The portal “In The Thunderstorm of War” presents interviews with academics from Ukraine who are no longer able to pursue their actual profession due to the Russian war of aggression.
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“In The Thunderstorm of War” is part of the Ukrainian academic platform “Ukraina Moderna”, which also has an academic journal with the same name. The project, led by Oksana Ovsiiuk, has set itself the objective of recording and preserving the experiences of academics in the wider context of the Ukrainian war experience. The contributions cover a wide range of topics, such as siege situations and persevering in contested locations or the activities of those in volunteer services. Academics who have exchanged their professional activity for active service in the army report on their deployments to the front line and describe in vivid detail how they are experiencing the war and how it makes them feel, or how what they are experiencing can mean the end of their emotional response to the war:
This loss of feeling is the key to our emotional survival today, since genuine human feelings are more dangerous than weapons at the front1
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Visitors to the portal are presented with a whole series of deeply shocking sensory impressions of the war in Ukraine like this one. They illustrate very clearly the upheaval that the war has meant for many academics. All of a sudden, historians, ethnologists and anthropologists became soldiers and volunteers in military service. Following the outbreak of war, it became impossible to express oneself through publications, conferences and lectures. And yet, many of the people portrayed here remained true to their academic origins. For example, Dr. Oleksandr Khomenko reports how he was given the nickname “historian” as a soldier on the front line.
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Alongside questions surrounding general experiences of war, the interviews often contain questions around how those portrayed classify their experiences as academics. The portal seeks to provide a voice and an audience for those affected within their own academic community, despite their new roles. The “Ukraina Moderna” platform was created in collaboration with the non-government organisation, “Centre for applied anthropology”, in part for this purpose. Thanks to this, the website is also accessible to those who do not speak Ukrainian: there is a German version as well as translations into English and French.
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The interviews themselves each take around 20-30 minutes to read, that is, enough time for a deeper dive into the individual stories. The website is particularly worth reading since it augments news reports and portals that usually only report at a macro level with descriptions of the emotional and very personal consequences of the war.
At that time I was most worried about my family, since it was clear to me that they could be taken hostage because of me. And I did not know what they would have done with them. Because of all these worries I lost fifteen kilos in less than 6 weeks.2
