As my friend Olga showed me around Kyiv last month, she talked about her boyfriend Volodymyr on the front lines. Olga was feeling ill, but thinking about him in the trenches as the winter drew in, she visibly strained to tell me as much as possible about her country, so I might pass it on when I got home – we visited exhibitions about the war effort until it grew dark. When we came out of the deep Arsenalna metro station, an air raid siren groaned overhead.
The war has changed Olga’s life forever. She spoke Russian her whole life, but the day the first missile fell on Kyiv, she swore never to use it again. She used to work in PR, but now has a job as a “fixer” for foreign journalists. The latest story she'd worked on had been about Ukrainian children abducted by Russia in the East. She seemed traumatised by what she’d seen, but is determined the fight must go on.
