This week it will be one year since the war started. When I think back to the last week before the invasion, I think about coffee and seeds. I remember that my brother, Sasha, who lived in Kyiv, was working on his startup business plan in a cosy café, sipping flat whites; I recall that my mother, who lived in the countryside in Khersonshchyna, was sorting through her handmade seed packets, preparing for the sowing season in March. Here, in London, I was doing both, the coffees and the seeds, and to me, those two rituals – one so modern and one so ancient – were great signifiers of stability. They’re also something that most people in the UK can easily relate to.
In a country where you can drink flat whites and sow tomato seeds, how can you also have tanks grinding down the streets? How can you have strangers with guns, that come from thousands of miles away, breaking in and barking at you that now you are either one of them or you’ll be taken down to “the basement” for “re-education” or worse? It’s just absurd.
The early morning of 24 February 2022 started with my screaming. I had not slept all night, glued to any live tweets I could find (the regular news channels were not updating fast enough), listening to the war in Ukraine unfold in real time. So at 6am, when my husband came into the spare bedroom, where I had retreated the night before in nightmarish anticipation, and asked me to look after our toddler, I cried, “The war has started, Joe! They fucking bombed Kyiv, they bombed everywhere!”
The rest of the day is a blur. I remember being glued to a screen, any screen, either watching, reading or trying to communicate. Were my parents OK in Kakhovka? They had heard explosions, but they were fine. How was my brother and his children? He saw explosions, but they were OK. My extended family in the Kherson region, in Berdiansk, Lviv, Odessa… Yak vy? How are you? Yak vy? Yak vy? I remember watching a Russian tank drive over a car in Kyiv, crushing it. Mouth agape, howling. The driver survived, but so many did not. This simply could not be happening.
Only two days earlier, I had watched Kyiv being Kyiv on my social media. People walking down Andriyivsky Spusk, seeing familiar bars, Sasha being a part of that world. My parents came to visit us in London for 2022’s New Year celebrations. As always, Mum smuggled in one of her home-reared ducks, frozen in her suitcase. We cooked it simply, in its own fat and a little bit of water, salt and pepper. Mum and I made hand-cut noodles – our speciality. We laid out salads and honey kraut, and slurped the noodles dressed in sticky duck juices. Joe opened a bottle of champagne. There is a Polaroid of Mum and me laughing… She is wearing a leopard-print top, has immaculate hair and lipstick, I’m beaming. I look quite young, almost childish, dressed in my happiness. We are looking at the phone, at my brother celebrating New Year with his older son and his girlfriend in Kyiv. They, too, roasted a fat duck, so my brother walked his phone through the kitchen to show us. Yana, his son’s girlfriend, who we’d just met via this video call, was shy and tried to avoid the screen. Mum and I must have been so intense, so happy about the duck coincidence – and about meeting her.
I suggested that my parents stay with us for a little longer, just in case, but we did not believe that a widescale attack was possible, so they casually refused and I casually accepted their refusal. They flew home after Dad’s birthday on 3 January and their life went on in Kakhovka as usual. They worked during the day and went to the sauna in the evening. This was often followed by a gin and tonic. Then Mum would embroider or knit and watch Netflix next to the wood burner in the summer kitchen. They were semi-retiring in their much-loved house, with a huge sleepy garden and orchard, right on the shores of the roaring Dnieper River. Whenever we visited with our kids in the summer, we picked fresh, warm cucumbers from the vines and huge gnarled tomatoes with split, leathery stripes on the side.
We joke that worrying is the Ukrainian national pastime. On day two of the war, when I saw my brother holding a rifle, his feet in trainers, head covered with a cap instead of a helmet, I realised that the crippling anxiety I had felt my whole life, waiting for something terrible to happen, finally had a purpose.
“Where is your gear? Your helmet,
vest, boots?”
“This is it.”
“OK.”
I could stop being anxious and jump into action. I only knew of the Territorial Army as something I had watched on TV – it was a joke, what Gareth from The Office did. And yet, here was my brother joining an actual territorial defence unit alongside other Kyivans, businessmen, bakers, dentists, carpenters and even a famous Crimean Tatar director, to actually defend the capital city against an army of homicidal lunatics and marauders.
Within two days, we raised enough money to equip them all and then some. I crash-learned about helmets, vests, drones, thermo-vision goggles, even ballistic underwear. My kitchen turned into a freedom fighter’s HQ. It felt like a movie. Volunteers helped me navigate the campaigning and interviews, and writing letters to the prime minister.
I have experienced fight or flight sensations briefly in my life. But it was a different beast altogether to be running on adrenalin and cortisol for so many months. That energy, when you feel as if you could move a car off your child’s body, kept me going until Bucha. When the atrocities were revealed, they said this is what happens as soon as communication goes down. When people have no way to contact the outside world or have no help coming, it turns into a different dimension, an Upside Down World.
It so happened that week, I could not reach my parents for two days in a row. Those 48 hours were hell. I remember walking through London, to record an interview, and it felt as if I was wading through jelly. Momentary relief came when I finally got through to them, but they told me they had received a call from the local collaborators. The new “mayor” said he knew their son was in the Ukrainian army and that my parents were to tell him to lay down his arms or else. They also demanded keys for my mother’s B&B in town. My parents said no. And then I lost it.
“Tatous [Daddy], you must leave now! It is not too late. You can leave through Snehirivka.”
“We cannot, it is too dangerous. Besides, we have our house, our work, the employees – how can I leave them? I am responsible for the people. And the animals.”
I screamed the scream of an animal. A similar scream to the one I made when giving birth to my son, Wilfred, just two years earlier. I yowled: “If you don’t leave, I will kill myself! If something happens to you, I will not be able to go on. I will kill myself, do you understand? What would happen to your grandchildren? You are responsible for us and for them!”
I did not expect to shout all these things. In normal circumstances, I would not try to manipulate or distress them, but this was different. This was life and death, possibly life or death. I did not know how else to make them leave. My screaming was so primal, so urgent, I scared them and the following Wednesday they broke through 19 Russian check points and drove for five days through Ukraine and Europe to my cousin’s holiday home in Italy.
A year has almost passed. My mum was with us this New Year’s eve, my father was not. After four months in Europe, he admitted to himself and to us that depression and inaction was going to kill him. He drove back to Ukraine to stay with his sister near his native Mykolaiv, just above Kherson. He’s made numerous trips to the frontline with aid and he feels better, useful, in Ukraine. Mum was with us, but she did not come downstairs. She did not wear a nice dress or make herself up that day, she stayed in bed and cried.
There is a Ukrainian expression, probably one of the most used in the past year – nakrylo. Literally it means, “It covered me.” It really means that it beat you down to the ground, whatever it is. When this happens to me, like anything else, I interpret it visually. I literally feel a huge dark dome coming over my head and it hangs over me. This concave abyss, wrapping me, choking me, disabling me. This is what happens to most of us still, intermittently. For my mother – the realisation that Russian soldiers live in her half-destroyed house, that her home town is mined, that it is getting bombed every day as the troops try to drive the population out and bring Russians from Ekaterinburg in – it was too much. For me, too. I kept cancelling work this summer, I could not cope. Until Mum phoned me and said: “Olyu, you cannot keep doing this, because this is exactly what they want. This is psychological warfare as much as it is physical. You cannot let them do this to you. You finding joy with your children and Joe or just by yourself, you working… all of this is an act of resistance. It is hard, but we must try.”
Mum tries her best to follow her own advice, and so do I. There are days when we see light. My brother phones, electricity came back briefly and it is tough, but he is hugging Tetyana, his new love. He is in love, it’s been so long since I’ve seen him this happy. My niece Asya, my brother’s daughter, who I collected from the Polish-Ukrainian border last year and has been living with us since, came back from school the other day and declared that she was named star of the term. From zero English in April, she confidently tells me her original, independent thoughts about medieval English history, Macbeth, and Jekyll and Hyde. My 20-year-old nephew, Danylo, managed to visit, thanks to the swift work of my longsuffering MP who I have harangued with pleas for visa help for months. I didn’t tell Asya he was coming – she hadn’t seen any of her immediate family for almost a year. The moment when Danylo knocked on the door and Asya opened it was heartbreaking and beautiful, her hanging on to his neck so tight. He must go back now with no guarantees he won’t be conscripted.
And now it’s that time of year again. My brother, having defended Kyiv the first time round, is digging trenches around the capital in case there is another onslaught from Belarus. Despite all this, you can still get a decent coffee in a Kyiv café, powered by a generator. People are unbeatable, unstoppable. My home town is being shelled daily, my father’s factory was hit, as was their home.
In their summer kitchen, the seed packets are replaced by squatting Russian soldiers. We don’t know if there will be anything to come back to. Except – of course there will. Even if the buildings are destroyed, we will rebuild. We won’t bring back the dead and we will never be the same, but perhaps we have done enough to make people relate.
People often say to us: “You are so strong, I don’t know how you do it.” To which I reply: “We do not have a choice. If you were in our situation, you would act exactly the same.”
It’s been a year, and as I write these lines I get news from my brother that a huge offensive is being planned on Kyiv in time for the “anniversary”. Some say it’s a make-or-break situation, but I do not even entertain the idea of the latter. I keep going, at the ready with my pen and packets of seeds, ready to sow hope and resistance, until the end.
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