Dear friend,

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, I have lost almost all words. They have become so tiny in the shadows of griefs and pains that they are hardly to be found among the latter. The very words that used to be a home for my restless thinking are now a lonely wall of a house bombed by the Russians, with only two sides: testimony and resistance. Language has no other forms nowadays than testimony: the testimony of those who have lived or continue to live in the catastrophe; and it has no other purpose than resistance: the resistance to those who deny your very existence. Everything else around is absorbed by the silence that settles in the destroyed cities and villages, in the yards and basements, among the lumps of concrete, metal, pieces of cloth and furniture, invisible mines and tripwires in houses and gardens, broken glass pieces, mangled trees, and blackened blood. Perhaps it would be easier to talk about all of this at a certain distance, and perhaps the right words, texts, and books about Russian crimes will be discovered by those who have never known this silence but will open themselves to it, so will be able to find its scattered signs everywhere. It is quite possible that they won’t even be Ukrainians; perhaps they will be Norwegians: yourself, your colleagues, or friends. I would like it to be so.