At the beginning of a crisis it’s the adrenaline that gets you through. When Ukrainians woke up on the morning of February 24, 2022, they were jolted into a world of urgency and alarm. Explosions, jets screaming overhead, tanks on their highways.
I remember reading headlines in the sleepy village on the coast of Brittany where I live, when an email from an editor popped into my inbox: Do you want to go to Ukraine for us? Once upon a time I had been a war correspondent in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt during the Arab Spring, but over the past few years I had started writing about food as a way to illustrate larger issues: ecology, economics, identity. I briefly weighed the article about onions I was working on against the Russian invasion. Forty-eight hours later I was in Ukraine. Call it muscle memory, my brain switched from peace to war as soon as I pulled on my Blundstone boots. All the everyday stuff—grocery shopping, admin, social events, diary entries known as “plans”—fell away.
Ukrainians were forced to make this transition at gunpoint. Very suddenly, actions were reduced to reflexes: fight or flight. In the western city of Lviv I saw volunteers for the Territorial Defense Force lined up in the street in borrowed, mismatched camouflage; at the train station there were thousands of people queuing in snow flurries, carrying children and pets and whole lives in raw, chafed hands, evacuating from cities under bombardment in the east.
Immediately a vast network of volunteers connected through social media, organizing drivers, humanitarian aid, places to stay. Among them was Anastasia Zamula, a fashion stylist and regular contributor to Vogue Ukraine, who had fled Kyiv for Lviv and, together with a friend, started fundraising to supply body armor and combat gear for frontline units. “People were so united,” she told me in September this year, remembering those early febrile days. “People would give $3,000, $4,000—huge amounts for Ukrainians. They would say: ‘I want to give you all the money I can.’ They wanted to be part of something, to help.” I heard these stories everywhere, and never worked so hard. There was barely time to brush my teeth.
At the end of March the Russians pulled back from the Kyiv region. The chaotic intensity of those first weeks ebbed, but the fighting continued. Ukrainians entered a new phase of war: endurance.
“The second year of war is the hardest,” says Nataliia Zaretska, Ph.D., a military psychologist I first met reporting a story about POWs. Nataliia also counsels wounded soldiers and people who have lived under Russian occupation—and she designs protocols for psychologists working with veterans returning to civilian life. “The first year,” she explains, “is mobilization. You are concentrated. All the regular issues from your normal life are put on the shelf. But then you begin to realize that this war is going to be a long story.” Somehow, Nataliia told me, “you have to understand that life must go on.”
Anastasia now has three jobs: in addition to her volunteer work, she continues to style for Vogue Ukraine and is a brand director for the Ukrainian womenswear label Bibliothèque Nationale. Her volunteer group, named Cvit, or Blossom, has grown to eight team members, all women, funded by ordinary Ukrainians who have developed the habit of scrolling social media and sending modest sums to volunteer organizations. Cvit has also started collaborating with artists and fashion brands and coffee shops, some of whom donate a small amount from every cup of coffee they sell. Supporting the volunteer sector has become part of Ukrainians’ financial housekeeping, like paying taxes.
Over the past year and a half, I have observed my own reactions to the strains and stresses of wartime along with those of my Ukrainian friends and colleagues. It turns out people can adapt to almost anything. In frontline towns the crumpf and crunch of outgoing and incoming artillery is an ambient soundtrack, constant enough to make you cock your head when it falls silent for an hour or two, as if the war beast was gathering strength for an even bigger barrage. In the cities, air raid sirens have been subsumed to commonplace irritants, like traffic jams, rain, or car alarms. When I hear explosions at night (usually in Kyiv it is the boom of Ukrainian air defenses; thanks, in part, to the American Patriot defense system, almost all Russian missiles and drones are shot down), I grumble at another night of interrupted sleep and drag my duvet into the bathroom to bed down safely away from windows, muttering, like the rest of the city I suspect, profanities at Putin.
Last October one of my back molars began to ache. Luckily, Ukraine is an established destination for dental tourism; well-trained specialists, low prices. I had a root canal in Kyiv in November, but in January the pain came back. There followed a litany of dental disasters: surgery, two extractions, two implants, various complications. For months my front line was gumline. I started naming my aching teeth after battles: Bakhmut, Sloviansk, Avdiivka.
I withdrew into survival mode: work, dentist, drugs. It was a very binary existence: when my teeth hurt I was miserable, taciturn and irritable; when they stopped hurting, I felt myself again. I noticed this was a bit like the mood in Kyiv during the Russian campaign that targeted electrical infrastructure over the winter: when the lights were on people went about their normal business; during the power cuts everyone hunkered down in grim sufferance.
I eventually found a lovely dentist in Kyiv called Victoria. She took me in hand, drove me to consultations with specialists in her own car, kept in touch with smiley-face texts, told me everything would be all right. Like the air raid siren app on my phone, Victoria’s dental office became part of my life. I told her about the dental desert in Brittany (I could find no clinic anywhere near me that was taking on new clients) and how in Britain people were pulling out their own teeth with pliers because there was a shortage of National Health Service dentists. Victoria told me she was helping, pro bono, to rebuild the shattered face of a soldier. I saw him in her waiting room; he had a caved-in nose and missing teeth, his head was bent to the floor. I tried to tell him, in my broken Russian (so atrocious that Ukrainians don’t seem to mind me using it), that Victoria was great and everything would be all right. I think he tried to smile.
Last year Ukraine had almost fairy-tale military successes, sinking the Russian flagship the Moskva and taking back Kherson and parts of Luhansk. This year the progress of the counteroffensive has been slow and bloody. When I was there this summer, I noticed a new kind of resignation. More than one person told me they knew Ukraine would win, but they expected it to take a long time. A dogged optimism prevails, but Nataliia, the psychologist, told me that accepting the new reality was crucial: “If you are spending the war waiting for it to end, you will only waste your time.”
There are roughly six million Ukrainians outside of Ukraine, while men between the ages of 18 and 60 are mostly not allowed to leave the country. As a result, many families are divided. “If a Ukrainian family in Europe is waiting for the war to end before they return home, they have to understand that it could take years,” Nataliia told me. “Their children could be grown before that happens, and when they return, they will find a changed society.” It’s an illusion that life can go back to how it was before.
She knows how difficult these reckonings are. Her own two younger children, an 11-year-old son and an 18-year-old daughter, evacuated to Portugal with her sister and her sister’s children at the beginning of the Russian invasion. She was able to visit them only twice in that first year of the war—a separation that was the hardest of her life. When her sister decided to return to Ukraine, Nataliia’s children also came back. Now, as a single parent, it’s a different kind of strain; she worries, constantly, for their safety.
Anastasia suffers from her own strains of anxiety. She has been able to access psychotherapy through a group offering free counseling, but she says, “we all have our emotional problems; we have all been under stress; it’s been nonstop intensity, a state of survival.” When a member of the Cvit team is struggling, they are encouraged to take a little time out. “I took a day off in January when one of my friends was killed at the front,” Anastasia told me, “and another in April when another friend was killed.” But, she noted, she never took off more than one day at a time. “It is important to keep working. My highest motivation is being able to fight back in this way. That’s our remedy.”
Everyone is tired. But, Nataliia told me, as did Anastasia, that many people are afraid to relax. I remember talking to a volunteer who drives corpses from mortuaries near the Ukrainian frontline to be buried in their hometowns in the west. Each trip is 10 or 12 hours one way; he rested, very occasionally, only for a day or two. “When you stop it feels worse,” he said, eyes drooping, loading up the back of his van with body bags, “because then the thoughts come and you feel as though you are not helping as much as you can. But if you stop, you feel like you would just collapse.”
A mixture of necessity, obligation, and determination tunnels through the fatigue. When I was exhausted from typing up my notes past midnight, I found that the stories—the people I talked to—gave me the energy to keep going. When I was wrung out with tooth pain, I didn’t dare impose it on Ukrainians who were suffering much worse. At one point I chipped a tooth just before an important meeting, did the interview, and never mentioned it.
In May I was in agony two weeks after an extraction and no one could figure out why. In the middle of a week of blood tests and an MRI (a curiously meditative experience, like being in the tractor beam of an alien spaceship), with the dreaded words “trigeminal neuralgia” hovering over me, my friend Oleh and I drove two hours to Chernihiv to interview a 13-year-old boy who had spent months in a Russian children’s camp. I took half a tramadol and sucked ice cubes through the four-hour interview.
On the way home, we talked. Oleh was depressed, worried about his family and life and career—he was an architect, work was thin. My gum was prickling terribly despite the medication, but I was also happy. I told Oleh, surprising myself, that we had much to be thankful for: a good day of reporting, spring sunshine, and this conversation, warm and friendly and honest. “I think we have to learn to feel different things at the same time,” I said, thinking out loud. “You can be worried about your 12-year-old son, but you can also laugh when he dyes his hair purple as a thistle. Let the pain and the joy coexist.” I was sure I had hit upon some great epiphany; Oleh looked at me sideways, not at all convinced. The road unraveled for a few minutes in silence. Then he said, “I have just remembered: I have a friend who is a maxillofacial surgeon. I will call her for you.”
“Or you can distract yourself by helping others,” I said, thanking him. Oleh was also a volunteer; delivering drones to frontline units. “That probably works too.”
Oleh’s maxillofacial surgeon friend diagnosed a bone spur in my jaw and filed it off in 10 minutes flat. Hallelujah! She said she didn’t want any payment and so according to the wartime custom, I made a contribution to Oleh’s volunteer group. Keep going, I thought, help others when you can. “There is a rule in psychology: that we can use that which we accept,” Nataliia told me. “Resilience is the result.”
More than one Ukrainian friend has admitted to me that they have found, in rising to the war’s challenge, a common purpose and pride. “In Cvit I have found my aim,” Anastasia said. “It has given me hope and a path. I feel part of something big and important. I am different from what I was before.”
I find I am changed too. I am oddly less stressed, a little easier on myself, more tolerant of my own failings and others. I look out over my Brittany bay, liminal blue of sky and sea, grateful for the peace and beauty, and can’t wait to get back to Kyiv, a place that has become as familiar and friendly as home.