A theater in Poland has gotten into a scandal over "fraternal peoples" and a Ukrainian survivor of violence by the Russian occupiers. Exclusive details

Ukrainian illustrator Daria Zymenko, a survivor of the occupation and violence by the Russian military, faced an outrageous position of the Polish Theater on Facts at the Grotowski Institute in Wroclaw. On June 23, she was invited as a speaker at a reading based on a Ukrainian woman's story about her experiences in the Kyiv region in early 2022. However, some of Daria's important messages disappeared from the published version of the video.

As the illustrator noted on Facebook, the theater was not meant to remind us of the war crimes of the occupiers, but to call for "reconciliation of peoples." To this end, a Russian director who works there took part in the festival.

"Today I received a recording of the readings and discussion. And what did I see? That some of my answers were cut out! Because the theater tolerates Russians, and I said things that go against this policy. I wasn't warned about the theater's policy, and if I had been, I would have refused to tell my story," emphasized Daria Zymenko.

The discussion was in Polish, so the Ukrainian woman did not fully realize what was being said around her. Only in the end did she realize that the theater was promoting the thesis of "fraternal Ukrainian and Russian peoples."

"That is, they put a Russian director in the same space, talking about 'love and art in the middle of nowhere' and me, a Ukrainian who suffered from the Russian occupiers. And as a result, according to the organizers and participants of this event, a symbolic reconciliation and hope for friendship were supposed to take place. For obvious and understandable reasons, this did not happen," the author of the post shared.

In acommentary to OBOZ.UA, Daria Zymenko said that after the reading, many complaints about the theater were written by organizations and activists. Later, a new version of the recording with her full answers appeared online.

One of the powerful messages that the Ukrainian woman was trying to convey, which was not aired, was as follows: "In Ukraine, the situation is such that we have neither time nor desire to figure out who, where, and what kind of Russian is. Russia is a terrorist country. There can be no truce between us."

Daria's words were never aired. As the theater explained in an apology post, the speaker's comments disappeared not because of censorship, but because of an unstable Internet connection.

"It was with great surprise and concern that we noticed that the end of the discussion was not broadcast correctly. It was simply a technical error that was beyond the control of the organizers or the experienced and professional technical specialists involved in the broadcast. This is the second time in one day that we have been disconnected from the Internet for some time. We could not have foreseen such a problem. To our surprise, there were accusations of censorship in the comments under the video. Here we have to express a strong protest - we do not censor any statements. The discussion was not organized live to cut something out of it," the post reads.

The theater publicly apologized to the Ukrainian woman and assured that it was not intended to tolerate Russians.

Earlier, OBOZ.UA wrote that a blogger from the temporarily occupied Mariupol was outraged that during a performance in the center of Kyiv, the song "Maybe the Night Doesn't Hurry" by Alexander Serov was played. The company responded to the accusations.

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