There will be words to stop this war as well

Among this year's awardees of the CPJ International Press Freedom Award is the editor-in-chief of "Ukrainska Pravda" Sevgil Musaieva. This is the text of her speech at the ceremony on November 17 in New York.

"We should get your friend dressed. Clean clothes, socks and underwear are needed. You can hand everything over in the morning."

In the morning, a huge Patagonia bag was brought from the car. And it took me a long time to open it. I felt like I was invading Brent's personal space, which he had always been known to protect. 

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After taking a deep breath, I managed to pull the zip.

The clothes inside smelled of laundry and this scent hit me immediately. I picked out a brown T-shirt, brown trousers, matching socks too. And then I found a warm woollen shirt. The shirt would keep him warmer.

I suddenly caught myself thinking: "God, why does it matter? I'm taking these things to the morgue".

This is a record in my diary, which I have been keeping since the beginning of the all-out war. 

It was made on 17 March, on the 22nd day of war. And it's called "Brent". It was the first time I had written anything in four days after I learned that my colleague and classmate, documentary filmmaker Brent Renault, had died near Irpin.

Day 123, 26 June.

At four in the morning I woke up startled by a dream that a cruise missile was flying over the centre of Kyiv. I drank some water and dozed off. At 6:20 I woke up to explosions. Smoke in the central part of the city was visible from the window. The missile had hit a residential building.

These almost nine months of war now make me feel like Robinson Crusoe, who marked off every day he lived as he didn't want to get lost in time. And he wanted to survive, too.

It is even more difficult for a Ukrainian journalist: their marks represent the survival of a large country, their country, which is being tried to destroy in front of their eyes.

These months I often think about the language of war, about the ways to convey all the pain and tragedy that is happening in my country every day. Are there words that can stop it? Are there words that can describe this grief? Yes, there are, and they are the simplest.

The people in the liberated villages and towns, whom I met shortly after the arrival of the Ukrainian troops, speak a special language. It is like a confession without fear. Grief covered by formaldehyde. There was so much simplicity and strength of spirit in their speech that I felt ashamed to weep when I listened. I cried later, over the voice recordings.

When I went back to the same people, to the same cities, over time, I noticed that their language had changed. Their stories of what happened develop into legends. Grief fades because life wins out.

Out of the routine of war one sometimes gets thrown into a different reality. Before I left Kyiv, there was a power outage in our office. And we tried for almost an hour to establish Starlink by connecting it to a generator, because people needed our news.

After another unsuccessful attempt, I gave up and went out onto the balcony. There was a gymnastics school across the street and several dozen little girls were doing their exercises with hoops and ribbons. They, unlike us, had electricity. And I rejoiced, watching this picture from another life, as if it were a miracle that suddenly burst into a terrible reality.

War is always about choices, which one has to make every day, and a journalist all the time. Should you publish lists of Russian military personnel when they are a few kilometres away from the families of your staff? Should you tell about a friend who is captured and tortured, and his parents are against it because it might hurt him?

You also often ask yourself whether you are more of a Ukrainian or a journalist. 

"I am not joining the army because of guilt or duty. It's about our dignity, which Ukrainians have been standing upon for centuries. I have no other country and can never have any," reads an abstract from a letter to the readers of Ukrainska Pravda by our reporter Eldar, who became a soldier.

Dozens of Ukrainian journalists have now chosen to go to war.

In the nine months of war in Ukraine, 42 journalists have died. Among them are those who went off to fight and those who told the truth about this war. Among them are my friends.

"I want to take a picture that would stop the war," once wrote Maxim Levin, who was shot dead by the Russian military on 13 March – the same day my dear friend Brent Renault died.

And I believe he could have taken it.

When a journalist dies, their untold stories, their unwritten books, their unreleased films, their untold truth – all die with them.

And all the more you want to do whatever you can to keep that truth alive. And your friends are alive in your work. In memory of Georgiy Gongadze, Pavel Sheremet, Brent Renaud, Max Levin and others.

"You can kill the messenger, but not the message" was the name of a campaign dedicated to the murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017.

Truth survives when there is someone to fight for it.

Therefore, there will be words to stop this war as well.

Sevgil Musaieva, UP