While checking when the light will go out in my house, I noticed that I see birch trees in the power outage schedule. The sequences of light and dark cells resembled bark with recognisable stripes.

Birch is a basic image of Russian myth. It evolved from a lyrical cult to a pathetic personification of the motherland and eventually degenerated into a commonplace marker of Russianness. Nowadays, anyone can ask a person who lives in the paradigm of the Russkiy mir (Rus. “Russian world”) to “go hug a birch tree”.

While waiting for my portion of “electricity nutrition”*, I looked at the schedule and saw the so-called “great Russian culture”. Terrified enough for its delusions of grandeur to be dispelled, it launched missiles at civilian infrastructure. And yet, once again, depriving me of light, it only exposed its darkness even more.

*“Electricity nutrition” is a popular meme that emerged due to Ukrainians mocking the failed Russian PSYOP in the fall of 2022 - winter of 2023. The Russians performed a false machine translation of the word "elektropitanie" (Rus. “electric power supply”) from Russian into Ukrainian. In Russian, this term literally means “electricity nutrition”, so this failure resulted in the “elektrokharchuvannia” meme trending.