Iryna Tsilyk is tired. The Ukrainian poet and film-maker apologises for her English, unnecessarily, and for her patchy cognitive ability, also unnecessarily. The whole of Ukraine, you could say, is tired: tired of the missiles, the deaths, the stress, the grief, and of the guilt that seems to afflict everyone from frontline soldiers to those in safer exile abroad for “not doing enough”. Tsilyk, an author of light-footed, vivid poems and of tender, quietly devastating films, says she has been diagnosed with depression. She shrugs: it’s the same for a bunch of her friends, probably much of the population.
It is hardly surprising, given the extreme pressure Ukrainians are living under, more than two and a half years into Russia’s fullscale invasion. Tsilyk’s husband, the novelist Artem Chekh, is in the armed forces. He fought in the war that began in 2014 after the Russian-backed takeovers in the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. His 10 months in the trenches back then were intensely difficult for the couple. So was its aftermath after the initial euphoria of his return, Tsilyk tells me.
