The Long War #6
KYIV—While both events fell on the same day, it was clear on August 24 that the six-month mark of the Russian invasion (or the “Great War”, as more and more Ukrainian media call it) had overshadowed the 31st anniversary of the country’s declaration of independence. Close to 200 air raid sirens blared that day all over the country in response to Russian bombers taking off and, according to Ukrainian military command, making “simulated missile launches” designed to trigger alarms and scare the population (there were some real strikes, too, including one on a train station that killed at least 25 civilians). Security measures prevented all celebrations, but the desire to celebrate wasn’t there anyway.
Is six months a long time? I don't think anybody knows, not yet. Talking to people across Ukraine, you often get the confused sense that it’s been both. There’s the common feeling that life has been “put on pause” since February 24, that everything that has happened since is outside the realm of a normal life, a parenthesis that will, hopefully, soon be closed—by Ukraine's ultimate victory over Russia.
Exhaustion is just as common, along with the feeling that even if you can forget about the war for an instant, it is basically impossible to truly relax while you’re in the country (“nowhere in Ukraine is really safe” has become one of those sentences you hear again and again). Yet six months is also long enough that a new routine has settled in for millions in Ukraine. It’s been long enough that, in Kyiv, the sandbags protecting the city’s statues have started ripping, and weeds started growing on the sand that escaped. Long enough for the war to become a new reality. “We’ve gotten used to it, but I can’t say it’s become ordinary” is how one man, an electrical engineer from Kyiv, put it to me, and I think it reflects the feeling pretty well.
For those Ukrainians who have been spared the worst of the fighting (things are different in frontline cities), routine without normalcy can still translate to a lingering feeling of surrealness. A therapist I met on a train back to Kyiv described to me this strange sensation, as she looked from her balcony in central Kyiv and watched people casually sipping wine on terraces, ignoring both sirens and passing soldiers. She called it a “vinaigrette”— a forced mixture of substances to do not naturally mix together.
Something to read
🇧🇷 (NPR) Ukrainian refugees feel surprisingly at home in Brazil's 'Little Ukraine' (What a lovely story. A small group of Ukrainian refugees ended up in a Ukrainian diaspora community in Brazil that settled there a century ago and still speaks Ukrainian.)
🚫 (openDemocracy) 'We have orders to live here!' Luhansk faces Russia’s ‘soft’ occupation
🏛️ (London Review of Books) Blast Effects
Some maps worth checking out
Ukrainian outlet Texty released a series of graphs, interactive maps and satellite pictures looking back at six months of Russian shelling and missile attacks all over Ukraine, day by day (it’s in Ukrainian but well, most of the data speak for itself).
Also an interactive map—the Russia-Ukraine Monitor Map created by the Centre for Information Resilience now features more than 6,000 verified & geotagged entries of videos and images documenting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Finally, the Conflict Observatory released a thorough investigation into filtration camps set up by Russian forces and Russian-controlled separatist groups in the Donetsk region, including a map of 21 identified camps.