When Silence is a Siege Weapon

Foreword

Most of the poems I’ve read, including the one I wrote myself, tend to focus more on Ukraine than on Russia, which is, without any doubt, to blame for the ongoing war and atrocities in Ukraine. We could pretend that “ordinary Russians” are not responsible, but in truth, they absolutely are. It is their government, and that is always their responsibility. This applies to every country. For example, I believe I would be to blame if the Polish government did anything wrongful. The silence of the Russian people is a major reason the war continues.

Furthermore, the fact that some people are more willing to give away parts of Ukraine than to fight for its freedom and independence is absolutely sickening. Appeasement was the reason the Second World War happened, and it is also why Russia keeps destroying parts of our world.

Poem: When Silence is a Siege Weapon [contemporary free-verse]

The Dnipro’s throat chokes on tank hulls,
yet Moscow’s churches hum as if occupation
were a hymn only the dead can hear.
My brother spits facts like sunflower seeds:
“One protestor chained to Red Square
could unravel this war faster than any bullet.”

They say “ordinary Russians” weep in kitchens-
but kitchen tears don’t douse phosphorus.
We’ve seen your ballet stars pirouette for generals,
your scientists forging smarter drones,
your poets rhyming Z with zombie.
Apathy, when armored, becomes atrocity.

My brother’s Belarusian fists map the calculus:
“One railway worker refusing tank transports
equals ten villages unbombed.
One conscript discarding his rifle
equals a hundred mothers unbroken.
War’s algebra is simple; cowards prefer chaos.”

Omsk to Odesa, the silence thunders-
not the quiet of fear, but the roar of assent.
Your “patriots” hang Z banners from dorm windows
while Kharkiv’s students dig graves with textbooks.
History grades in blood:
1917, 1945, 2022-your empire is a slow suicide.

Each factory hand that welds the tank’s steel throat
holds power to mute the cannon’s roar.
A nation’s spine isn’t flags or hymns-
it’s the sum of choices: build or break.
Your silence isn’t neutral; it’s the fuse
that waits for one wet breath to drown the spark.

They say “children don’t grasp geopolitics”-
but we see your students scribbling Z in notebooks,
your teenagers enlisting for TikTok glory.
If a 12-year-old in Szczecin knows shame,
why can’t Moscow’s youth smash recruitment fliers
instead of sharing tank selfies?

Putin claims peace has no road-but we’ve seen
walls crumble in ’89, chains snap in Kherson’s snow.
Your silence now is mortar for the Kremlin’s bricks,
each shrug a trench dug deeper into shame.
History writes hymns for those who chose to speak,
not ghosts who whispered “What could I do?”

You cite Tolstoy but practice Stalin.
We’ve read your manifestos-
they always end in mass graves.
My brother laughs bitter as Arctic wind:
“Russians love martyrs, provided they’re centuries dead.
Try resurrecting one. See how fast they shoot.”

They’ll call this poem naïve. Good.
Naïve as the partisans who starved the Reich,
as the hands that dismantled the Berlin Wall,
as the grandmothers who stopped tanks in ‘91.
Revolution isn’t a spectacle-it’s the sum
of a million refusals to become the regime’s tool.

When this ends (and it will), ice will hold receipts-
every shrug, every “Just following orders,”
every Z scrawled on dorm walls in coward’s ink.
Monuments won’t weep for the silent; they’ll ask:
“What did you break when you chose to bend?”
The land keeps score in sunflowers and mass graves.