For nearly five years, Europe has been torn apart by war. Here in Italy, a few thousand kilometers from the Ukrainian front, we too often pretend not to know it . We experience the conflict as if it were a talk show clash or a fictional story. In our somewhat surreal times, it's easy to divide into camps as if we were in a video game or an episode of Amici: to resurrect old factions, with pro-Russians and pro-Ukrainians replacing the Guelphs and Ghibellines. It's easy to believe the oversimplifications or, worse, the propaganda. Meanwhile, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is growing ever more intense and changing the lives of more and more people. Those caught in the middle of the conflict, in fact, cannot help but be affected by it in some way, and all of us, from afar—as citizens of a state that hasn't fought a war on its soil for nearly a century—struggle to understand this. Indeed, we fail to understand it.
What we don't fully understand is how profoundly war changes people. Every conflict is accompanied by pain, death, wounds of body and soul. It brings with it resentment, hatred, and more hatred. This baggage of experiences is shared by everyone, even if its burden is not equal for everyone. It is a deadly burden that unites victim and perpetrator, innocent and guilty, aggressor and attacked.
For this reason, it's important to understand war, or rather, what happens to the people involved in it. But this knowledge is complex and necessarily limited because none of us know exactly what the roar of cannons and the whizzing of missiles triggers in human souls. None of us knows a man's or woman's reaction threshold or what truly lies within their nature. No one knows in advance what they will decide to do in the event of war.
Artem Chapeye , a Ukrainian writer and journalist, chose to fight after the Russian invasion of his country, as he recounts in his book "Normal People Don't Go Around Armed" (Altrecose, 2026, €17.50, 132 pages. Also available as an ebook. Translated by Alessandro Achilli). He has always considered himself a pacifist and a leftist. But on February 24, 2022, he was forced to rush into a friends' car with his family to escape Kyiv, where the Russian bombing had begun. And in the following days, he decided to enlist to defend his country, despite his lifelong distrust of nationalism. The reasons for his choice: Ukraine was his country, it had been attacked, and there was a question of freedom at stake that concerned everyone .
After four years of war and facing the threat of war, Chapeye today finds it hard to believe that some Western intellectuals who have always inspired him, and many people in European countries, are shirking this defense of freedom for all. He writes of his experience as a fighter: “What does it mean to be 'tired' of war? What does it mean to be so? What alternatives are there? I don't want to delve into Ukrainian history now, but it's clear what our options are. Either we defend ourselves now, with all the losses that entails, or we return to being a colony of the empire for a hundred or two hundred years. We can't all escape from here. If we surrender, they will do what they want with our lives, a bit like China with the Uighurs. For now, they're helping us with weapons, but if we give up, the rest of the world will at most express its 'deep concern.'”
There's a sense of inevitability and desperation in Artem Chapeye's words. There's a piercing, yet dignified solitude. For Artem Chapeye, his choice to fight has to do with the possibility of looking himself in the mirror and his wife and children in the face. He continues: “Sometimes foreigners ask me if I'm 'tired' of war. I don't know. It seems like a purely abstract, theoretical discourse, like 'pacifism' when missiles and grenades fall on you. Both in the first days and now, the thing I dream of most is for this nightmare to end as quickly as possible . And just like in the fourth year of the war, already on the first day I couldn't wait to take off my uniform so I'd never have to wear it again. And above all, I dream that my children won't have to wear it when they grow up.”
Ordinary People Don't Go Around Armed is, in short, anything but a hymn to heroism or an apologia for warrior virtues: it's the story of the daily life of a European forced into war in these years, but it also shares reflections on the contradictions of pacifism, patriotism, and even feminism as experienced by a man. All things that will need to be addressed once the war is over, says Chapeye, but which it's best to start thinking about now.