As a Ukrainian refugee based in the UK, I know one thing: people notice the absence of my British accent as soon as I greet them. A question inevitably follows. I both fear and expect it: “Where is home for you?” I answer shortly: “Ukraine.” I already know the questions that will follow after a bit of uncomfortable silence, signaling my conversation partner doesn’t know which route to take next.
The most obvious is: “So, how are things there now?” It is also one of my least preferred ones; almost four years later, I’m still unsure of how to answer. My first instinct is to appease, smooth things over—as if to reassure the other, comfort them like I would a small child. “It’s alright,” I want to say, “it’s better now.” There are no monsters hiding under the bed.
But this is not the truth. I cannot mold the uncomfortable reality of war into nonchalant small talk. The truth is—it’s not good. Hundreds of missiles and drones terrorize Ukraine daily, and their numbers are growing. My hometown Mykolaiv has been severely damaged. My family survived three close missile attacks. I’m fearing for the lives of my loved ones every day. They are not safe. No one in Ukraine truly is. But that’s a lot to say to a stranger, isn’t it?
Russians occupied the neighboring city of Kherson in a matter of days in 2022. This meant two things: first, my hometown was in their missile range, so they could attack, cheaply and conveniently, every day. Second: Mykolaiv was next. Nobody knew what would happen—but the city prepared, gathering used tires and Molotov cocktails. Our two main bridges were wired to explode. When they landed by air, just ten minutes away from my family apartment, they received a quick pushback. A tank battle happened right in front of my brother’s apartment, on Mykolaiv’s central avenue. When I drove there a year later, the road was smooth and freshly-cemented, burnt tanks were cleared out, removed, along with the bodies of those who’ve given their lives to protect my city.
But then, the war was right on my doorstep, breaking into my childhood haven, blowing up the safety locks. They were coming for my family, and they would come for me; that is, if I was there. But I was in Europe, having arrived four days prior to the full-scale invasion. Paralyzed by fear and guilt for not being there, I was watching the war ravaging my city, unfolding from my screen—from local news reports, messages from friends, and calls with my mother, who was right in the middle of it.
My mother, one could say, was the unfortunate case. She lived in downtown Mykolaiv and was looking after her two immobile parents, living along the same street. In ordinary times, these two facts were unremarkable, but in March 2022, they made her the perfect target. Russians bombed the central area relentlessly, setting off explosions every few hours. She started sleeping in our small closet, as per official recommendations—between the two walls, leaving her shelter only to attend to her parents, moving in short runs from one to another. The woman who looked after them had escaped the city on the first day, meaning someone had to feed them, buy medications, administer treatments.
Every day that I called her, I could hear the life withering from her voice, slowly slipping away. “I’m fine,” she repeated in a quiet, robotic voice, “I’m fine.” And I was there, on the other end of the line, utterly helpless, lost, mute. It’s a special kind of torture—being unable to help those you love.
One March afternoon, I heard from my childhood friend: “Your mom can stay with us, if she needs to.” No one sends those kinds of messages out of the blue. Something had happened. In the next minute, I find the photo of my apartment block on the news. I’d get used to it over the next few years, but the first time hit the hardest. Hysterical, I called her; she did not pick up. She called back a minute later, the longest minute in my life. When the missile hit, she was in a supermarket. The damage was manageable—a few windows and a total mess inside, caused by the blast wave. Our apartment remained whole.
Even after the missile attack, she refused to evacuate. But water—water was the final straw. Two weeks later, the Russians hit the pipeline bringing water to Mykolaiv from the Dnipro river—hardly an accident. Nothing was running from the taps. Panic ensued: people looking for long-abandoned wells, emptying supermarket shelves, queuing for the emergency water stations. Volunteers from other cities rushed into Mykolaiv with trucks, giving packs of bottles away to hundreds of stretched-out hands. My mother was one of them.
“You don’t even feel like you’re human,” she’d tell me on the phone. “So humiliating.” Every other day, she’d stand in a line to the water station with three five-litre bottles, the most she could carry, to fill them up and drag them back to each of the three apartments she was responsible for. Admiring her resilience, I wondered: how long could she last? That’s not exactly how I imagined my middle-aged mom spending her retirement. I had to ask her the hard question: “How much worse should it get for you to get out of there?” The next week, she and my grandparents evacuated to a village in the Ukrainian west.
For the next eight months, daily attacks on Mykolaiv continued. Every morning, I was waking up to yet new pictures of the fresh destruction in the city, trying to recognize places I used to see every day. And every day, I saw just the debris, the distorted fragments of my past, unable to collect them into a single image. A missile hit the school I attended for 11 years. My parents’ university, the place where they first met. The city administration building and the luscious green square surrounding it, my to-go summer spot.
I envisioned a middle-aged Russian general with a pen in hand and a printed list, sipping on a cup of coffee, crossing out the names of the places I loved. Erasing them from the map of Mykolaiv, making it impossible to live in. Spaces to study and fall in love in, grow and dream—smashed to pieces, sentenced to no future.
Until one day, the attacks subsided. It was November 11, 2022, Kherson Liberation Day. The Ukrainian army had pushed the Russians back, and their missile range could no longer reach my hometown. By then, they had destroyed a total of 10,000 civilian facilities in the Mykolaiv region.
Since then, slowly, Mykolaiv has recovered. My family has returned. The city filled with people moving from Kharkiv and Kherson, away from the frontlines. The city administration replaced our windows, repaired our roof, cleared out the debris. Renovation plans were made for hospitals and universities. My school was rebuilt and opened its doors for new students this September, for the first time since 2021. And finally, after three years, a new water station has been built in Mykolaiv, delivering fresh water to the pipes.
Mykolaiv hasn’t fallen because its people persist. These are not soldiers prevailing on battlefields, not wartime heroes awarded with medals “For Courage.” But day by day, they are doing what they’re supposed to. Dentists and teachers, doctors and policemen. They wake up in the morning, and they get to work. And that is how they are doing justice to their city. By not giving up on it. By keeping on.
But it is not a story with a magical resolution. The monsters are still under the bed, lurking. There’s an ever-present danger of Russian troops advancing again. Mykolaiv remains vulnerable, drones crossing our skies every night. People who were killed won’t come back. Buildings won’t recover with a wave of a wand.
With war, there’s no happily ever after—only blood, toil, tears, and sweat. But, most importantly, there is hope.
Anastasia Lebedenko is a Ukrainian non-fiction writer. Her political and cultural writing in the form of first-person POV and personal essays explores her experience of living through a 21st-century war. She looks to bring Ukrainian voices to Western publishing and journalism.
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You write beautifully. Please persist. The world needs to know.
This is heartbreaking. Thank you for publishing it. I hope that we in the West will all keep faith with Ukraine.