As soon as the curfew was lifted in Kyiv, I drove around to understand what had happened to our capital overnight. For two full days residents had not been allowed to go out, even during the daytime. Russian saboteur groups were identified, and random street fights took place.
I did not recognise my city, with checkpoints in the old town, with people digging trenches, bridges being fortified and the subway turned into a bomb shelter.
A huge crowd, up to 500 people, lined up to volunteer for the territorial defence unit in one of the neighbourhoods.
“Do you enrol everybody who shows up?” we asked a young guy in charge. “Almost all, but I do not accept those under 18,” he said. “And there are a lot of them. I wouldn’t be able to look their mothers in the eyes. I fought in 2014-2015 in Donbas, so I know what the war is.”
It’s a predominantly male group but there are three women. The youngest is a lawyer. “What Russia has already done to the civilians has made us act,” she said. She had not told her family of her decision to fight. They live in a small town on the Ukrainian-Russian border, which has been partially destroyed. Another woman, in her 60s, said she was a nurse. Her husband had joined the defence units and she felt she needed to be with him. The last was a retired officer. She enrolled because her son had already joined the Ukrainian army. “When our grandparents, who remember the second world war, were wishing for peace, we didn’t understand why,” she said. “But now I know.”
The figures say one thing, experience another. The official toll of civilian deaths is 350, but after seven days’ fighting, there cannot be a single Ukrainian who doesn’t know somebody who has been touched by tragedy. There are more than 1,600 wounded.
“That’s my classmate,” one colleague wrote, on seeing the front page of the Guardian, with a photo showing a woman wounded by shrapnel during the first attacks in Chuguev, on the eastern border. Elena Kurilova is not well. She can’t see with her left eye, and it’s getting worse. Her daughter, whose Instagram account looks like that of a beauty blogger, now livestreams with her mother in bandages to prove to Russian commentators that the injuries are real; her mother is not a fake.
One of the flats destroyed belongs to a colleague in Kyiv. It was hit by a rocket and she circulates the pictures, but first she complains how unfair it is that Russian media have used pictures of her flat to accuse Ukraine of bombing its own people.
“Those of you who have come to ‘rescue us’, just go away,” cries a woman holding a baby at Kyiv’s main station. “We were all right before you came. Just leave. All I have is some cash and a backpack.” Like thousands of people here, her mission is to go somewhere else, anywhere. The Ukrainian railway allows everybody to ride without tickets, including foreign citizens, and is running extra trains to the west.
We count the hours: seven, 20, 70, 100, 144: hours of the Ukrainian army on its own, its citizens holding off one of the mightiest armies in the world, which is now being bolstered by support from Belarus. The count becomes symbolic. For those under bombardment, each hour seems like a year.
The primary Russian target is the capital, and that army has been struggling to take it, but the fight is also a fierce one in many small towns whose names are never mentioned in the headlines. Irpin, Hostomel, Bucha were all attacked, but not captured.
In Vasylkiv, on the Stuhna river, the college where IT specialists, construction workers, chefs and barbers study and train has been destroyed. Luckily 18 people who were staying in the college’s dorm were evacuated. The director of the college, Liudmyla Postolenko, walks through the debris, showing a damaged hall that had only recently been renovated. “Thank God, all are alive,” she says. “But our hearts are broken. Our kids are crying … But, you know, among our students there are construction workers, welders – so we will rebuild. What we need to do is care, and support those who are fighting.”
Two weeks before the invasion, when things were still calm, I travelled to a town in Donbas and met a friend: a humanitarian worker from Kyiv, who had moved there after the start of the fighting. He took a day to walk around the city “to say goodbye to the last peaceful days”. He was confident, as were many, that the Ukrainian army, which managed to defend and take over towns in the area eight years ago, was in better shape. Still, while walking in a chilly but tranquil industrial town, he took pictures to remember. With every shot I felt more anger. I didn’t want to accept the notion of saying goodbye to peace.
Driving through Kyiv, I film the queues outside the pharmacies and shops. The scenes in heavily shelled areas are surreal. The post office window has been broken for four days but no one has looted it. The computers and parcels are all perfectly in place.
I film the billboards above the roads. They’re written in Russian, saying: “Russian soldier, stop! How can you look into your kids’ eyes? Remain human”; “Russian soldier, stop! Do not kill your soul for Putin’s oligarchs. Leave without blood on your hands.” There are details of the deal being offered by Ukraine’s defence minister to Russian conscripts: 5m roubles for anybody prepared to lay down their arms.
I take photos of random buildings: Kyiv zoo, the opera house, my former office. The next day, they may not be there.
For months before Putin’s air force attacked Ukraine, I was being asked by those abroad why Ukrainians were not panicking. I said we were not scared and that the source of our confidence was a belief that we could prove to Russia that in the long run we were unconquerable.
And in the first days of the invasion, when civilians were killed by airstrikes that mainly missed their targets, it seemed clear that the Kremlin blitzkrieg was not working. But the cruise missiles that killed people in Freedom Square in Kharkiv, in the north-east, in the hospitals in Zhytomyr in the west, and in the residential areas in Mariupol in the south, showed us that the strategy has changed: now the plan is to terrify Ukrainians into submission. And this is just the beginning.
Looking at the courage, unity, support and the heroics of our troops, 90% of Ukrainians believe Ukraine will win. The question is the price.
Seven days were enough to get used to sirens and bomb shelters; a new reality in which I did not walk outside without a flak jacket. In a few days we might need to get used to life without electricity or running water. Ukrainians are ready for that.
But the loss of all the lives feels different. These are losses that could and should have been prevented. They are something neither we nor the outside world should get used to.
Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist specialising in foreign affairs and conflict reporting, and author of Lost Island: Tales from the Occupied Crimea
