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Royal Gift Of The Kalinouski Regiment

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Royal Gift Of The Kalinouski Regiment
IRYNA KHALIP

You cannot choose heroes.

You cannot choose a hero. This is not a position someone could be elected to take. Heroes do not register with election commissions, do not record commercials, do not meet with voters, do not make empty promises. Just one day they take up arms and quietly, without public statements, go to defend the country that was attacked. Sometimes it’s their country. Sometimes — someone else's, which also becomes theirs, because it is saturated with the blood of sworn brothers.

I'm talking about the Kalinouski regiment — you guessed it, of course.

The sincere curiosity and inexhaustible strength with which many of us search the Internet for news on the topic “a thief stole a hat from a thief” and read who says what about this is amazing. Every day they start with a search — well, what is there, who accused whom of what again. I am not interested in the participants in those scandals, much less their discussion. Every day, I wait for news from the Kalinouski regiment. Because I know, like all of us, where our heroes are and what they are doing. And in the background of the tasks that they perform, and the shells that fly at them, their deaths and injuries, everything else — especially this agro-glamorous stuff — appears in its real scale. The scale of the statistical error.

Another warrior died this week. Trombley and Kleszcz are still in captivity, soon it will be five months, and no news comes from them. No one knows where the body of Vasil “Syabro” Parfiankou was left. His widow Elena Gergel had already taken the children to visit a cemetery. She explained to them that dad is not here, but now it will be possible to communicate with him only in this way — in a quiet place where you can talk and even ask something without expecting an answer. But she promised the children that someday their family would have their own secluded place in that cemetery, definitely with a photograph of their father, and then it would be possible to tell everything to him — to that image in the photo.

I also remember a video from the regiment’s Telegram channel, filmed before that same summer battle, from which many did not return. There, Vadzim Shatrou, with the call sign “Daddy”, when one of the fighters asks him to say something to the camera, says with a laugh: “It's all right, we are all going to die!” The next day, Daddy died. Besides, his call sign wasn’t taken out of thin air — he is survived by three children. Vasya Parfiankou had two.

Our heroes do all the work for us. They redeem our silence and our compromises with their own blood. And they die for us too. So when I hear the whining “why are the parliamentarians of Ukraine and Lithuania meeting with them, they can’t be legitimate, no one elected them,” I can answer with what I started from: you cannot choose heroes. There is no passive voice for doing heroic deeds. No action is performed on a hero, they act themselves. And they decide whether to stick to their guns until the end of the war, or to start political negotiations simultaneously. And we can only be grateful to them for that. If, of course, our conscience is mature enough.

Who can be more legitimate in Ukraine today than the same Vadzim Kabanchuk, who first went to prison in 1997? Today, this article of the Criminal Code, “organization of group actions that grossly violate public order” is called the popular article. Back then, no one heard of it, and Kabanchuk was already imprisoned under this article — perhaps the first. And he has been fighting in Ukraine since 2014. So who can Ukrainian parliamentarians trust? And who can we trust? Here, in my opinion, there can be no doubt.

And if anyone still has these doubts, just recall Daddy and Syabro, recall Atom and Brest, Tur and Volat, Hans and Terror. And those whose names for various reasons have not yet been called, like the fighter who died on November 7. Thanks to their heroism and death, so generous to us, we can afford the luxury of not feeling shame and guilt, but only pride for our compatriots, for the country and for our people. Many of us have not even realized what a royal gift the Kalinouski regiment gave us.

Just don't die anymore, please. Don't make fun of death in the “we're all going to die” style — don't call on this toothless beast. Let death wander somewhere in the swamps, lose its way in broad daylight, and never find it. And we will find our way with your help. Heroes, of course, never die, but still be alive.

Iryna Khalip, exclusively for Charter97.org

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