Hans De Borst and Stanislav Baklanov
Hans' photo by Michael Hübner; Screenshot of Stanislav from a video by Ed Ram.
This essay contains content that some may find disturbing We all have images that accumulate in our minds over the years of our lives, don't we, and once they're inside of us, they never really leave. They fade but they're always there, and they can be conjured back into our thoughts in an instant.
One of the images that's stuck inside of me is that of a man holding a photograph of his daughter. I first saw it eight years ago, and until recently I couldn't remember the names of the two people in it. But I could never forget that picture.
The man in the photograph is Hans de Borst from The Hague, Netherlands, and he's holding a picture of his daughter Elsemiek. She was a passenger on
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 when it was shot down by a Russian missile over the Donbas region of Ukraine on July 14, 2014. All 298 people on board the airliner were killed. Elsemiek was seventeen years old.
You can't read much from Hans' expression in that photograph, but you can feel the emotions that are behind it. A father who's lost his only child. The shock and the horror of how she died. The sadness, and the feeling of emptiness that never goes away. I guess that's why the picture keeps floating around in my mind after all these years; Whenever I feel sad, I see it again. I can't imagine a worse form of grief than the loss of a child.
A few months ago, the picture of another father forced its way into my mind, and it's also unlikely ever to leave. I couldn't look at that picture without also seeing a line drawn between this other father and Hans de Borst from long ago.
The other father's name is Stanislav Baklanov, and he was on a business trip in Kazakhstan when Russian troops invaded Ukraine. On the 28th of February 2022, his neighborhood in Karkhiv came under attack. When the fighting came too close, his wife and two young sons were forced to flee their apartment. Stanislav's brother Sergei and his sister-in-law came to help Stanislav's family evacuate. Their plan was to shelter with Sergei and his wife in a safer part of the city. As they fled in two cars, they encountered a checkpoint. Almost immediately, automatic gunfire riddled the car that carried Stanislav's family. His wife Dariya was shot and killed, and his seven-year-old son Volodymyr was severely wounded. Somehow their three-year-old son Viktor escaped serious injury.
As I watched the report about Stanislav's family on the
PBS NewsHour, I couldn't help but draw a line between the pictures of Hans and Stanislav. Two fathers, whose lives were destroyed by horrific violence in Ukraine that neither of them witnessed. Two families, separated in time and space by eight years and thousands of kilometers, torn apart by the same evil force: The maniacal whims of a murderous dictator named Vladimir Putin.
Months before Elsemiek died on MH17, Putin sent Russian forces and weapons into Ukrainian territory - to Crimea, Donbas, and Luhansk - in support of his deluded imperial ambitions. The weapons sent into Donbas included anti-aircraft missile systems, one of which destroyed MH17. After the airliner was shot down, Putin and his government tried to blame Ukraine for the tragedy. The Dutch Safety Board
MH17 Final Report, and an
investigation by the organization Bellingcat, conclusively proved otherwise - that Russian military forces were responsible. Hans briefly gained notoriety in 2014 when he
penned an open letter to Vladimir Putin as a way of expressing his anguish. Naturally, Putin never responded, and his government continues to deny responsibility for what happened.
There are of course thousands of other points of grief on the line that connects Hans and Stanislav, and the line neither begins nor ends with them. There are fathers like
Sergei Kalinchenko, who lost his daughter in Moscow when her
apartment was one of several that were destroyed by bombs in 1999. There is compelling evidence that Vladimir Putin's
FSB were behind the bombings, which they used as a false flag operation to lay blame on Chechen rebels. Putin's brutal response and the subsequent destruction of Grozny
vaulted him to power in Russia. Anyone who tried to prove Putin's involvement in the bombings wound up dead.
All of them were murdered.
We should have seen this coming. Putin's ruthlessness, and his intentions, have been hiding in plain sight since he rose to power. Yet we chose to appease him, to do business with him, and there are still those who think that the only way to end the war in Ukraine is to negotiate a settlement with him. I hope that we in the collective west now recognize that there can be no negotiation with a bloodthirsty unscrupulous madman like Vladimir Putin. He has never and will never honor any agreement that we make with him, and the suffering that he is causing will never end while he
remains in power. Unless we stop Mr. Putin, we may someday even find ourselves on the line that connects Sergei, Hans, Stanislav, and all the victims of Putin's decades-long reign of terror. And we may discover someone we know in the picture of yet another father.
Postscript
This was an extremely difficult essay to write, and I don’t
think that I came anywhere near to saying what I wanted to say. I just kept
seeing the images of these fathers floating around in my mind, and I had to try
to express how that made me feel.
It made me feel sad, of course, and if you’ve made it this
far, then their stories have made you sad as well. I apologize for that; I
debate sometimes whether I should write about subjects like this at all, as we’re
already subjected to too much sadness these days. But, if you’re like me, you
grow numb to the endless stories about human suffering, to the point where you
can’t see the trees for the forest anymore. Focusing on individual human suffering is a necessary,
if difficult, part of maintaining awareness of the world around us.
If you can stomach learning more about the devastation that
has been caused by the Putin regime over the last two decades, here are a few
recommended links. Some of them are referenced in the essay above.
Sergei Kalinchenko and the 1999 Russian apartment bombings:
https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-russia-president-1999-chechnya-apartment-bombings/30097551.html
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/foiled-attack-or-failed-exercise-look-ryazan-1999
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0913/The-forgotten-victims-of-Russia-s-9-11
Chechnya - Images of a Forgotten War:
https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/conflict/first-chechnya-war-conflict-russia-thomas-dworzak-lawrence-sheets/
https://www.rferl.org/a/the-second-chechen-war-in-photos/30185257.html
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/1085861999/russias-wars-in-chechnya-offer-a-grim-warning-of-what-could-be-in-ukraine
Aleppo:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/04/killed-after-posing-for-pictures-the-five-year-old-victim-of-russias-airstrikes-on-syria
https://youtu.be/8jFHbo0Cgu8
(For Sama – the film. Highly recommended).
An article and video interview with Hans de Borst:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-16/hans-de-borst-remembers-daughter-killed-in-mh17/6625712
Two video reports about Stanislav Baklanov and his family. Warning:
These are very difficult to watch.
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/civilians-endure-intense-suffering-russian-shelling-reduces-kharkiv-smoking-ruin
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/inside-kharkiv-hospital-a-family-waits-for-a-wounded-boy-to-wake-up-20220310-p5a3gr.html
And what of the mothers? Well, I’ve read plenty of stories
about them too, of course, as have we all. Some of the stories were simply too
horrific, and I had to stop reading them mid-sentence. One of the stories that I’ve managed to follow,
with great difficulty, is that of Viktoria Kovalenko. She’s suffered more than
any human being should ever suffer. I don’t have the heart to write about her
here, but if you want to learn about her story, follow the links below. Let me
warn you again – Viktoria’s story is extremely upsetting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-61811642
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61038811
And the children? This CNN report says it all.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/04/14/brianna-keilar-children-deaths-ukraine-new-day-vpx.cnn
Even the journalist was unable to complete her report
without crying.
Finally, what can we do to help the current crisis in
Ukraine? Sign up to volunteer on social media sites and donate what you can to
worthy causes. Here are three that my wife and I have selected:
Nova Ukraine: https://novaukraine.org/
RAZOM: https://razomforukraine.org/razom-emergency-response/
Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund: https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/ukraine-crisis-relief-fund/
And an update. On the 8th of 2023, the Dutch Safety Board investigating the MH17 tragedy released a report concluding that Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian Buk missiles to be deployed in the Donbas region. But of course, nothing will come of their conclusion, other than the affirmation of what we already knew. May the souls of the MH17 victims rest in peace.
There, that's enough. Except - Let's spend a few seconds reflecting on how lucky we are.
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