“It was like thousands of thoughts swarming in my head. And thoughts kept coming... The first ones were about the danger and how to ensure the safety of my family. Then came the realization of what had happened. And when that realization came on the second or third day, anger and hatred overwhelmed everything inside me. It was like I didn't care anymore... You had already constructed in your head where the wife and child would go, where they would stay. And you realized that your boiling point was beyond what journalists’ or people’s involved in journalism was. Firstly, they are pragmatic, and secondly, I think they, like doctors, have a fairly high threshold of sensitivity to this darkness. And you realized that your threshold had already been reached. That you were not capable of receiving so much shit, pardon my French. And then there was this feeling of shame inside. Shame that you had been waiting for so many years, shame that you had been thinking for three whole days, shame for the fact that the generation on Maidan, these students, were cooler than your generation.”
I have a very good friend from Dnipro. And every time we reached a moment of closer unity, such as when we were by a fire, playing guitar, when people opened up, we united more through something national, like songs, humor, and... At that moment, it felt like he had a gap. And then something Soviet had to come up, like when he was about to cry, during the peak of excitement, romance, all that, he started... he plays guitar very well, sings, and started singing songs from “The Three Musketeers” and others - romantically, beautifully, but he doesn't have anything else. He only has what he saw in the Soviet Union. Only Soviet.”
“I understand for myself that this job, in theory, I should have paid additionally a lot more for it. Because I gained such an experience that most people will never get in their lifetime. That is, from crawling deep into caves to climbing on spires, from communicating with Paolo Coelho or Borys Hrebenshchikov for half a day. This... You are not an active participant, but you see this whole environment, you hear the conversations, you meet people. It's the acquaintance with a bunch of cool journalists, whose existence I didn't even know about before, because at that time the level of branches was the elite, they were the gods who were allowed to attend the coolest events, who traveled to places where others could only hear about and write, and this is a separate circle of communication. This <...> they were gathering in certain places, or waiting for some action, five or six people would gather there, and you listened to and absorbed it all.”
“Plast” provided great structure at that time. Since there was a lot of new things coming in, it was overwhelming and you didn't know what to do with it, but “Plast” organized everything nicely. There were clubs... Children from different backgrounds brought their own bricks, and we built our own home. In that home we had our own lockers, there was a music locker, and everyone brought something of their own. I heard this, I heard... that there was music of a certain style, and you learned about everything and organized everything. I think that besides the fact that we started hiking, that we learned history, songs, that there was discipline, cooking, tent setting, the most important thing was that active children of active people came, each of whom had the baggage of their parents, their knowledge, their experience, and all of it fit together like a puzzle. And it helped to structure all this newness. In addition, it allowed to have a new progressive group, there were about 15 of us there. And when you have a group, and they are energetic progressive people, they take on different things and it goes easily, it goes happily and everything succeeds.”
“These first blue and yellow flag badges that were attached to the back of the lapel. - Inside? - Yes. So, we wore them on our school uniform jackets, and boys in the second and third grades had these badges. They were hidden. And we had this computer science teacher, Kryvtsov, who saw them somewhere, and he tried to rip those badges off our lapels. Well... he was surprised, but the first two boys he approached and wanted to rip the badges off, they grabbed his hand and wouldn't let him do it. And when I saw the helplessness in his eyes, that's when I understood that it was all right now to talk about everything with everyone. When a teacher can't do anything anymore, that's... And he went to the principal, the vice-principal, there were some talks with parents, but that's already... that's not the same.”
Liubomyr Yasnyskyi was born on February 25, 1976 in Lviv. Father and mother came from Lviv region. The father worked as a workshop manager at Lviv Television. The mother worked in preschool education: first as a speech therapist, later as a preschool education inspector. In November 1991, Liubomyr Yasnyskyi joined the Plast National Scout Organization, which influenced his entire life path. In 1993, Liubomyr entered the Ivan Franko Lviv National University, Faculty of Journalism. Almost immediately, he transferred to correspondence education in order to gain direct experience at Lviv Television, where he worked for a year. Then Liubomyr Yasnyskyi resigned and got a job at the radio “Nezalezhnist” (Independence), where he covered local news. After working on the radio, he worked at the Center for Creativity of Children and Youth “Halychyna” at the School of Journalism. After that, he got a job in a small studio at the “Telestudio Oko” educational institute, where he met people who influenced his outlook and development. In 2000, Liubomyr started working at the Lviv branch office of “1+1” TV channel as an operator. After six years, he got married and at the end of 2006 he resigned and left journalism and news. He worked in the commercial production studio “Mediaclub”. In 2010, he got a job at the TV channel “ZIK”. With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he evacuated his family abroad and started volunteering. Currently, in 2022, he lives and works in Lviv. Still volunteering. Raises two children.
