are all over there, in the future world that ends every day and begins every day, here, in Ukraine.

Individual chronological time and big historical time – where war is telling us its story from the future about our here-and-now – aren’t on the same scale. Peace and war, laying their paths and roads through people’s fates, are forever sparring with reality. “Death, please. Not today,” my soldier friend jokes. “Not you today. All clear,” goes one of Victoria Amelina’s poems.

War, unlike people, never sleeps, never stops. Peace, racing alongside it trying to get ahead, huffs the whole way. It can’t keep up; it stumbles, flags, and looks up time after time to see war’s wiry legs far ahead. At the very beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, time seemed to stop, stuck in an endless February 24th. Yet space in Ukraine began to move that day, to change with so much speed and intensity that no intellect, no reason, no consciousness could manage to make even the slightest order out of the changes. A single day of the year became synonymous with the totality of the war, at least for 2022.

Yet on the national scale, the transition from peacetime to wartime didn’t happen in one day. It may be more accurate to say that this transition is a process that’s ongoing, not an event that’s come and gone. Life in the two modes – war and (the illusion) of the everyday – is replete with the physical dangers of war, but also emotional ruptures, where grief and suffering give time a different shape. People need to readjust every time they switch from one existential wavelength to another. My temporal orientation, like the motion of a joint after a fracture, hasn’t fully recovered. Since February 24th, 2022, I’ve only learned to orient myself by dates, or days of the week – by one or the other, but not both. It’s the same with events. I remember events as emotions, but I can’t always recover their order or place in time. My “before” and my “after” still need physical therapy; they need re-setting.

Memory, which shapes our sense of time, is suffering just as much from Russian attacks and strikes as Ukrainian territory. Individual memory, collective memory, societal memory. Memory, the critical infrastructure of the Ukrainian future, is being cracked, shattered, split, and blown to shreds by the war. This is why there is so much documentary, archival, and memorial work being done now in Ukraine. This work with memory gives the Russo-Ukrainian war structure and form, and gives the Ukrainian future space for self-preservation. Even after its formal conclusion, the war will still need to be won on the battlefield of narrative. Today’s living memory of a war that hasn’t yet become the past is like a spring that needs a well built around it.

Life on the edge of the Russian World obligates us to face death. To approach death not as some distant event, but to accept our own mortality in the here and now – as if our own death had already happened, as if the future without us had already arrived. To measure one’s every deed, thought, choice, word, and even feeling, not against a timeline of plans and prospects, but against the notion of an eternity that looks at you, weighing your value and significance. This is the logic of reverse perspective, of medieval iconography.

War, as a condition of existential insecurity and uncertainty, takes away your calm (both situational and baseline) and with it, your inertia and inertness. Time at war is like an emergency getaway bag whose contents have to be shaken out and reviewed every day. There’s a daily assessment of the reality of the moment; a daily struggle to make sense of the here-and-now. Even when the Russians can set their sights right here, right now.

To re-think anything in war, one needs not only quantifiable time – or chronos – but above all qualifiable time – or kairos. Here one is reminded of Horace’s “carpe diem”: “Seize the day, trusting the future as little as possible” – as well as the biblical “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today!” Both sayings take on a new ring in wartime.

Compressed by war into one day, time – with the curfew as its limit, which gives it a real shape, a bulbous form – becomes above all time to create something of value; a time for values. During peacetime, the logic of living one day at a time places tomorrow in the formula. When one lives one day at a time in war, the formula doesn’t have a tomorrow.

During war, “carpe diem” means looking at today from the perspective of the future, where its value is not in battling chronos for quantity, not in the effort to pluck as much fruit as possible from the tree of life in one day, but in the chance to plant at least one tree over the day’s course.

Ukrainians see the future during wartime much like a gardener who knows that they themselves are in danger, that the space into which they are putting their love, time, and effort is in danger, that the flowers and trees that they’re trying to grow in Ukrainian soil are in danger – but who still keeps digging, planting, watering, furrowing, fertilizing, mulching, and weeding. Literally and metaphorically. The New York Literary Garden of Victoria Amelina, for example, is blooming with essays by teenagers from the Donetsk region contemplating the future – Ukraine’s and their own.

As for the garden of the Ukrainian future, the gardener might not live to see what grows here. But something will always grow from love.

Translated from Ukrainian by Ian Ross Singleton.

Copy-edited by Katharine Quinn-Judge.

Illustration: Jenya Polosina