This – for once – is another death. The death of a car, of a massive ground combat vehicle, which this man is observing in the village of Zdvyzhivka. He has it in front of his eyes like a severed limb, but there is no blood. Technology too has its cracks, its wounds, its defeats. It is not invincible. Maybe that man is thinking this? In what state of mind? With disbelief? With relief? The death of a killing machine.
The stillness of the scene freezes the devastating truth of the movement, suspends it. As happens to places upset by that destructive movement: “Suddenly – writes the Ukrainian author Serhij Zadan in the novel ‘The Donbas Road‘ –
you happen to be in a place where everything disappears – the cities, the population, the infrastructure. And even the enemies disappear who knows where, in that situation you would even have liked them, and instead they have disappeared, and the further east you go, the more restless you feel. “
Do you realize what a tank war means? It’s a simple and scary question. “Finally here, – Ernst made a sweeping gesture with his arm around him –
fear takes hold of you, because here, beyond the last fences, three hundred meters just beyond the railway, ends what you imagined of the war, and of Europe, and of the landscape as such, the endless void begins, the true total emptiness in which there is not even a thing to cling to …
That’s what tank warfare is, Herman. “