The weekend when Ukrainian forces liberated Bucha in spring 2022, I had one of the most vivid nightmares of my life. I dreamt that someone (a blurred militant figure, definitely a man) broke into my home, climbed the stairs to the bedroom where I was sleeping, and attacked me. He was hellbent on annihilation. Though no words were exchanged, the dream-logic was clear: this person wanted to destroy me because I’m Ukrainian.

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It didn’t matter to the assailant that I was born in the United States, that I hold an American passport. In the universe of this nightmare, anything even vaguely Ukrainian was to be obliterated.

I was alone that week in a quiet, rural part of western New York, thousands of miles from Bucha and the areas around Kyiv that Russians had recently occupied. I was safe, though my friends and family in Ukraine were not. My body seemed unable to accept that I was oceans away from the war. I woke up shaking and breathless, a bleary, violent presence filling the bedroom. It took several minutes to dissipate.

In the days following, I couldn’t eat, as if a current passing through my gut left no room for anything else. But really, this pain is so insignificant I hesitate to mention it. Does it matter that the news from distant Bucha made me sick? That it activated some memory stored in muscle fiber, in bone?

Once you begin dredging up the sediment of the last century, you come to realize that all of Ukraine is an ocean.

“Nina was found dead on the kitchen floor,” The New York Times reported from Bucha on April 11th. In the accompanying photo by Daniel Berehulak, Nina is tucked just below her kitchen table, beside a set of mixing bowls the color of robin’s eggs.

*

For years I’d been asking my father to take me to Україна, the land of his parents and our ancestors. In my youthful imagination, Ukraine was a mystical place full of people who, like us, wore embroidered shirts, danced hopak, and ate copious amounts of borshch and varenyky dumplings. I envisioned a country where our folk customs wouldn’t cause embarrassment, as they sometimes did for me, at that age, in the presence of other American kids.

Once you’re old enough to remember, my Tato said, then we’ll go to Україна.

When I turned eighteen, Tato announced he’d take me to Ukraine as a graduation present. I was elated. My grandmother, Nina, had always described her rural western-Ukrainian childhood in romantic terms. I would sit for hours in her Chicago kitchen while she told stories about the old farm, how every beet, potato, onion, and egg came from the family’s garden.

My grandmother and her four siblings would work in the fields or in the kitchen during the day, and in the evenings everyone in the village would dance and sing folk songs. She explained that when a song was finished, if you listened carefully, you could hear people singing in the next village over. I liked this image, which gave the impression that all Ukrainians everywhere were doing more or less the same thing; that, regardless of location, our songs served as a thread.

In the short period of her youth, Nina’s village was occupied by the Poles, the Soviets, the Nazis, and then again by the Soviets. My grandparents met as World War II refugees in a displaced-persons camp in Germany and emigrated to Chicago in 1949. Though when I knew her Nina was decades removed from the village, she still loved to sing. She and I would sit at her kitchen table and belt out the Ukrainian national anthem and folk favorites like “Chervona Ruta.” My grandmother was most animated, most alive, when she was singing.

I envisioned that my first trip to Ukraine would be a pastoral homecoming, a return to an idyllic ancestral village. So when my father brought out the Lonely Planet guidebook for Ukraine (the only English-language guidebook he could find in 2007), the image on the cover surprised me: a castle on a craggy cliff, hanging over what appeared to be a vast ocean. Nina had never spoken to me about oceans or castles or cliffs. Whose Ukraine was this?

The photo was from Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula. I’d heard of the Black Sea before, but somehow didn’t make the connection that Ukraine had thousands of kilometers of coastline. As a teenager, this realization excited me for one selfish reason: perhaps our homecoming journey could double as a beach vacation.

Tato’s response was swift. We don’t want to go to Crimea—it’s heavily Russified.

So what? All I could see was water, sunshine.

Just trust me, he said, sweeping the idea away with his hand.

My father is a political scientist who wrote a book on Ukrainian Soviet-era dissidents, so even as a child I was accustomed to hearing him say things like heavily Russified. I knew that Russians had treated Ukrainians horribly, but I didn’t grasp why such relics of history should affect my first visit to Ukraine. By that point Ukraine had been independent for almost sixteen years—a lifetime, to me.

When we landed in Kyiv, I was shocked and mesmerized by the brutalist architecture. My cousin who had traveled with us from the U.S. complained that most people on the streets of the capital were speaking Russian, not Ukrainian. Our insular diaspora experience of Ukrainianness had not exactly prepared us to meet these daily reminders of Moscow’s imperialism.

But as we rode to the village in a family friend’s old Lada, urban Ukraine faded into fields of wheat and poppies. There was no ocean, no sea in this part of Україна, only a purling river. When we greeted my grandmother’s cousins, who still live in the village, it became a true homecoming. Floral embroidery hung on every wall. Jars of homegrown beets, potatoes, and onions lined the cellar. Goats and chickens roamed the yard, and a family of storks nesting on a telephone pole clattered their red bills. It was an uncanny sound, like a machine gun, replicated from village to village.

*

2022 was not the first year Moscow perpetrated a genocide against Ukrainians.

There it is. The word I’ve avoided until now, wary of how it sucks the air out of the room, wary of the semantic debates that follow.

Speaking of semantics: the terms genocide and crimes against humanity were coined, respectively, by Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, both Jewish legal scholars who studied at the same university in present-day Lviv, Ukraine. There’s no evidence the two men ever met, and their conceptual approaches differ, but I marvel that they must have been asking the same questions at the same time. Perhaps, on the black soil of Ukraine, thoughts of death are unavoidable.

In 1932 and 1933, Soviet authorities manufactured famine conditions in Ukraine by seizing all of the grain reserves and punishing Ukrainian peasants who attempted to keep or consume part of their own harvest. In her book Red Famine, historian Anne Applebaum describes the choice that Ukrainians faced: “They could give up their grain reserves and die of starvation, or they could keep some grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execution, or the confiscation of the rest of their food—after which they would also die of starvation.” The cities were flooded with emaciated Ukrainian peasants begging for food. Eyewitnesses saw corpses on the streets, in train stations, in ditches. Other peasants escaped into Russia and Belarus, where, strangely, no one seemed to be starving.

For Stalin’s vision of empire, Ukraine’s national identity and resistance to collectivization were a problem. Authorities also worried that an influx of skeletal Ukrainians in other parts of the USSR would spread “counter-revolutionary” attitudes. So in January 1933 the borders of Ukraine were closed. If caught trying to flee—whether on the road or at a train station—peasants were detained and either imprisoned or sent back to their dying villages. Historians estimate that between three and four million Ukrainians were killed in the famine, known as the Holodomor (hunger-extermination). Meanwhile, the Soviet Union continued to sell Ukrainian grain abroad.

In a 1953 speech, Lemkin called Moscow’s Ukraine policies a “classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification—the destruction of the Ukrainian nation.” He goes on to describe the Holodomor as part of a multi-pronged approach. While starving farmers and peasants, the Soviets systematically executed and imprisoned members of other key Ukrainian social groups—artists, writers, political leaders, and clergy—and forced mass deportations that dispersed Ukrainians across the Soviet Union.

Lemkin is careful to distinguish this process from what the Nazis did to Europe’s Jews, arguing that the Holodomor was not an attempt to kill every living Ukrainian but an effort to eradicate the Ukrainian nation so its fertile territories could be more thoroughly subsumed into the Soviet empire. “And yet, if the Soviet program succeeds completely…” Lemkin said, “Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people.”

Nina’s village was not yet under Soviet control in 1932, but her brother-in-law, my great-uncle Vasyl, grew up further east, in a region where the Holodomor was especially catastrophic. He was a child when everyone in his village began to starve. People made pancakes out of leaves, buried potato peels and hoped they would grow, ground bones into flour. They ate cats and dogs, bugs and weeds. Sometimes villagers lost their minds and tried to eat each other. My grandmother described young Vasyl once climbing a tree to escape from an old man acting erratically. He hid up in the branches for an entire day, while the starving man howled below.

*

There were other attempts at annihilation. In Ukraine, genocide is plural, a pattern marked by the word again.

Less than a decade after the Holodomor, Germany invaded. The Nazi occupiers, sometimes with the help of local collaborators, murdered one and a half million Ukrainian Jews. The Holocaust conjures images of Auschwitz, but before Hitler’s regime invented the death camps, his troops relied on bullets to kill Jews in Ukraine. One eyewitness, speaking to NV.ua, said: “Trust me, the blood that was spilled here (around the death pits) would be enough to drown Ukraine entirely.”

In 1944, Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of having cooperated with the Nazi occupiers, who were in retreat by then. Crimean Tatars are a predominantly Muslim, ethnic-Turkic group indigenous to the Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine. The Black Sea coast—where teenage me hoped to vacation—is their ancestral home.

Scholars suggest that around ten percent of Crimean Tatars may have collaborated with the German occupiers. A greater number fought in the Red Army and conducted partisan resistance against the Germans. But Stalin ordered that the entire Crimean Tatar population be forcibly deported to central Asia, regardless of what any individual had done during the war.

The NKVD loaded 200,000 Crimean Tatars onto train cars. The conditions were brutal, and many people died en route. By their second year in exile, an estimated forty-six percent of all Crimean Tatars had died. Meanwhile, back on the peninsula, land seizures and Russification accelerated.

A few months after the deportations, the NKVD discovered that, in their haste, they’d forgotten to deport inhabitants of a few fishing villages on the Arabat Spit. Having noticed, they forced the remaining Crimean Tatar villagers onto boats and sank them in the Sea of Azov. Those who didn’t drown immediately were killed by machine-gun fire.

“Between 1933 and 1945 there was no more dangerous place in the world than Ukraine,” historian Timothy Snyder said in a 2014 lecture about the land caught between Nazi and Soviet colonial visions. “More people were killed as a result of policy in Ukraine than anywhere else in the world between 1933 and 1945.”

Once you begin dredging up the sediment of the last century, you come to realize that all of Ukraine is an ocean.

*

In my young adulthood, I lived and worked in several countries that had once been part of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine. I grew to appreciate the brutalist architecture, which had shocked me on that first trip. I followed all of the Soviet kitsch accounts I could find on social media. I even thought that my family members who didn’t want to visit anywhere “heavily Russified” held antiquated, unfashionable views.

In 2013, I was teaching at a university in western Ukraine and saw my students join the country-wide protests against government corruption and police brutality. Their concerns were timely and urgent, oriented toward the future, while my third-wave diaspora community back in North America had always seemed entrenched in the past, preoccupied by causes like securing international recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide. Perhaps such recognition was important, but it was low on the list of things my relatives and friends in Ukraine were worried about. The diaspora’s constant focus on our historical victimhood bothered me.

By the spring of 2014, when Russian troops invaded and occupied Crimea and started a war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, my annoyance changed to distress, tinged with confusion. How could this land grab happen in the twenty-first century? And why did Russians seem generally unbothered by it? It was surreal to be in Ukraine among friends, watching Putin announce the annexation of Crimea on television. The Russian president was obviously a tyrant with no respect for Ukrainian statehood or international law, but I was still slow to understand the events in Crimea and Donbas as connected to some broader, historical urge toward annihilation.

Perhaps my pain only matters in relation to the larger tapestry of pain, the dots that connect my existence backwards and forward through time, across oceans.

Crimean Tatar Ukrainians, however, knew exactly what was happening, the memory lodged in muscle fiber, in bone. Crimean Tatars had only been allowed to return to the peninsula on the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Now, in 2014, they opposed Russia’s renewed occupation of their homeland and boycotted the sham referendum. Soon after, activists among them started disappearing.

*

My nightmares teem with images of Bucha that circulated after the liberation. Bodies, contorted and shriveled. Splayed across the thresholds of their own front doors. Strewn on the sidewalk. Stuffed into cellars. Bodies haphazardly covered with rugs and blankets.

One photo shows an elderly, mentally disabled woman named Nina in a black-and-white coat, lying dead on the floor beneath her kitchen table. Above her: a floral tablecloth, baking soda, cold medicine, brandy. On the doorstep of their house, Nina’s sister and caretaker, Lyudmyla, was found with bullets in her head and back. Nina and Lyudmyla were killed because they were Ukrainian and happened to be in Ukraine during the spring of 2022.

On the weekend when Ukrainian troops liberated Bucha, RIA Novosti, a Russian, state-controlled media outlet, published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev entitled “What should Russia do with Ukraine?” He writes that Ukraine must undergo “de-Ukrainianization,” arguing that “Ukrainianism is an artificial, anti-Russian construct that has no civilizational substance of its own.” This process would result in what the author calls “inevitable hardships” for civilians.

Later, a video went viral in which a Russian mercenary named Igor Mangushev talks on stage at a nightclub. He holds what appears to be a human skull, and claims it belonged to a captured Ukrainian soldier.

“We’ll make a goblet out of his skull,” Mangushev says into a microphone. “We are not at war with people of blood and flesh. We are at war with…the idea of Ukraine as an anti-Russian state….We don’t care how many of them we have to kill.” He took the skull, he explains, because one of his buddy’s wives wanted it as a souvenir.

The nightmare-logic seems to be this: the Russian military murders people, then accuses them of being anti-Russian. Three years after the start of the full-scale invasion, there are now mass graves in Ukraine; reports of kidnapped children and forced deportations to faraway regions of Russia; enough accounts of torture and rape that it will take years to catalog them all, even if the war stops tomorrow. As Mangushev gazes into the eyeholes of the skull in his palm, it feels like I’m diving into a dark and bottomless well of understanding, like I am submerged in a place so deep, and so monstrously familiar, that it’s difficult to breathe.

I understand, now, why my father was wary of being surrounded by Russians on a beach in Yalta. Russia has repeatedly sought our annihilation. And this is not a nightmare. I am wide awake.

*

When I talk with Ukrainians in the diaspora, many of them report similar symptoms. Insomnia. Nausea. Depression. Panic attacks. Crying fits. Dreams in which our babas and didos speak to us. Dreams in which we die.

I have heard Ukrainian peers say they are glad their grandparents have already passed. I have said it too, that I’m relieved my grandmother, Nina, is not alive to witness another war, another genocide, on Ukrainian land. Do I really mean it? I guess I’m afraid of what might have happened if she’d seen that photo of the other Nina on the kitchen floor. History’s current is twisting back into itself, and I’m afraid of raking the silt on the bottom.

It is a luxury—afforded by distance and safety, by my American passport—that I have time to reflect on generational trauma. My days have not been spent in bomb shelters. I’ve asked myself if this pain is even worth mentioning. It is so insignificant compared to the immediate suffering of others. Perhaps my pain only matters in relation to the larger tapestry of pain, the dots that connect my existence backwards and forward through time, across oceans.

It would be wrong to argue that all Ukrainians everywhere are doing the same thing. I am not, for example, fighting on the frontline or making the dangerous journey to evacuate civilians from a city that’s being razed to the ground. I’m not running to save my crops from fires caused by Russian shelling, or sifting through concrete rubble to salvage family heirlooms. My grandparents endured war and displacement in the twentieth century. I have been spared, for now.

But if you listen carefully, you can hear people singing in the next village over. Our songs of mourning serve as a thread, a reminder of life—an insistence on it. Maybe we are most alive when we are singing.

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“On Dredging” by Sonya Bilocerkowycz appears in the latest issue of AGNI.