Čornaja poliŭka

He breaks into your home without knocking, he is hungry and hopes you will feed him. He has always been hungry, and he likes to expand the boundaries of his appetite. This hunger has a dark history of liberation wars, peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operations. Evoked by imperial fantasies, the appetite extends to the territory of your home, the guest is already here. A friend from my hometown once posted a story on Instagram. I saw a warplane there. War? Not immediately, but after a while, I remembered that there is a military airfield in Luninets, the existence of which I had successfully managed to forget. Until 2022, when it was reactivated as a result of the start of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. The Luninets airfield is located 40 km from the border with Ukraine. At the initial stage of the full-scale war, it was actively used for attacks on Ukrainian territory: missiles were launched and Russian airplanes made sorties from there. Čornaja poliŭka is soup that I offer to an uninvited guest — a dish of traditional Belarusian cuisine, made of goose or pig blood. It is a polite way for a young woman's parents to reject a young man's marriage proposal. By offering this dish to my guest, I refuse to accept him in my home.