When Anastasiia Vereshchynska, 27, left Kyiv with her partner for a trip to western Ukraine in early February 2022, they did not pack lightly. “We were taking a bit more just in case. There was lots of information on social media about what to pack in case of war: medicine, warm clothes, valuables and documents, thermals. I was thinking we are doing this because we are panicking and that it would not really help us.”
But Vereshchynska was not panicking unduly. They were meant to return from the city of Ivano-Frankivsk on 23 February. But Russia’s invasion the following day meant the couple remained in the city for several months, staying in a friend’s flat.
One year on, the couple are living in Uzhhorod, a city perched on Ukraine’s border with Slovakia. “It’s a pretty small city but lots have come from other regions,” says Vereshchynska, who works remotely for an NGO. “I suppose for people living there before the invasion it’s a bit uncomfortable – probably the city wasn’t prepared for this number of people.” Rents have also risen, she says.
More than 18 million people – more than 40% of Ukrainians – fled the country in the wake of Russia’s invasion last year, but about 10.3 million have since returned. Millions of others have been internally displaced by devastation in cities including Kharkiv, Odesa and Mariupol.
Vereshchynska worries about her mother, who lives alone in a city in central Ukraine. “My mother spends all the time during air alerts in the corridor, and has her documents and everything packed. Luckily [her area] has not been affected by bombardments,” she says. “The first month was very stressful – because she’s alone there, I just can’t imagine how that was for her.”
Though she misses her old life, reflecting on the last year Vereshchynska says the war has brought her priorities sharply into focus. “If you asked me a year ago, I would have said I have so many problems. This year has really shown what is really important and what is just white noise. When you can have a call with friends or relatives and you can hear their voice, it means this day is pretty much successful.”
Moments once considered ordinary have become exceptional. In December, she went to her first concert since the war began, held in an underground venue in the neighbouring city of Lviv. “That was a piece of our old life that was dear to us. It was similar to what we did on a weekly or monthly basis in Kyiv, that was part of the routine and now it has become something extraordinary.”
When Viacheslav Bozhko, 29, thinks about the time before the war, it seems distant. “It feels like a different life. Pretty much everything has changed,” Bozhko, who works for his family’s clothing business in Kharkiv, says. “It feels like the war has been going for much longer than that.”
Bozhko had been anticipating Russia’s invasion. “The night before the attack happened, I saw the intelligence report, fuelled up my car and my mum’s car and gathered stuff in case a war started. I woke up at 5.30am to explosions. My knees started shaking.”
On 24 February, he and his mother drove to Ternopil in western Ukraine with friends. Bozhko rented a studio flat with three others due to the city’s housing shortage. In April, a neighbour called to tell him that his home had been hit by a missile, damaging the balcony and smashing windows.
Bozhko, who has received a medical exemption from conscription, has now returned to Kharkiv for good. He first went back temporarily for work in May. As well as their home, a rocket had hit a building next to his family’s store. “I took out a lot of shrapnel from the clothing,” he says.
Coming back to Kharkiv was “surreal”. “There were no cars, no people – I drove through an empty city,” he says. But many have now returned. “A couple of days ago I was in a traffic jam, a thing I haven’t seen for a year.”
Kharkiv was under regular fire over the summer. “[In that period] the shelling would start at 11pm,” he recalls. “I would set an alarm at 10.55pm because I knew that in five minutes we would get hit.” Following “the rule of two walls” – keeping two walls between yourself and the building’s exterior – he would wait it out in the bathroom or the hallway.
It was in one of these moments that Bozhko first experienced a panic attack, on the eve of his return to Ternopil. “I was thinking how stupid it would be to die today when I was supposed to leave tomorrow,” he remembers. “The panic started to rise – I had a feeling that I knew somehow that I would definitely die in the next hours.”
Like many others, he drank at night to cope with the terror. “The most effective thing to stop the feeling of fear is to get drunk,” he says. “Everyone I knew here was drinking in the evening.”
Oxana Brygadyr, 45, recognises these fearful premonitions. “I wake up sometimes in the morning and think: ‘This is the day that I can die’. I’ve started to think about death and my kid, how’s she going to live. I shouldn’t think of this at all – I’m young, everything is OK, but one thing: war.”
Brygadyr fled Kyiv for Lviv, where the family own a house, on the first day of the war, and the family have lived in both cities over the last year. She was adamant about remaining in her country. “I wouldn’t leave Ukraine. Somebody has to stay here – we cannot let them break us. It’s our land.”
While in Kyiv, the attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure left Brygadyr unable to cook or work remotely, and having to climb 11 flights of stairs to their flat. An outage once left the family trapped in the lift for an hour.
“[My daughter] was crying at the beginning,” Brygadyr remembers. “Now she is afraid of elevators.” Her three-year-old doesn’t comprehend the significance of what is happening around her, she believes, but other older children do. “Maybe we’ll see later how deeply it’s affected our kids.”
The war has left Brygadyr unable to think ahead. “You’re not certain about your future – this feeling is very difficult. I’m the kind of person who likes to have a plan.” Brygadyr and her husband work in property and construction and have seen work dry up in their sectors. “Many are afraid to start a new project – you renovate an apartment and [the] Russians bomb and you’re left with nothing.”
She is desperate for a return to her old life. “I’m hoping that war will end [soon] and I’ll have all my normal life as I had before. I’m dreaming of seeing the sea. For sure, I hope the war will end in 2023. We have a lot of work to do inside the country, like fighting corruption.
“We have a lot of lessons from this war. What we lost makes us stronger. We became more united – people realised what it is to be Ukrainian and [to] protect their country.’”
Vereshchynska does not dare to hope for victory in the next few months. But between now and peacetime, daily life, in all its shades of mundanity and glory, continues.
Living in the here and now is vital. “It won’t be the same as before – but there will be joy and love, even during war. I’m not thinking a lot about the time after the victory because I don’t know when it [will] happen. It’s easier to plan tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.”
• This article was amended on 22 February 2023 to correct a calculation of the proportion of Ukrainians who left the country after Russia’s invasion.
