I made propaganda for my Religion classЯ зробив пропаганду для уроку релігії

I want to use the honest word for this, so: the thing below is propaganda.

Not in the sense of lying. Every number in it is sourced and every photograph is real. But I chose the story, I chose the faces, I chose which sentence lands last on the page. I built it to make you feel a specific way about a specific country. That's not reporting. That's persuasion, and I did it deliberately.

This post is about how I do that — and why I keep doing it.

The assignment#

Grade 11 Religion. The unit was Development and peace, arms and weaponry, and the brief was to take a moral issue and argue it through Catholic ethics.

I'm an atheist. I don't believe the framework I was handed. But the assignment was about people getting killed in my country, and my opinion on the metaphysics is a much smaller thing than that. So I used the framework properly — Levinas, Aristotle, Liberation Theology, the Church's teaching on just war and the arms trade — because those were the tools in the room, and using them well was the way to get the story heard. If Kant and the Gospel of Matthew are what makes a room in Ontario look at Kyiv for six minutes, I'll take Kant and the Gospel of Matthew.

One story, not a statistic#

I didn't want to talk about "the war." The war is a number, and numbers slide off people.

So I took one night. April 24, 2025 — a Russian missile hit a residential building in Kyiv's Sviatoshynskyi district in the early hours. 54 apartment buildings damaged, over 700 apartments affected, 13 killed and around 90 injured, including six children and a pregnant woman.

I made the newspaper two days later, while it was still the top story and before it became one more entry in a list.

The people in it are our age. Danylo Khudia was seventeen. He had a girlfriend, Alyona, and they'd been together 499 days. He was going to propose on her eighteenth birthday that summer. He died with his mother and father in a first-floor apartment.

That's the whole method, really: find the person the headline is standing on top of, and put them on the front page instead.

What the pages do#

Each spread has a job. Page two is about the twelve hours after — the friends who stood at the rubble in silence so they could hear tapping, the rescue workers digging by hand while knowing that rescue sites get struck a second time. Page three is the children who stopped talking about cartoons and started talking about which hospital their friend might be in.

Then it narrows down to two people and stays there.

Page six is the one I still think about. Alyona sitting in front of the flowers. Would it be ethical for her to want the people who did this to feel what she feels? Kant says act from duty, not emotion. Levinas says morality begins when you see the face of the other. She has seen too many faces under ash. I wrote the question and left it open, because I didn't have a clean answer and pretending otherwise would have been the dishonest kind of propaganda.

The last page is the works cited, which matters more than it looks. The whole argument depends on none of it being invented.

Kramatorsk#

Here's the part where I stop pretending to be neutral.

I was born in Kramatorsk. On April 8, 2022, a Russian missile with the words "For Kids" painted on its side hit the railway station there while more than five hundred people were waiting to evacuate. 63 people were killed, 9 of them children. Over 150 were injured. Human Rights Watch later called it a clear war crime.

I had left through that station a week earlier.

That's why this isn't a school project I happened to get a good mark on. When I make something like this, I'm not an observer choosing a topic. I'm someone who got out and is aware, constantly, that the difference between me and Danylo is timing.

The presentation#

A month later I stood up and walked the class through it. Someone recorded it.

By then Pope Leo XIV had said, at his inaugural mass, that "the martyred Ukraine is waiting for negotiations for a just and lasting peace." I put it in, because it was the strongest thing that room could hear from inside its own language.

Nobody looked up#

I got to the slide about my friend's painting of the Kramatorsk station — the one with "For Kids" on the missile — and I had to stop for a second to keep my voice steady.

And the room was just… a room. Some polite attention. A couple of phones. It ended, and we moved on to the next presentation.

I've thought about that a lot since. My first reaction was that I'd failed, that I hadn't made it hit hard enough. I don't think that anymore. Nothing I could have built would have made a Tuesday afternoon in Ontario feel like an air raid — that gap isn't a design problem, it's the entire point. People who don't live it can't feel it, which is exactly why someone has to keep saying it out loud in rooms where nothing is at stake.

So I'll keep calling it propaganda, and I'll keep making it. The word only sounds dirty when you assume the truth is supposed to defend itself. It doesn't. It needs someone to put it on a front page, in a font big enough, with a name attached.

Danylo Khudia. Seventeen. 499 days.

Sources#

• Kyiv hit by deadly Russian missile and drone attack — BBC News
• A young couple in Ukraine delighted in first love. Then the war came for them — AP / CityNews
• Kramatorsk railway station attack — Wikipedia · Ukraine: New light on Russia's rail station attack — Human Rights Watch
• Pope Leo XIV calls for unity at inaugural mass and meets Zelensky — BBC News