Ira Hadetska, 28, returned to Kyiv a few months ago, assuming it was safe
(Picture: Tom Mutch)“It’s 24.02 déjà vu,” a friend texted me shortly after the missiles slammed into a university park, government buildings and popular tourist attractions in Kyiv on Monday morning. She was referring to the day in late February on which the Russians first launched their invasion — a date etched into the minds of Ukrainians across the country and indeed the world.
This week, 10 months on, hundreds of civilians crowded back into Kyiv’s underground metro stations to seek shelter for the first time since the war began. Troops and first responders could be seen all over the streets. People’s phone were full of messages from friends and relatives, texting them to make sure they were OK. For some, it was the news they had been dreading for the majority of the last year: at least 19 people were killed and more than 100 were injured in the barrage of over 80 missiles fired throughout Ukraine – Putin’s revenge for the Ukrainian army’s string of major battlefield successes in Kharkiv and Kherson last month.
“I don’t know how much longer we are going to be able to go on with this madness,” says Ira Hadetska, 28, a mediator originally from the city of Mykolaiv. She fled Kyiv after the war began, spending time in Cyprus, but returned several months later after the city had been deemed safe. “Now I know I’ll be completely crazy once the war finishes,” she says, explaining how the continued bombing and anxiety of war gradually chip away at your sanity.
It wasn’t Hadetska’s first close shave. Her mother remains in Mykolaiv near the southern frontline, which faces Russian rocket attacks almost every day. When she went to visit her several weeks ago, Russian rockets slammed into her old university three times in a single week. Seeing her alma mater wrecked in such a way was heartbreaking and infuriating. “Russia is losing on the front line and the informational front,” she continues. “They are so stupid trying to threaten Ukrainians, it is just hopeless.”
Hadetska’s words reflect the wider mood in her country. In cities across Ukraine, there is surprisingly little panic, just anger, as people continue to defy the Kremlin simply by living their normal lives. “After the bombings, I went to the supermarket and people seemed OK, nice, calm, buying whatever they needed,” Ira tells me. “People went to walk their dogs; the cleaning lady was cleaning the streets.”
Kyiv wasn’t the only target of Putin’s strikes this week. In addition to the capital, the Russians hit the Ukrainian cities of Dnipro, Kharkiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Zaporizhzhia and Zhytomyr. In many cases, the targets were civilian infrastructures such as power stations. The aim is to make the winter as harsh as possible for Ukrainians, after a huge explosion hit the Kerch Bridge between occupied Crimea and the Russian mainland, a vanity project by Putin opened in 2018 to showcase the unity between Russia and the territories it had illegally annexed. Russian authorities had mostly claimed it was too well defended to ever be destroyed.
This bombing — which Putin has called a “act of terrorism” but Ukraine has so far denied responsibility for – was just the latest humiliation dished out to the Kremlin in its disastrous war against Ukraine. Just two weeks ago Putin announced the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in a speech in Moscow’s Red Square but, by the next day, Ukraine had liberated the key city of Lyman in the Donetsk region, making a mockery of the Russian leader’s claims in under 24 hours.
Still, the latest strikes spark fears that the Russians are making a renewed effort to ramp up the war – especially chilling for those who have spent much of the last few months at the mercy of their Russian invaders. When I visited the Kharkiv region three weeks ago, surviving residents described the terror of living under recent occupation. “We heard a column of tanks coming from the side of my house, we could feel the earth shaking even in the cellar,” she says. The Russian soldiers lived in the house across from Tatiana, where they drank heavily and looted nearby houses and stores. One day they broke into her garden and disassembled her car for spare parts. “We had constant threats, one man in the village was tortured almost to death. Our lives were constantly in danger,” she tells me. “We lived in our basement. We were like meerkats, we would crawl out to get bread, go to the grocery store and go back to hiding again.”
Tatiana takes me into her back garden to show me two huge shells from rockets the Russians had fired at the town shortly before they captured it. “We were so lucky none of them hit our house — although one landed in our vegetable garden.” Now, they are delighted just to get back to their everyday lives.
Like many Ukrainians throughout the country, Tatiana and her family have relatives in Russia who refuse to believe what happened to them, so they do not speak any more. In her last conversation with her now estranged Russian family, she says they told her: “We came to save you, we came to liberate you!’” Her response? “Well, we didn’t need liberation, all was well, and we lived in peace. You came, and now we’re like slaves.”
Wherever they manage to retake territory, Ukrainian troops uncover houses of horrors that the Russians have left behind. In the Kyiv region, a series of mass graves where civilians were murdered was infamously discovered in the town of Bucha. Near Kharkiv, the city of Izium suffered the same fate. Men in white overalls and gas masks are seen painstakingly digging up the corpses and filling them into body bags. Several wear jackets with “War Crimes Investigators” written across them in English. Each grave is marked with a simple wooden cross. New ones have just been discovered near newly liberated Lyman.
Thousands of buildings in Kharkiv are still damaged, but the city is being repaired and slowly coming back to life. For months, Russian troops stationed on the outskirts shelled the city constantly, and in my first visit in March, we could hear the constant sound of explosions. I first met Olya Filipskaya, 29, in a metro station in the centre of Kharkiv where she was sheltering along with hundreds of other locals. Now it is safe enough to meet at the Protagonist, a trendy café in central Kharkiv. “It is the first time since the invasion that we feel safe enough to walk the streets normally,” she tells me. She is now working with the United Nations delivering supplies to recently liberated villages. Only the occasional missile strike from the neighbouring Belgorod region hits the city, but the residents, “have learned to live with the danger,” says Filipskaya. I heard a similar sentiment echoed from friends and colleagues around the country after Monday’s strikes.
Ukraine’s success on the battlefield last month certainly marked a new phase in the war, with the missile strikes on Ukrainian cities being just one of the ways in which Putin is doubling down. In September the Kremlin announced a partial mobilisation of reserve forces in Russia, prompting hundreds of thousands of young men to flee the country. Seats on private jets to the few cities that still allow Russians visa-free travel such as Yerevan in Armenia and Istanbul in Turkey were going for as much as $25,000. Protests spread to cities all over Russia.
Ukrainians in general remain mostly scathing of the Russians who are fleeing and protesting. “I don’t want to be named saying this, but I want them to die in agony,” said a Ukrainian friend from an occupied region. “Ukrainians want to know where all these protesters were when the atrocities in Bucha, Izium and Mariupol were revealed.”
The more Ukrainians learn about Russian occupation, the more urgent the reconquest of Ukrainian territory becomes. After learning about Bucha and Izium, vast swathes of the population know that the idea of giving up territory to Russia and leaving their fellow citizens to suffer similar fates is unthinkable. Daria Gorbatsevich, a 28-year-old living in Georgia who works at a charity helping refugees, is originally from the city of Khakovka in the Kherson region. She says she was devastated and angry to see her home annexed. “I feel such sadness to know that I can’t come back home because the place I grew up in doesn’t exist any more.” She says she managed to get her mother evacuated, but “all her stuff and life are still there. But I’m sure we will be back in the Kherson region once it is liberated. She’s seen enough of this disgrace.”
Now, the escalation that Ukrainians and Western officials feared seems to have started — but how far will Russia go? The Kremlin has made suggestions that it could use tactical nuclear weapons, with a tweet from the Russian Embassy to the UK saying on Monday the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War Two could be “precedent". The Biden administration was quick to retaliate, warning the Russians of catastrophic consequences if they were to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
But Ukrainians remain resolute, even in the face of these threats. “Do you think there is going to be a nuclear war?” Yana Troianska, 28, a writer from Mykolaiv, asked me as we strolled around a newly reopened art gallery. It was as casual as though she’d asked if it was going to rain this weekend. “It is the only thing I still worry about,” she adds. But most accept there is simply nothing they can do about the threat and continue to live their lives as normally as they can and try to view the threats as a bluff based on desperation.
Most remain overwhelmingly supportive of President Zelensky, who has been an inspirational political leader and has left the fighting mostly to his generals. This response has paid dividends — it has united the country, galvanised international support behind Ukraine and produced a string of battlefield victories.
On a building in Izium that survived the wreckage is a huge mural of John Lennon. “Give Peace a Chance” it reads in Russian. If only the powers in the Kremlin could see it. Back in Kun’je, Natalia and her family are still giddy with the feeling of liberation. “When we saw Ukrainian flags, we were so pleased and grateful,” she says. “We went on to the streets, bringing them bread and pork. During the occupation, we were offered Russian passports, but we didn’t take them, because this is Ukraine. Now, we finally feel freedom.” But this freedom is coming with an appalling price that soldiers and civilians are paying all throughout Ukraine.
Back in Kyiv, many people took a day off work the day after the missile strikes, but they’re already back to normal. Hadetska is determined to stay despite the renewal of the danger. “When I arrived back, I knew I would never leave Kyiv,” she tells me, bravely. “I feel safe for myself, but worry about my friends and relatives, and they the same about me and other close people. At the end of the day, we just have to exchange our love towards each other."
Ukrainians like her have been through too much to consider surrendering now.
