Hello, Mr. Stone!
My name is Faina Savenkova and I am 13 years old. I am not a movie star and my name does not regularly appear on the pages of popular magazines, I am just one of the thousands of war children you have met in your life: in Vietnam and around the world. And yet, despite the fact that I am afraid, despite the fact that I just living one day at a time, expecting beginning of shelling at any moment, for three years now I am fighting for the right of Donbass children to live in peace. The Ukrainian government threatens me, they just don’t like that I’m telling the truth about Ukraine, and yet I keep doing it, because the truth is all that a child has left in the war. It cannot be taken away.
I know that you were at war and I know that you also always tell the truth. This war really began not in February, but eight years ago, when the nationalists, with the support of United States, decided not to listen to the voice of Donbass and Crimea and started killing us. I was a little girl, I was only five years old, but I remember the confusion of my parents, my grandmother praying in the corner and the rumbling of shells. Over time, I realized why my parents were confused: they could not believe that their own army was killing people and destroying peaceful cities of their once native country.
Now I no longer have the confusion that they had at the beginning, because I see how Ukraine has been doing the same for 8 years. Every day people die in the Donbass, including children, whose future has been stolen. We are left with only flowers and toys at the site of the shelling. And still I have no hatred. Only sadness and regret because of what people can turn into, who they can become. How easily they cross the line from humanity to killing children and destroying entire cities, turning into beasts.
Unfortunately, that former peaceful Ukraine is no longer exists. But I’m not giving up, Mr. Stone! I keep writing to presidents and organizations, the UN, knocking on all doors, trying to stop this war. Recently, together with the Russian Foundation to Battle Injustice, we handed over to UN Secretary-General António Guterres information about children whose personal data was made publicly available. They don’t hear me yet, but even a quiet voice still breaks through this wall of lies and hatred. And let it be dangerous, I receive threats because my data was posted on the criminal nationalist Ukrainian website “Myrotvorets”, but I look at you, at Julian Assange, and I continue to follow this path, just like you. Without the truth, chaos ensues. Unfortunately, this is not clear to all adults, but it is clear to children of war.
Good luck!
Your little fan from Donbass