Vitalii Lylyck, 21, was shaken but smiling when I reached him in his dorm room in Kyiv, just 10 days after Russian forces began sending low-flying drones to destroy infrastructure and terrorize Ukrainians far from the front lines. I had hoped to meet with him in person that week, but when the drones started flying he discouraged me from traveling to Kyiv so I remained in Poland and we spoke by Zoom instead.
He was wearing two coats but was still, as he put it, “chilled to the bone.” The dorm had had no heat for days, and although there was still electricity, Lylyck and his friends were using it as sparingly as possible. The students had eaten no hot food that week, living out of tin cans. When Vitalii and I spoke, they had running water. A week later, it too was cut, for a day, by the bombardment.
Conditions were “harsh,” Lylyck conceded. But he and his classmates at the Kyiv National University were unbowed. “We’re doing fine,” he said. “We’ve agreed among ourselves — after all the sacrifices our country has made this year, we don’t have the right to be gloomy. People have laid down their lives so we can live, and we’ve made a promise to ourselves: We won’t be sad this fall. Only Russians will be sad.”
