It has been 617 days.
A few months ago, my usual day did not look as it does now: although my region was the only one that did not physically suffer from rockets and shellings, we had air raids, sometimes several times a day. Our school did not have a shelter, so the younger students were hiding on the first floor of our school, while we, the older ones, had seven strict minutes to go to the shelter in a school nearby. The difference was that we knew that in a few hours, we would easily get home, and life would continue – another day would come. People who live closer to the east or in occupied territories never know whether the next rocket will destroy them and everything they created and cherished: their house, their cattle, their belongings. Cities, in the span of almost two years, disappeared, burned to the ground, with only dust floating – cities where even the ground is dead.
The horror does not limit itself to these parts of the country – this summer, a dormitory, schools, and civilian houses were hit in Lviv – a majestic city in Ukraine bordering Poland, whose center is considered part of the world heritage; a city that was considered safe to be in. Every day, there are air raids, shellings, and buildings destroyed.
I was lucky – I am still. I simply cannot express how privileged I am to be here and how grateful I feel. I wish I could grant this safety easily. Ukrainians are filled with everything – worry, questions, nerves, despair, and rage. But most of all – they are filled with light.
Winter is coming. Even here, thousands of miles away, our fingertips get colder and colder, and we rush into the nearest building to save ourselves from the far-reaching wind. At my home, it is also coming. People are on the verge of freezing: the soldiers and the medics, to whom we owe our lives, will hide in icy dirt, their uniforms hardly protecting them from the cold. They will fight, and perhaps the only thing giving them warmth will be the idea of victory, the idea of coming home, of seeing their mother, of remembering their lost brothers and sisters who gave everything for us to exist. Ukrainians are incandescent but also powerless as they await the inevitable arrival of winter.
They wait for attacks on power and water plants because we know what happened last year; the cold is not forgotten. When Russia attacked a year ago, Ukrainians responded to them: stores and families bought generators, and energy operators created schedules for every city with regular power outages. As my region’s plants were not destroyed, we tried saving energy as much as possible to share it with the rest of the country. Sometimes, we didn’t have power for sixteen hours a day, and my parents gratefully thought about the wood they had bought over the summer that kept us warm. Our lamps didn’t work, and almost all of those working on batteries were sold out everywhere, so people lit candles (that there was a lack of too) and slept earlier than usual. Still, I felt like giving up hours of light was the least we could do to help those who lived far away, closer to the cold, far closer to the real darkness.
As the evenings wore on, towns and cities became a dark blue shadow – with no sheepish light in the windows, and people became used to the incessant sound of working generators.
The events recounted above happened only a year ago and might happen again in a few weeks, only on a much larger scale of damage. As for now, Ukraine suffers from massive shellings: the biggest drone attack on Kyiv since the beginning of the invasion and an attack on the National Fine Arts museum in Odesa are only a few of them. The reach of the damage is difficult to describe – one in five Ukrainian families faces food insecurity due to Russia’s invasion; children are separated from their families and are illegally deported to Russia and Belarus; civilian buildings are damaged daily – and each of these inevitably impacts thousands of lives.
At the same time, Ukraine is grateful for the support of volunteers, organizations, news coverage, and simply thoughts and prayers from people around the world, for protests and memorials on the streets of far-away cities and the light that these people and events share with us. Ukraine is enormously thankful.
