Andrea Valesini.
With Ukrainian winter. Chronicles between a people (Beyond editions), Andrea Valesini – Chapoder de The echo of Bergamo – Signs a report of reportage that goes far beyond the simple journalistic narrative, despite the pure reality: it is an act of love for a people, a battered land and, together, a lucid and painful warning against oblivion and indifference. The title is already a strong, ambivalent image: winter as a real season, the one that has enveloped millions of Ukrainians in the dark and in the frost caused by the bombings on energy infrastructures, and the symbolic winter, that in hearts, unleashed by the shock of the Russian invasion of 24 February 2022. From that day, the time in Ukraine has broken: there is a before, with a style, Sobrio and participant, he witnesses the aftermath, walking between the rubble and the broken lives.
This collection-about thirty reports published between March 2022 and November 2024-does not seek geopolitical explanations nor indulges in the living room analysis: it is a lived chronicle, it is empathic immersion in the-symbol places of the tragedy (Bucha, Mariupol, Odessa, Kharkiv …), but above all it is listening to the voices, fears, the dignity of the people who resist. The author made Pope Francis’ invitation to journalists his invitation: that of consuming the soles of the shoes. He consumed them in dozens of Ukrainian villages and cities, animated by the passion for his profession and the vocation of a hunter of stories, of witness of the truth. Valesini enters homes, churches, hospitals, refugee curtains and NGOs, to collect that subdued and often forgotten pain that makes the true substance of the war. To clarify an atrocious war but clouded by a media fuss that almost never allows the facts to analyze with objectivity. Paradoxically. The media clamor of our time has re -evaluated the reporter’s mission, the only profession capable of testifying the truth.
Extraordinary is the respect with which the author approaches each story: every testimony is treated with modesty, every detail is returned with precision, but without compliance. For example, the phrase pronounced by an Ukrainian woman after the interview is striking: “We felt people again”. It is in this brief expression that the strength of the book condenses: the journalism that becomes bridge, which returns humanity to those who have lost it. Valesini is not silent. The strategy of the “deucrainization” imposed by Moscow openly denounces: a systematic cancellation of identity, language, culture. He does it with rigor and courage, documenting the destruction of schools, libraries, churches, homes. But alongside the pain, it also gives voice to hope: that embodied by Ukrainian Caritas, by Italian associations, by international operators who, in the middle of the catastrophe, messed up pieces of the future. And here hope is not naive optimism, but theological virtue, writes the author, founded on the certainty that “evil does not have the last word”.
In an era in which war tends to become news of routine, and the emotional distance becomes increasingly broad, Ukrainian winter It has the merit of bringing us back to the center of the tragedy with sobriety and truth. “The word hope is not synonymous with optimism”, writes Valesini, “indicates a theological virtue and rests on certainties: evil does not have the last word, the good is also in action in Ukraine, identifiable in those who act in the midst of the conflict to save lives, to repair and reconstruct what is daily destroyed by artillery blows, missiles and explosive drones. From hatred. It is easier to destroy than reconstruct. The annihilated existences do not come back but life is not zeroed, resists and regenerates itself also in current wars ». It is a book that honors the best journalism: what does not shout, but digs. What he does not explain, but tells. Finally, what, does not forget that every figure, every title, every bulletin, is always a face behind each figure. And a story of tears and blood that deserves to be listened to.
