Ilya Kaminsky on Lesyk Panaisuk’s Poetry “Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” the poet Lesyk Panaisuk wrote to me a few weeks ago. When the war began, Lesyk left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian invasion. “War will live in Bucha long after the soldiers are gone,” Lesyk emails me, “because they left a lot of mines throughout Bucha.” Now it is dangerous to walk around the town. Lesyk’s neighbors found some mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors returned only to install doors and windows. “In our neighbourhood doors to almost every apartment were broken by russian soldiers,” Lesyk writes. This is a window into the horror that is the current invasion of Ukraine: in the middle of the ransacked city of Bucha stands a house whose owners couldn’t return …
