Aleksei Bobrovnikov Foto: Stefanie Silber

Through his inquiry, the Ukrainian author and investigative journalist Aleksei Bobrovnikov revealed connections between a smuggling ring and the Ukrainian military. As a result, he is getting public death threats and was forced to leave his homeland. Since February 2018, Aleksei Bobrovnikov is a scholar of the Writers-in-Exile Program of the PEN-Center in Germany.

 

Meaningless dates

 

Meaningless dates

Make you retain

the meaning.

Power of zero,

that basic math,

the thing that made empires rise and fall

long before the Manhattan project —

that multiplying power of nothing

that makes one’s purse empty

but the head

strikingly

full.