What happens to our cities is too inconvenient for Western media.

What happens to our cities is too inconvenient for Western media.

Kharkiv is a city comparable in size and population to Hamburg, Barcelona, Dallas, or San Diego. Last Friday, russia targeted absolutely all of its electrical grid nodes.

This alone should be a huge story.

This is some Batman-villain-level crime.

Imagine an electrical grid of a city in your country with million+ inhabitants deliberately and meticulously ruined. Yet it barely made a news feed, not to speak of front pages. Why?

Because to write about it would’ve required journalists to do their fucking job. To provide context. To show that despite the closeness to the frontlines, in the second year of the war, it is a city full of a peaceful life: children, gardens, working cafes, and bookshops.

It would’ve required telling lucidly how it is: when the full-scale war goes on for months, then years, the cities continue to live despite everything. So that soldiers have where to get back to. So that the children grow on their land with their language.

But this requires journalists to do their job: to explain why “some city bombed in a country that is at war anyway” is a big deal. This might’ve made a striking story of resilience and tragedy and more resilience. But they just don’t have tropes and narratives for this.

They have many tropes for war!

“Look like those poor people suffer amidst senseless hostilities” is a favorite one. By refusing just to suffer—and by trying to restore everything, to live our lives, to fight back—we aren’t falling into this narrative.

And, truth be told, the Western audience quickly grows wary of “look at those poor things” when it drags for years, anyway. But when “poor things” refuse to be just that and reopen a 4th-generation coffee shop in a regularly shelled city… Confusing!

Another favorite narrative is “both sides”—which, it seems, became a golden standard of Western war reporting. And which is really, really hard to apply to this war—though oh boy, do they try!

(The recent BBC pearl I’ve noticed was something along the lines of “people from settlements near the frontlines flee their homes while both sides intensify the hostilities” or something like that—I was so awestruck I lost the link.)

We fit into the decolonization narrative perfectly, but we don’t match their expectation of how it should look: not “exotic” enough, not far enough from the empire, too European.

So they use that nice pre-decolonization model of “big civilized country and its scum outskirts.”

And the heroic trope of “our boys are fighting so and so,” they can’t apply either: because their boys are dragging with every possible scrap of help, not even mentioning some heroism—so our boys and girls keep dying.

So, the only trope they have for countries like us is “this is [some] war, things happen!” and it is non-news.

Would Western media work properly, this war might’ve changed the ways people speak and think about wars, the international community, and journalism. Whole new ways of talking truth might’ve been born here.

But well, I guess it is easier to be safe on your “job,” following the searchlight of public attention (or, imagining where it might fall next), not directing the searchlight, as a good journalist should do. Pathetic.

Signed, the inconvenient ones.