to deal with the grief, the overwhelming grief, of losing your brother was, was to write about it and actually put on a stage play as well. were they driven partly by an anger that people at that time, because again, you re writing this before 2022, that people were not actually in the country, you d adopt the uk aware really of what was going on? frustration, perhaps. yes. and just desire to wake people up and remind them that the war is still ongoing. that it s claiming a lot of lives, notjust the military, but civilian lives as well. that people are still living in occupation, and occupation, we already knew at the time what it was like. it s now that the world is discovering what the russian troops leave behind. mass graves, torture chambers and so on. but we were already aware of, say, a concentration camp in donetsk, so called izolyatsia. you know, i really wanted to tell people to pay attention to this forgotten war.
a playwright and an author, because i guess the way you. one of the ways that you chose to deal with the grief, the overwhelming grief, of losing your brother was was to write about it and actually put on a stage play as well. were they driven partly by an anger that people at that time, because again, you re writing this before 2022, that people were not actually in the country, you d adopt the uk aware really of what was going on? frustration, perhaps. yes. and just desire to wake people up and remind them that the war is still ongoing. that it s claiming a lot of lives, notjust the military, but civilian lives as well. that people are still living in occupation, and occupation, we already knew at the time what it was like. it s now that the world is discovering what the russian troops leave behind. mass graves, torture chambers and so on.
that the rest of the world is also looking at the war in ukraine and wondering what its role is. you can only imagine that in a u.s. china sort of era of competition, the rest of the world is even more worried if you consider the global south. it strikes me that we are again coming on the one year anniversary, why should this matter to americans? i ask that because y all are my foreign policy military coups and i am not one, i just play one on television and used to do the talking points, but for people watching, why is what vladimir putin is doing to the people of ukraine, why should that matter to them, admiral? i will give you three things that i think anybody can grasp. first is, look at the horrific war crimes, we are talking about rape, torture chambers, attacking civilians, destroying critical infrastructure in the middle of winter.
that really went ways towards the russian position. the russians ignored it. what has happened since march, is the ukrainians have seen what has happened in towns like bucha, irpin, and where they saw the torture chambers, the mass, graves executions, really grotesque things like ukrainian children being taken back to russia for adoption by russian parents. they saw the three month assault by the russian military on mariupol, and so, the attitude of the ukrainians, and attitudes of president zelenskyy himself, i believe, hardened. there was a poll in october, and it said 80% of ukrainians want to keep fighting, and they have negotiations. so those limits, even if president zelenskyy wanted to get in a negotiation, there is real question of how far he could go. so what changes things? what changes things, well, again, i would hope the ukrainian military could continue the military success, ideally they could drive the
obviously, the temperatures are dropping and getting very cold on the ground there, and taking out the power and the heat makes it very difficult for the ukrainians. having said that, they are committed to continue on the fight and to move forward, but this is going to be a really difficult winter. yeah, it s going to be a hard winter. there will be power outages that affect heating and may affect water supplies, but the ukrainians are incredibly determined to keep fighting, to ride this out. it s either do without water or do with russian occupation and torture chambers and war crimes covering hundreds of thousands of people in ukraine. so, they re determined to fight and they ll take the water shortages, the power shortages and keep fighting rather than see their countrymen subjected to such abuse. how do you see this eventually resolving itself? does the conflict go on until, you know, one party has perceived, you know, a win