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
If only there were more Faina Savenkovas, and less Greta Thunbergs in the world, when in
fact, one Greta Thunberg is more than enough.
the mirror making company where greta lives concurs with that. most of the screeching banchee leftist females routinely turn men to stone from just the sight of them…
But Greta Thunberg may end up providing Germany’s natural gas.
According to Miles Mathis, Greta Thunberg’s family connections directly tie in to families who are direct participants in a lot of significant atrocities, both great and small.
Very touching. Well written. Beyond her years. Seems that even the beleaguered Donbass may have a better educational system than the average in the U.S.
@edwardi: there is no room for maybe, it is a certainty. In fact, every former Warsaw pact country has order of magnitude better education than anything in the west. Former USSR republics, now “independent countries” have even better education systems than former Warsaw pact countries. Even Ukraine. Even former Yugoslavia “independent countries”. It is not that people over there are extremely smart or hard working. It is that western education system, USA, UK, EU has been systematically destroyed from inside, some say from 1970s. The west USED to have good schooling system. Schools themselves are perhaps in good shape, the problem is curricular. You do not teach kids anything – they will not learn anything. And so for 50 years.
It is what it it is. Road to recovery? Remember when foreigners were coming to USA to study engineering and science? The direction will have to change, lest USA/CA/UK/EU become third world countries.
The deliberate destruction of the American public schools from within was evident to me by the time I graduated from high school in 1983.
Before it had even become a movement, by my sophomore year at Purdue, I decided that my children should be home schooled. Not to mention that the atmosphere itself was becoming uncivilized and abusive by letting bullies run rampant with little to no repercussions for their behavior.
Note the fact that I graduated FROM high school, I didn’t “graduate high school,” as so many illiterates would say today. (When did “to graduate” in the sense of completing a level of education become a transitive verb?)
No doubt about it Donbass having a better educational system than the average one in the US. The US education system is abysmal, with the emphasis on teaching what to think rather than how to think.
Dear TravelAbout,
I have been saying the very same thing about the Australian Education system. In Oz, it was the States that controlled the education system but in 1984 it was taken over by the Hawke Federal system. And then our children had to pay for a higher education, as well as pay more in taxes as their earning capacity increased due to that learning; two bites of the cherry.
And then to cap it off, we get all of these migrants come in with their children, from 3rd world countries whose Primary level education skills such as writing and spelling are far superior to our children. But, they do know how to save the whale and save the planet, and climate change/cooling/heating/whatever.
I’ve had a university education in Australia and I didn’t pay for it when I did it. Instead payments were deferred until I started earning above a certain threshold. Then, instead of seeing money back from my tax bill when I take out costs of earning a wage the tax return I once would have received went to paying off my Higher Education scheme. Let’s be honest here. We don’t ‘pay’ for our higher education when we receive it. We pay only when our income goes above a certain threshold and even then it is via our tax system.
The creation os a national education system was done because some of our states were not teaching to a standard deemed suitable. It was an effort to raise every education system, no matter the state you were in, to a higher level. A standardization where things are improved is a benefit to the general education, not a hinderance.
My mother is a teacher at a highly prestigious private school (Paid education). My mother-in-law teaches at a public school (government provided and mostly free) in a lower socio-economic area. I have listened to them both talking and they teach the same basic content to the same standard. The primary difference is the private school has better resources and smaller class sizes resulting in better outcomes for the students. No surprise there though. Wealth and inequality are well known factors in society.
This girl is very brave. I wish her all the blessings she can have. Always good to read her letters and bring the realities of the Donbass home to people.
Wonderful message. Thanks to her and to you for publishing.
Did she write to Roger Waters yet? That might do it…
Oliver Stone produced a very good film of events leading up to the massacre in Odessa (2014) and the eight years of Ukraine shelling Ukrainians in the Dombass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_on_Fire
You’re right, Faina, even a quiet voice still breaks through this wall of lies and hatred! Nice letter :)
This brave young girl is more deserving of the Nobel Peace prize than most on planet Earth. Truly a bright light in a darkening world. May God grant her an aura of divine protection and the strength to persevere and illuminate the way forward.