“I am concerned that people here are becoming more fatalistic, and care less about the danger,” says Gregory Scherban, a friend of mine, a Kharkiv resident and a volunteer helping the evacuation of those escaping the new Russian assault in the villages in north-east Ukraine.
I understand what he means. Walking with colleagues through northern Saltivka – once a populous residential area on the edge of Kharkiv that was hit by heavy shelling in the early stage of the war – we hear the sounds of explosions. I’m scared but my colleagues from the area are calm. “It’s too far away,” they say, casually. An air alert warns about further strikes, but the communal workers nearby continue repairing the road as if nothing is going on. The air alert can be on for dozens of hours at a time, so not resuming activity isn’t an option.
It’s later confirmed that one of the city’s biggest printing businesses was hit. Seven employees were killed, with more than 20 wounded. The firm publishes 3% of the manuals for Ukraine’s schools. Thousands of books were burned in the resulting fire.
I’m a resident of Kyiv, the most protected city in Ukraine, thanks to the Patriot surface-to-air missile system. But spending time in the country’s second biggest city, Kharkiv, is a very different experience. Here, in a city of millions that lacks air defence and is often at the mercy of Moscow’s bombs,normality and immense danger sit side by side.
The stories of suffering from the city are full of bravery and sorrow. Before the war, Pavlo Kushtym was producing furniture in Kharkiv, and also played in a reggae band. During the first months of the war, he saved more than 600 people, organising their shelter and evacuating them from the most dangerous areas of a city just 30 miles from the Russian border.
He was asked by friends in the military to perform in the trenches in front of the soldiers who needed some psychological support. The soldiers asked him not to play anything too sad. The biggest hit became No Putin, No War, sung to the tune of Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry. His new Ukrainian lyrics imagine a world of “peace, beauty and kindness” where soldiers are all at home – if the Russian president would just disappear.
Kushtym is usually cheerful, but sobbed the night he learned that the whole platoon he had sung to was was killed in battle. “Those young guys were from Odesa – they came that far to save my native Kharkiv,” he says, visibly pained by their loss.
Beyond the personal stories of the people I encountered in Kharkiv, the conversation in much of the rest of the country is about the lack of manpower in the Ukrainian army. Some feel bitter that there aren’t more men queueing up to serve, while others complain about the ruthlessness of the military commissioning – some men of serving age are stopped on the streets.
Almost every day I learn about a new person being mobilised: my colleague, my former best friend at university, or just an old acquaintance. Many do not rush to go, as their turn will come sooner or later. On 18 May, the new law on mobilisation was enforced which, among other things, limited the number of people considered not fit to serve due to minor health conditions or because of family reasons; it also broadened the list of the law enforcement agencies that can issue the summons to serve. There was speculation it would lead to a mass exodus of men. It didn’t happen. About1.6m Ukrainians have been newly registered as potential soldiers, according to the Ministry of Defence.
The political debates are heated, almost like prewar times. They are about everything. From how taxes should be spent – for defence or social payments – to whether it is OK to throw fundraising parties and music festivals, even if the aim is to collect funds for the army. Some people question whether it is ethical for a Ukrainian writer to sit on the same panel as a Russian liberal. There are also legitimate concerns about the presidential office taking control of the state-owned media, as well as its increasingly centralised powers.
Ukrainians care least about the question of whether there are elections or not. With the country living under martial law, it means that the presidential vote cannot happen. It’s a cliche that authoritarian leaders use security threats as a pretext to avoid the polls; but when bombs are falling on your head and Russian troops are on Ukrainian soil, you know that martial law is not an authoritarian ploy.
Ukrainians would not mind elections, but they would have to be valid, representative ones. How to do that when millions of people are displaced, stuck under occupation, or fighting in the trenches? How to count the votes safely under a barrage of airstrikes or during a power cut? Is it right to use state funds for political campaigns if the country doesn’t even have enough money to defend itself? The results are likely to be predictable, anyway: during crises, incumbents often stay in power.
For an outsider, an election contested between multiple parties may give the impression of schisms in the fight against Russia. But despite our differences, we are more united than we might seem. Even the fiercest enemies reconcile and communicate decently during funerals. It’s not a metaphor. We all have to attend funerals too often. We have too many occasions to mourn that force us to forget our internal feuds.
In a recent interview, President Zelenskiy spoke about the difference in the way Ukrainians and the west feel about time. “You say time is money. For us, time is our life,” he said. The Ukrainian president explained that for people in the west who take security for granted, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to think about physical survival at every moment.
But there are varying degrees of danger within the country too. Instead of saying that Zelenskiy speaks “from the height of his position”, we often joke that “he speaks from the depth of his bunker”, where he spends his time mainly with a narrow inner circle away from the line of fire. Can he understand what the population is going through from down there? His justification is that physical survival is essential. But that is something everybody can relate to. What life under the bombs teaches us more clearly is what is necessary for survival – and why it is not worth giving up.
Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist, and co-founder of the Reckoning Project
