Konstantin Shavlovsky: In [your] text about why many Ukrainians do not want to fight, you describe a Ukrainian soldier whose entire body is burned, including his genitals. You ask: “do people who send others to war understand exactly what they are doing?” Do you think they do not understand?

Shura Burtin: We all send people there. Because we are all spectators who root for one team or another. We have the words “wounded” and “killed” in our vocabulary, but they do not scare us; they have been devalued. And until you see with your own eyes what that really is, you cannot understand it. But when you do, the feeling that we all had in the first days of the war comes back: “how is this possible?” When you get closer, you recall again what that means.

So you write so people stop being cheerleaders of the war?

Yes, it is very important not to be a cheerleader. On the other hand, I do not know what, if anything, depends on us. Maybe nothing at all. We are sitting in the stands and what emotions we have, whether we are watching the action or not, it does not matter.

If nothing depends on us, then why do you write?

For me, the goal is to increase the level of solidarity (bratstvo) among people. I have hippie values. I always want to feel a sense of commonness (obshchnost’) with the person I am talking to.

And I feel sorry when, after a publication, a holy war breaks out and everyone quarrels with each other even more.

Many people criticize you, saying your latest materials about Ukraine are untimely, that they could harm a country that is fighting against aggression. What do you say to that?

I do not know; I think it is all very timely. But I was collecting the material before Trump came to power, so I did not think about it. You go to the front line, you talk to soldiers and all your doubts disappear. Because you see people who are in hell. I think they have the right to be heard. These little articles are unlikely to affect the country’s security. I do not think it affects anything, except that people see this part of reality and perhaps will recalibrate their attitude. I think everyone was angry not because the text is dangerous for Ukraine, but actually because it says difficult things that people do not know how to handle. And that scares people.

Did you have moral doubts because you are Russian and your criticism of Ukrainian society might really grate some people?

I did not start this war, I have not supported it and I do not feel any responsibility for it. Moreover, I think dividing people by nationality is complete nonsense. If I had done something bad, I would be ashamed of it. But I have done nothing bad and therefore I am not ashamed. In my view, everything is straightforward here.

How do they view Russian antiwar journalism in Ukraine? I know you do not tell the people in your stories about your Russian background right away.

I really try not to lie. I am a citizen of Georgia, I live in Georgia, I entered Ukraine [as a journalist] from the Swiss publication Reportagen.

When I see someone for the first time, I tell him this. When we get to know each other a little, when we are sitting and drinking, naturally I tell him I was born in Moscow.

Most Ukrainians have a negative attitude toward Russian antiwar journalism because “there is no such thing as a good Russian,” but they read it. I really hoped the Swiss publication would be the first [to publish this text], and I sent it there first. But they told me no one cared about Ukraine anymore and no one would read it.

What Russian opposition media do people read in Ukraine?

It turns out many people read Meduza. I do not know what else, but people probably also watch the big ones, like TV Rain and [Maxim] Katz. It depends a lot on the person, how immersed they are in the Russian cultural and political space.

There is a text ticker on Ukrainian Railways trains: “dear passengers, drinking alcoholic beverages, smoking and listening to Russian (rossiyskiye) songs is prohibited.” All guilty pleasures.

You have been accused of sometimes coinciding with Russian propaganda. Does that bother you?

Of course, it is terrible. I do not want to help them at all. The fact they can take any statement out of context and give it their own meaning is very unpleasant. But I do not know what to do about it.

In your very first report from Ukraine, you wrote about a sudden feeling of freedom that took hold of you at the Lviv train station in May 2022. And you quote a person who responds to this by saying, “you probably think freedom is Ukraine. But it is war.” It would be interesting to find out what this person thinks now.

This person is my close friend, who is introduced in the last piece as Borya, a designer. The same guy who says that at first it seemed to him that war mobilizes the good qualities in people, but later he figured out that it awakens all the worst in people. And that a long war is a catastrophe for society.

I think it took one day at the beginning of the war for it to become clear [to me] what was important and what was not. Everything became very real. Peacetime and wartime modes of existence are just different psychophysiological registers.

But that freedom quickly dissipated. Neither an individual nor society can remain in such a state for long. Now, the situation is the opposite. It is hard to speak of freedom and mutual assistance when everyone is running from TCRs (Ukrainian territorial centers of recruitment) and coming up with all sorts of papers just so they do not have to go die on the front line.

How has your personal attitude toward this war changed over the past three years?

When the war began, I had the feeling, on the one hand, that a catastrophe had occurred and, on the other hand, that everything had finally become clear. There were no compromises anymore; we could say where the evil was. Because all these 20 years under Putin we had been wriggling, trying to make room for everyone.

And then suddenly it became clear – finally we did not need to try to build consensus with them; they are just monsters, and that’s it. There was a sense of clarity and plainness. I think many people look for that in war, in fact. And I think for many this war has brought moral relief.

Three years later, the monsters have not gone anywhere and we still need to talk to them.

Yes, it turns out the monsters have not gone anywhere.

But that is not even the main thing. The real result of these three years is that everything has become more complex, not simpler. And the complexity of reality has been revealed in its terrifying fullness over these three years. In 2022, we fought against the [Russian propaganda trope] that “everything is not so black and white,” but everything turned out much less black and white.

The leitmotif of your latest pieces is that the warring sides have much more in common than it seems. It seems like the people fighting for one side could have ended up on the other if their fate had been a little different.

Of course. Take a guy who was mobilized in Luhansk or Donetsk – if he had gone to central Ukraine before the war, he would have been mobilized [into the Ukrainian army] there. And yes, almost everyone has relatives on the other side. This is the truth that the propaganda hides, of course.

Judging by your pieces, despite three years of war, family ties between Ukrainians and Russians are still strong. How do you explain this phenomenon?

This may be a distortion. When I learn that a soldier calls, say, his son, who is in Russia, this touches me, I pay attention to it. But people who have cut all ties do not mention it, and they do not make it into the pieces. I have not specifically studied the issue.

It also struck me that the vocabulary of this war is the same on both sides. They use the same words to dehumanize the enemy. What do you think this speaks to?

To what we have been talking about all along. It’s a problem every day on the front line to tell whether these guys whom you have started shooting at are friend or foe.