![]() ![]() In “Enemy,” one of four new tracks that Otoy penned between and during stints on the battlefield driving ammunition and weaponry to front-line troops, he snarls of Russian soldiers: “We’re not scared but we are nauseous, because you smell stale even when your heart still beats. Otoy’s lyrics, with choice expletives directed at Russia and stark descriptions of Russian war dead, speak from the heart - he lost his older brother, a soldier, in the siege of the Azovstal steel mill in the devastated port city of Mariupol.īut they also give voice to the cold fury shared by many of his peers, now pouring out in song, in art and tattoos, online in hashtags proclaiming, “death to the enemies,” and memes targeting Putin, and in fundraising activism for the war effort. In Ukraine, the young generation born after the country’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 likewise say they cannot imagine feeling anything but disgust for Russia for the duration of their lifetimes. Only in 1984 - four decades after Nazi Germany’s capitulation - were French and German leaders Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl able to stand hand-in-hand in reconciliation at a WWI monument in France filled with bones of the dead. In France, antipathy for all things German lasted a generation or more. Just as many people in France found it impossible to absolve Germany after two invasions a quarter-century apart in World Wars I and II, young Ukrainians say three-plus months of brutality have filled them with burning hatred for Russia. 24 invasion launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin is that in ordering the destruction of Ukrainian towns and cities, he is fueling one of the very things he wanted to extinguish: a rising tide of fierce Ukrainian nationalism, forged in the blood of tens of thousands of Ukrainian dead and the misery of millions who have lost loved ones, homes, livelihoods and peace.
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