It’s 9am on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and in Ternopil, all the traffic has stopped. People step out of their cars, heads bowed, and stand on the road, remembering the dead.
Among the dead is the brother of the mechanic who fixed our truck in Lviv. His brother was wounded in Pokrovsk and brought home to Lviv where he died in hospital. After 12 years of war, and four years of the full-scale invasion, there is barely a family who has not lost someone.
This is my fourth time in Ukraine since the start of the big war, and my second time traveling as part of an aid delegation organized by the UK’s Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. Previously I have visited Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Izium, as well as brief stopovers in Lviv. This time, I am going to two new cities: Pavlohrad and Kryvyi Rih. I told a friend before I left—I am more nervous than before. He said – it’s because Kharkiv is a danger you know.
Pavlohrad
In Pavlohrad, men are ice fishing on the frozen river. We take the trucks to the drop-off point, where we meet Anatoly. He shows me a photo on his phone of his house in Pokrovsk, or, what was his house. I have spoken to so many people who have lost their homes, and stood outside the wreckage left by Russian drones, rockets, and missiles. The woman in Saltivka who sheltered in the basement when her apartment was destroyed. The woman in the village who refused to speak to me, and then relented, and showed off her garden, telling us that she is glad her husband died so he didn’t have to see how the Russians had destroyed their home.
I remember how at a destroyed apartment block outside of Izium, I had looked at the books that were still on the shelf, the TV that was still on the stand, and turned to my friend to say ‘you make your house your home, you make it how you want it, and then they destroy it for nothing.’ I had to hold back the tears. In Pavlohrad, with the aid delivered, we got to the stabilization center for internally displaced people. Nothing had prepared me for the scene that greeted us, in an old school corridor packed with the horror and grief of human suffering. It is hot and humid; damp with the breath and sweat of hundreds of desperate people, the air thick with the smell of human bodies and despair.
Hundreds of people line the walls, holding tight to small bags carrying the scant belongings they could grab before they were huddled into cars and buses by volunteers, and taken from their homes. One of those waiting in the corridor is an old man with a gray moustache. He sits, staring down to his folded hands, in a posture of defeat. His gaze is fixed on his fingers. He is completely still, silent, and alone.
Adjacent to the corridor is a classroom now designated as a ‘living room’ with rows of narrow campbeds and some donated toys. A family is inside: a young man whose face is so thin and gaunt that all you can notice are the cheekbones that jut out from under his gray skin. A blonde boy, his son, also too thin, totters around the room, looking to his mother, his grandmother, a toy… for something he recognizes as home.
Then there is the babushka, in her 80s or 90s, with frizzy grey hair sticking out from under her headscarf. Her brown eyes are blinking, frightened and confused, as if trying to work out where she is, and how, and why, as she works her lips against her gums. Her figure is hunched in her blue clothes that hang loose off her frail body. She never saw a life for herself outside her village. She thought she would spend the rest of her days in her home. Within days, her home may no longer exist.
I wrote in my notebook:
I saw her face for maybe 10 seconds. I will remember it for the rest of my life. The whole place felt like despair, like defeat, because they did not want to leave.
Our translator, Katya, tells me that one day when the shelling was really bad, her neighbour came and said: we have to go. She packed her things, but when the morning came, she could not get in the car. This city is her home. She did not want to leave her home. So she stays. She’s a teacher, she is a mother, she is determined her children will learn English. When she tells me this, she starts to cry. She says how as the war drags on, they have no joy, they don’t want to sing and dance. They work, and live.
We leave Pavlohrad to another location in the Dnipro region, to see the site where 12 people, mostly miners but one female garage worker, were killed when leaving work in a bus. The wall is shattered, peppered with shrapnel holes, a hunk of brick torn out of it. A dozen people murdered by Russian drones, memorialized by roses laid on the ground. We keep driving. For the first time in all my trips, I am wearing a helmet and a kevlar vest. I am so nervous putting it on, that my hands are shaking. The minibus takes us to the drone tunnel, 100 km installed in three weeks.
Later, in Kyiv, my friend asks me how I felt about the drone tunnel. I explained that it was a mixed feeling: on the one hand, admiration for the innovation and how speedily it was built. On the other, a total horror because it shows how the frontline is shifting, the killzone is growing, and how much more vulnerable civilians are to attacks.
Helmets and vests handed back, we visit a school and see the basement where children can study for the whole school day, underground, in the dark. The rooms are painted with cheerful images: emojis, flowers, bees, but it’s impossible to ignore how difficult it must be for multiple classes to sit in the basement, trying to concentrate and learn, during an air raid. There have been 100 rocket attacks on Pavlohrad since the start of the full-scale invasion. As for drone attacks, there are so many that people have lost count.
A group of teenage students greet us with a poem, dressed in their best vyshyvankas. They stand, so proud and determined. They chat in English to us, giggling and nervous, as are we! The children are so brave, remaining in this frontline city, studying English and IT and science and math, underground. They give me a traditional Ukrainian doll as a present. I’ll always remember their pride in reciting the poem.
Kryvyi Rih
A few hours before we arrive in Kryvyi Rih, Russian drones attacked the industrial city. But it is quiet when we are there. Quiet, and cold, at least -4°C. We visit the courthouse and see the damage from a missile attack. Sharp, mangled fragments of shrapnel litter the ground. I pick one up, it is heavy, and drop it again, clattering along the pavement. We drive to the river where people are walking on the ice, and the red trams cross the bridge.
The power goes out around 5pm, and there is no generator in the hotel. We have to prise open the automatic doors, and find our rooms using phone flashlights. In my room, I put a glass over the flashlight to create a lantern effect. The power comes back on at 11pm, but disappears again in the night, and at 5am I wake up colder than I think I have ever been in my life. I am so cold that I know I need to get out of bed to find more clothes, but I am too cold to imagine getting out from under the thin duvet. How have people done this, all winter, in temperatures much, much lower? I am so lucky, and I am so cold.
The sun is out in Kryvyi Rih, melting the snow. The blue skies expand over the green leaves in the park, and there are flowers at the World War Two memorial. That afternoon, we visit an English school – a small classroom where pupils of all ages can take additional English classes. On the wall is a poster where the children have shared what they dream: for peace, for peaceful skies, the chance to go to school every day, no longer having to study in the shelter. The children don’t talk to us about the war but the poster gives an insight into how it has affected their lives, their hopes, their dreams.
Children aged 7-14 have made lists of questions to ask us and they whiz around, questioning us on our hobbies, age, pets, siblings… The youngest is a little girl called Mila, who wants to be an artist, can do karate, has pets, a baby sister – and a dad at the front. Her grandmother tells us how whenever he leaves, Mila cries and cries.
Over borscht and Moldovan wine, we talk to a soldier about how he fought in the battle for Kherson alongside his son. He tells us how he and his fellow villagers defended their homes against the Russians using whatever weapons and tools they could lay their hands on. He goes to make a toast, then breaks down in tears.
Kyiv
Kyiv at 6.30am, and the city is waking up. Spring is almost here: the sky is a bright blue and the snow is melting into huge puddles. I see a woman at the traffic lights, wearing sunglasses, her gaze blissfully lifted to the sun.
We walk over to see St Sofia’s, and then to St Michael’s. A bugler is playing the last post, accompanied by drums. A coffin, carried by men in army camouflage, makes its slow journey through the arch and to the waiting car. A young woman following the coffin is sobbing; an older woman in a black veil looks blank-faced with despair. We stand back, silent with respect, and with the horror that this funeral is one of maybe 55,000 soldiers in four years. Many of those soldiers are memorialized in the Maidan Square. Every time I go to pay my respects, the number of flags and photos has grown, and it is almost impossible to take in the scale and horror of loss.
Russia is using the peace negotiations to demand that Ukraine hands over the remaining 20% of the Donbas region, having failed in twelve years to take it by bombs and shelling and guns. The region is spoken of as ‘territory’, but it is a territory filled with people, people who have homes, communities, lives and dreams. Handing over the ‘territory’ means the forced displacement of 100s of 1000s more people, while those who remain behind are condemned to live under a brutal occupation determined to wipe out Ukrainian language and identity, with murderous force.
For this reason, Ukraine has to win. And it has to win for those sitting in the safety and comfort of the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Poland… because, as the Kharkiv chief of police told me in September 2023, ‘if Ukraine does not win, all of Europe will burn.’
This article was first published by Ukrainian partner journal Krytyka. French partner journal Esprit chose the piece for translation and publication in its July/August 2026 issue under the Translation Relay project, an initiate to further exchange between Eurozine partners.