1 year of war in Ukraine (english only)

 It’s a year ago when I started to draw my first Love Bird - No War. When I started I still had the naive idea that it would be a short war. The first week I couldn’t stop crying. The weeks after it I lost two friends who died there. So far my experience with a war far from my own country borders. The world changed the last couple of years. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling a lot of people stopped listening to eachother and can’t reach the lanquage of the heart anymore. It makes me sad and it makes me desperate sometimes. If I want people to listen, I need to be open myself aswell. I need to hear and try to understand why some of us have a completely different opinion about this world then I have. 

I need courage to say I’m not ok with a lot of opinions, but an opinion used to do no harm. It was just an opinion and live goes on. 

In Russia you can’t have an opinion. If you do have one, make sure it’s the same, the Kremlin is having, because every other one is treason against a criminal government.

Nowadays almost every political opinion has a weight. Also in my little country. There are politicians here threatened by mobs or online. Live threads, dead threads, you name it... 

And like I was raised it’s never ok to threaten someone if you don’t share another vision or opinion.  

Polarisation is a verbal war at first, before it becomes a physical war I think. 

I often feel like WW2 is to far ago for some of us to remember how that started. I wasn’t there, but my grandmother told me a lot about it when she was still alive. It has it’s similar events. And do people ever learn from the past, or do we need to forget and learn it the hard way over and over again? Is this also human nature? 

I often asked myself last year what I would do when another country invaded mine. 

Would I fight? Would I stay passive? Would I know hate the way some people hate. Raw hate is a brick wall you can touch, but not break trough, because behind it, lies a great sadness and even bigger anger.

How would it be if soldiers marching trough my streets, occupying buildings not theirs? Where does our freedom go when a government has no other choice then to fight and calls everyone to join? Would I flee, or would I defend my country until I die? 

So with every bird I draw there are these questions.

Freedom as we know it in my country is more vulnerable then ever and we need to cherish it. Because it can be over in a wink of an eye. 

And that is why I draw my Love Birds. As a reminder that nothing and certainly not freedom, is for granted.