The Shape of War: Ukraine and Florida

Andrea Hildebran Smith finds a connection with the work of Byline Times war reporter Zarina Zabrisky in Ukraine and warns that MAGA does not just want Florida, and Putin does not just want Ukraine.

Zabrina Zabrisky reporting from Kherson, 15 February 2024.

I recently spent a week watching the inimitable Zarina Zabrisky, the American writer and journalist who is currently documenting the Russian war in Ukraine.

Zabrisky was born in the USSR, in Leningrad (which was later renamed St Petersburg), and spent part of her childhood in Ukraine. Her home for decades has been in California, but she has been reporting on the war since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 from all around Ukraine.

She reports from Kherson in the south of Ukraine, not far from Russian-occupied Crimea, working on a documentary and a book about the region.

In November 2023, after occupying Kherson for nine months, the Russians retreated to the Kherson region across the Dnipro River. Located now only a few miles from the city, they launch attacks every day, using artillery, aerial bombs, drones, and missiles. Before the war, Kherson was home to 260,000 people. Now, Russians destroy residential areas, private houses, and day-care centers; they kill civilians, blast by blast.

Zabrisky was speaking on Zoom calls with American podcasters all that week, as reporting from war zones now seems to be the purview of tiny podcasts rather than major newsrooms. She recounts the deaths, fires, casualties, and funerals. We hear explosions while she talks.

When Heidi Cuda or Jim Stewartson of the Radicalized: Truth Survives podcast ask if she needs to head for a shelter, Zabrisky waves them away, letting the audience know that it wasn’t close enough to warrant her moving to the marginally greater safety of an interior hallway.

Zabrisky and her colleague, the war photographer and director, Paul Conroy, are at work on a documentary about Kherson. The only two foreign journalists based in Kherson, they dodge bombs and keep at their job of reporting on the city that continues living amidst the attacks. Janitors working in bulletproof vests. Grocery clerks dodging artillery fire to get to work each day. Theaters presenting premieres in basements. When a war is conducted against a civilian population, journalists need to be embedded, as Zabrisky and Conroy are, with the civilians.

I listen to her, whispering to myself in horror, “Aren’t we all about to watch her die?” Bombs rattle the microphone as she speaks.

On The Five Eight podcast, she confirms as much. Speaking with Greg Olear and Stephanie Koff about the Ukraine aid bill that Republicans are blocking in Congress, Zabrisky says, “Make sure it passes. If it doesn’t… we all will be killed here. And I’m not leaving”.

Kherson is a long way away from me, I suppose, but as I sit in St Petersburg, Florida, I see too many intersections between our worlds.

The fact that she is an American who is there by choice is the first one. As a lesbian couple, my wife and I are often asked why we don’t leave Florida. The entrenched GOP supermajority here uses every tool at their disposal to dehumanize and erase LGBTQ+ people within our state.

But, like Zabrisky, we are part of a community that we cannot abandon. Our world is a vibrantly LGBTQ+-friendly city with our neighbors and friends, cafés, beaches, and schools around us.

It’s about these people and this place, but also more. We stay here to fight for Florida because the violence and corruption that are being normalized in Florida are just one presidential cycle away from afflicting the entire United States if they are allowed to succeed.

As Zabrisky reports, “One woman we interviewed said, ‘Ukraine is not a country, it’s a border.’ …if this horde goes over the border, this will be the end of Western civilization as we know it. We need to stop it. And the way we are stopping it right now is by helping Ukrainians to fight.”

That's very much the argument my wife uses to rally people nationally to support the work of defending LGBTQ+ equality in Florida.

What happens in Florida never just stays in Florida. The people ready to ban books will show up at a Connecticut school board meeting as quickly as COVID showed up in your town after spring break.

Please believe this: MAGA does not just want Florida and Putin does not just want Ukraine.

Another way I find myself relating to the story from Kherson is as a parent with a child in American schools. In my bones, I know the helplessness of seeing people I care about being senselessly shot and killed while Republicans block every attempt to stop the slaughter. As an American parent, I will never forgive nor forget the Republicans' endless betrayal of our children with their 'thoughts and prayers.'

Kherson residents are being killed by Russian shells because the GOP refuses to continue our aid to the Ukrainian forces ready to defend the city.

The strangling ties of Russian interference in both these realities are inescapable.

More waves of recognition: There’s deja vu for me, watching yet another woman speak on my screen, describing how she may well be killed in the near future because of Republican fanaticism. In Zarina Zabrisky, I see Kate Cox, whose Republican elected officials in Texas vigorously fought to deny her the health care that would save her life. Women in Texas, Florida, and more than 20 other US states have now lost the most important part of maternal health care – a doctors’ ability to save a woman’s life when a pregnancy could kill her.

Zarina Zabrisky, Kate Cox, and millions more women are being defined by the GOP's religious zealots first as sacred vessels and then, suddenly, as human sacrifice.

Throughout her interviews, Zabrisky tries to inform Americans about the fact that Russia is waging information warfare against us right now. To some degree Americans have become familiar with the idea of nefarious disinformation campaigns since 2016, but few people grasp, yet, the seriousness of our situation. The truth is that information warfare is used to prepare the ground for ‘real’ warfare, the kind of war Zabrisky is experiencing now in Ukraine.

Zabrisky talks about the mandatory course on propaganda she had to take as a literature student in the USSR before immigrating to the United States. This material seems ridiculous and arcane to most Americans. We don’t think of ourselves as being in a perpetual war to the death with Russia. But it turns out Russia has never stopped thinking about America this way.

Zabrisky isn’t the only credible source about Russia's dogged pursuit of a cold war. It’s corroborated by multiple defectors from the former Soviet Union and Russia. The KGB and FSB’s morbid obsessions with the United States seemed unimportant after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it turns out our American politicians were easy enough to buy and/or blackmail, and what they were willing to sell out was American democracy itself.

We need to grasp that the information warfare we’re in is an actual war, and it is being used to weaken us for physical war. That’s a grim message, but Zabrisky and many Ukrainians are trying to warn us so that we can avert some unimaginable catastrophes, both in Ukraine and here, in the US.

Which brings me to Florida. It’s not just the new military force DeSantis has created that is personally directed by the Governor, or the humiliating show made out of arresting would-be voters. It’s not just the Stand Your Ground law that allows people to kill a person with a firearm and pre-empt any charges with a claim of self-defense, or the bans on history and sociology, or the gutting of public schools.