A month into the war in Ukraine: “All normal life has disappeared”

I am writing this in a city where there is no bombing. There are no Russian missiles crashing into houses and no air raid sirens with a stomach-churning, energy-sapping howl.

I wish the Ukrainians could say the same. After a month reporting from your country, I have just left a nation under brutal attack and I have no idea when it will end.

Not that he didn’t know what Vladimir Putin was capable of. I reported on the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then on the war in eastern Ukraine, which was provoked by Russian proxies and propaganda.

I also reported for many years from Russia itself, covering the murder and poisoning of opposition figures, the wars in Chechnya and Georgia, and horrors such as the Beslan school siege, until I was expelled last summer as a ” security threat.”

Still, I arrived in the Ukrainian capital, kyiv, last month, convinced that Russia’s president would not launch an all-out war against that country.

The very idea seemed ridiculous, irrational, disastrous, and everyone I spoke to in both countries agreed.

But on February 24 I was woken up by the dull sound of an explosion Which proved us all wrong.

__________________________________

When the war started, Nika was so terrified that she sat at her piano and played the chords as loud as she could, screaming at the top of her lungs.

The 15-year-old couldn’t stand the sound of the bombs.

Nika is from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, but we met at a motel in a small town filled with families who had fled and were living in the dark, afraid of being spotted by Russian warplanes.

When we arrived the receptionist rushed us to the canteen urging us to eat quickly as the staff had to get home before curfew.

Anyone who went out after dark he was at risk of being shot.

“Don’t turn on any lights and don’t use too much hot water,” he instructed. When we asked her for the nearest bomb shelter, she pointed somewhere behind the kitchen.

Nika had been there a couple of nights but she hardly slept. The teenager said her first thought each morning was: “Thank God I’m alive.”

He spoke in English, and the directness of his language was captivating.

“We were in a panic because we had to hide because our lives were in danger,” said Nika, describing how she had spent the first week of the war in her aunt’s basement.

“It was cold and small. We didn’t have much food. This was a very traumatic period,” he said. “Now I’m scared of every sound. If someone claps, I think I’m going to cry. I start shaking.”

By torchlight, the teenager scrolled through images of her life before the war on her phone: smiling poses with friends, in the park, at home.

“We just want to go back,” he said. “We want to know that our families they will be alive tomorrow. We want peace”.

_________________________________

Kharkiv is only 40 km from the Russian border. Most of the people there speak Russian as their first language, not Ukrainian, and have friends and relatives from the other side.

Presumably, that is why Vladimir Putin thought his troops could enter Kharkiv and take control, or Mariupol, Sumy or Kherson. But misjudged the environment.

The war that Russia instigated in eastern Ukraine in 2014 had already transformed the country and forged a much stronger national identity, even among Russian speakers.

But now that the war has broken out into open invasion, it has destroyed every shred of “brotherly” relations.

It’s killing the same people that Vladimir Putin says he is saving.

So, as we traversed a landscape now littered with checkpoints and trenches dug into wheat fields, we also saw dozens of giant billboards telling Russia, or Putin himself, to get the hell out.

Other roadside messages were addressed directly to Russian soldiers: “Think of your families,” one said.

“Give up and stay alive.”

__________________________________

For much of the first three weeks of fighting, we were based 200 km south of Kharkiv, in Dnipro, a city that straddles the giant river that divides Ukraine into east and west.

Dnipro was a haven of relative safety in the region while Russia was trying to bomb other cities into submission.

But on March 11 we woke up from a night of long air-raid sirens with reports of an attack downtown.

We soon found ourselves next to the smoldering remains of a shoe factory where Russian missiles had killed a retired security guard.

Sweeping broken glass from the stairwell of her apartment block, Natasha broke down in tears, describing her son’s terrified screams. “What are they killing us with?” She yelled, covering her face with her hands.

Speaking Russian, he demanded to know why Russia was doing this. “We didn’t ask to be saved.”

It was one statement I heard over and over again.

At that time, people had already started to leave Dnipro. The exodus began a day after the university in central Kharkiv was bombed.

Suddenly no one felt safe, not even far from the front lines.

So the crowds piled into the evacuation trains. There were screaming women, huddled pets, and men trying not to let their families see them crying.

I overheard one repeating to himself that everything would be fine as he put a palm up on the window of a train that was taking his wife and son away for who knows how long.

Like all men, he had to stay and wait to be called to fight.

_________________________________

Running away from Kharkiv itself was more difficult, as we found out when I got a call about a girl named Polina.

The three-year-old has cancer and her medicine was running out. The family urgently needed to leave Kharkiv, but the city was under heavy Russian fire and Polina’s parents did not dare to leave.

When I first spoke with her mother Kseniya, the girl appeared on the video call. She had been playing in a bathroom full of cushions because Kseniya believed that she would be safer there if the building was attacked.

The bombardments did not stop, so Polina’s parents steeled themselves and dangerously crossed the city to the train station.

Days later, Kseniya sent me videos of the girl happily bouncing on a trampoline in the garden of a host family in rural Poland.

Said burst into tears when the volunteers greeted them on the border

“After four days of running, we suddenly stopped and I was very sad,” Kseniya explained. “I am relieved that my children are safe, but our whole life has been in Kharkiv.”

“Polina keeps asking where her dad is and I don’t know what to say.”

________________________________

Shortly after we headed to Kharkiv. Driving north, we passed a 6km line of cars heading in the opposite direction.

Many had hand-scrawled signs taped to their windshields that read “deti,” or children in Russian, in the hope that it might protect them.

At checkpoints around Kharkiv we heard explosions and soon saw the destruction.

Next to a half-bombed apartment building and the remains of a shopping center, a group of people waited in the snow for the bus that would leave the city. There was no schedule, just a rumor.

Svitlana, a physical trainer, told me that a missile had fallen 50 meters from her apartment the day before and that she did not want to risk her life for another moment.

“We haven’t slept in a week,” she said, hugging a miniature dog that was shivering inside her coat.

“They are bombing our houses.” I could hear the explosions as we talked.

A short distance away, thousands of people were sheltering underground. There were families living on the stairs, platforms and cars of a nearby subway station.

Volunteers brought soup and bread, but young and old, including babies, spent the day huddled on the floor under blankets.

They were alive, but in a dazed limbo since that the war had stopped all normal life.

______________________________

On my flight home, I sat next to a couple who had fled kyiv and were staying with their daughter in London.

They had been forced to travel by road through Ukraine, then Moldova and Romania, and were exhausted.

They were also angry. In Russian, their first language, the couple explained that their relatives in Russia refused to believe what happened to them.

Nikolai sent them pictures of kyiv apartment blocks destroyed by Russian missiles and of Mariupol under siege, its residents starved and murdered in its streets.

But his cousin told him the images were fake. He blamed the “Nazi” government in kyiv. He said that the Ukrainians were bombing themselves.

I know that many brave Russians they have been arrested for protesting against this war; others have fled the country.

But a few hours before my flight, I also saw a video of Vladimir Putin addressing a packed crowd at a Moscow stadium with the letter Z pinned to his chest, the ominous symbol of his war.

Russia’s president praised the troops he had sent to “save” Russian-speakers from “genocide.”

I thought of Nika, Natasha, and Polina, of everything I had witnessed since the first explosion startled me awake in the Ukraine on February 24, and felt nauseated.

________________________________