The Long War #18
KYIV—I very much wanted to share something about the few days I spent reporting in Kherson in late April, especially in light of the horrific Russian shelling that killed 23 people in the city last Wednesday. But I always try to include some sort of point into these newsletter pieces, and the truth is that I really don’t have any particular insights here: life in Kherson is suffocating, neutered by the constant thunder of artillery and the anxiety that comes with it.
Most people have fled. Even some who remained in the city nevertheless abandoned their flats or houses near the riverbank to hide deeper inside Kherson, in neighborhoods safe from Russian bullets and drones, if not from shells and missiles. Most of the 50,000 or so people still living there (out of 280,000 before the invasion) are jobless and exhausted. The fear that a shell could land anywhere—at a bus stop, at the market, while waiting in line to get humanitarian help—is always there, day and night.
Ten days ago, Ukrainian media rejoiced at the news that one McDonald’s had reopened in the city of Dnipro. Because McDonald’s is so popular among young people and the middle class, and because it’s a well-known foreign brand, these gradual and careful reopenings (the more than 100 McDonald’s restaurants across 25 Ukrainian cities all closed down when the Russian invasion started) have taken a special meaning. For any city that can now boast a working McDonald’s, they’ve become the sign of a fragile return to normal.
The one McDonald’s that used to operate in Kherson is still closed, of course. But when I entered the city’s train station on a quiet morning, a girl stood next to her mother, looking shyly towards the floor and holding a plastic, McDonald’s glass in her left hand. The 12 years-old girl had just arrived from the Lviv-Kyiv-Mykolaiv train after a two weeks-long holiday camp in Western Ukraine organized by volunteers, her mother told me. The empty McDonald’s glass she refused to discard came from Lviv, too. It had been her first time away from Kherson since the beginning of the war, two weeks without the constant sound of explosions, in a place where she could safely go outside to play with other kids (most of her friends fled Kherson). And now she was back here.
Something to read
OpenDemocracy / How war has hit Zakarpattia, hundreds of miles from Ukraine's front lines (this is an excellent story on the way that Russia’s invasion has affected even the Ukrainian regions that weren’t directly hit by fighting, but I more generally wanted to highlight OpenDemocracy’s outstanding coverage of the war in Ukraine)
Zaxid (in Ukrainian) / How displaced women integrate into the life of the Novoyavoriv community (this story by Lviv-based outlet Zaxid focuses on the new life of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the city of Novoyavoriv. One line in particular caught my attention, one glimpse at the transformations happening far from the frontline: “In the new city, Iryna got a job as a saleswoman, but only on a temporary basis: while locals go to Poland for seasonal work, immigrants [displaced people] replace them here. Permanent work is difficult to find.”)
Texty / What’s that got to do with Soledar? Death and renaissance of Russian occupation Telegram channels (Ukrainian outlet Texty published a first investigation focused on Russian Telegram channels targeting Ukrainian occupied regions back in October—this is basically a follow-up story, as many of these channels were deactivated for 6 months and so, and relaunched a few weeks ago)
Nature / How to keep Ukraine’s research hopes alive (“In the first episode of a six-part podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Ukrainian neuroscientist Nana Voitenko relives how she and colleagues fled Kiev when war broke out in February 2022, and how the country’s research landscape and infrastructure has fared since.”)
Journal of Genocide Research / Filtration Camps, Past and Present, and Russia’s War Against Ukraine