Winter, Again
A report from Kyiv.
Since shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Persuasion has been following the war through the voice of one Ukrainian, Kateryna Kibarova. Kateryna’s accounts of the horrors of living through the invasion—from the first days, to her return home to Bucha, to the terror of the first winter with the power grid under attack—capture the realities of life in Ukraine and the evolution of the conflict even as global attention fades.
In speaking with Kateryna over these past thirty months, what has struck me most is not when our conversation touches on geopolitics or the contours of a future peace. Rather, it is the moments in which an offhand comment—like the line in today’s update about turning up the radio to tune out suicide drones flying overhead—reveals how no corner of Kateryna’s life, however routine, has been left unscarred.
Through it all, Kateryna, like so many Ukrainian civilians, does what she can: collecting funds for children in her neighborhood, many of whom are internally displaced, for Christmas; organizing the purchase of a generator so that she and nearby apartments have a power supply when Russian strikes paralyze the grid; and visiting family in frontline cities.
As Ukraine’s future remains uncertain in the coming months, I hope this update from Kateryna will stay with you as it has with me.
With wishes for a peaceful holiday season, and thanks for being a member of our community,
David, Executive Director
By Kateryna Kibarova
If you live in Ukraine today, checking the news is your morning routine. You have to understand what is going on—how can you not?
You have to understand which direction the drones are flying from, whether it is dangerous to go outside. If you want to protect yourself, you have to constantly monitor the situation. When the air raid alarm goes off, immediately everyone’s phones in the office start howling. Everyone has the alerts set up.
The Russians have gotten more sophisticated with the air raids. Now they fly lower, at altitudes that make our air defense system operators fear that interceptions will hit houses or schools or kindergartens. They launch drones along the highways so low that they are almost level with cars, or along riverbeds so that they cannot be tracked and shot down. On the one hand, in Kyiv, the sheer number of drones—sometimes 150 per attack—makes it impossible to intercept them all. On the other hand, the cities closer to the front, like Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, are simply defenseless. They are in a constant state of fear—without air defenses, facing more complex attacks, tougher and more precise than ours in Kyiv. It’s an impossible situation.
The scariest thing is how cold-blooded you become. You're out there driving to work, and you’re turning up the radio, listening to YAKTAK and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk,1 in the car so you don't hear the suicide drones fly overhead. They’re launching the Shaheds2 in just incredible numbers to deplete our missile defense systems, so that we have no protection. And the Russians are constantly threatening to blow up the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. In my bag, next to my documents, I keep a special pill. In case of a nuclear explosion or meltdown, it has to be taken to neutralize the first of the waves of radiation. I carry it everywhere I go.
Inflation is very high. The prices are insane. But they don’t raise salaries. It gets harder every year. I remember three years ago, when you could put aside some money from your paycheck; now it’s out of the question. I can’t imagine how retirees survive while still paying utility bills, especially as electricity and gas prices have gone up.
Recently I realized I have not gone out for nearly three years. I haven’t gone to a restaurant with my girlfriends. I haven’t gone once to the theater. I drive home from work and I just don’t feel like going out. That’s the spirit of the moment. Now even New Year’s Eve and Christmas feel like formalities; you just want to get it over with. Or we’ll treat them like a weekend, when you can stay in bed and just check out. There’s no desire to go celebrate or sit around and enjoy. It’s not the most joyful time. You have to think about the guys who are on the front lines and how it’s very difficult for them.
Last month a man in Kryvyi Rih buried his wife and three children who were killed by a Russian attack on civilians. When you read news like this, at first you are just in a kind of stupor because every family in Ukraine could become a family like that. Very few people still go down to the basements or hide every time there is a siren, because you can’t spend the whole day in the basement. You have to work, and sleep, and do other things. These are the terrible realities now.
Many of my friends have gone abroad with their children. I think it’s the right decision because it’s so dangerous for kids to be here right now. This summer, 200,000 more Ukrainians left the country. Now that the winter blackouts are coming, more will leave.
But probably the strangest and scariest part of this situation is that there is already an abyss between us, between those who live in Ukraine and those who have left. Those who have left—even my friends who come here to see their parents or just to see their friends—aren’t embedded in the context of what is happening here anymore. I’m about ninety percent sure they’re not coming back. They have learned the languages of the countries where they live now; their children are going to school; they themselves have got jobs or are receiving welfare support.
Those of us who remain have become very wounded internally, in our spirit. For example: I feel strange when my girlfriend, who emigrated, comes to visit. She’ll make some ordinary comment and laugh, and I’ll get scared that I no longer have these simple, unburdened feelings.
Three years ago, we were all living carefree, and our problems were, in hindsight, absolutely not problems. It’s frightening to realize that now we have become alien to each other. Between the people who live in Ukraine and those who left Ukraine at the beginning of the full-scale invasion—there is a chasm between us.
A lot of people are talking about the results of the U.S. election. It was very interesting; I’ve watched interviews of Ukrainian emigrants who live in Brighton Beach, who came to the States recently or back in the days of the Soviet Union. It seems they all unequivocally voted for Trump. And those who live in Manhattan all voted for Harris.
For me, it’s too soon to say what the impact of this election will be. So far the only thing that’s changed is that a hundred Shahed drones attack us every night. That’s the only thing—the election has happened, but the situation has not changed. The strikes and attacks continue.
It is worth talking about peace talks, but on terms that will be acceptable to Ukraine. How can I say to my parents, who have lived their whole lives in Zaporizhzhia, that they must leave? How can I say to them: “Dad, Mom, give up your house, which you built, in which you invested money, your life—where, as they say, my umbilical cord is buried—give it up because everyone has decided so.”
Very often now I meet people who, when I ask “Where are you from?”, name cities that have been wiped off the map—Bakhmut, Torets’, Mar’inka, Avdiivka. I’m speechless, because I think about how it would be to be in their shoes. We too could have found ourselves in exactly the same position. And it’s just heartbreaking. Those cities are no more, and—as much as we would like them to be—they won’t be rebuilt quickly. Maybe they will never be rebuilt.
And now Zaporizhzhia or Kharkiv may become such cities, too. At the moment it seems there are two main options: either force us to give up the territories of the Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv regions, or we will have a military zone on the territory of Ukraine; the whole territory will essentially become a battleground across which the forces will fight, and all the civilians will leave.
In Donetsk and Luhansk, the people who wanted to leave mostly got out a long time ago. A lot of my friends left Donetsk and Luhansk and now live in Kyiv or went abroad. Now, these regions are being actively settled by the Russian Federation, which is repopulating them with people from Siberia.
But that is not the same as the other territory under discussion. If we talk about giving up Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, we have to realize we are giving away a huge piece of our industrial capacity, too. Zaporizhzhia is one of the largest industrial cities. In Zaporizhzhia there are, for example, the Dneprospetsstal and Zaporizhstal steel factories, and many other plants that are necessary for the Ukrainian economy. Kharkiv is similar. If we give them up, we are left with the so-called “intellectual” cities—services-focused, without manufacturing capacity—and we won’t be able to produce anything ourselves.
A great number of those who volunteered and are now on the front lines will not want to give up anything. So many men and women I know personally went to war, to defend their nation and to defend their borders. They did it voluntarily. Unfortunately, among them many died, including famous actors, singers, and world-class athletes. I don’t think it’s going to be that easy to just sign a piece of paper giving up territory.
And where is the guarantee that after some time—that is, if we give up some regions—the borders will remain? There will need to be a buffer zone. We will still need to have an army; we will still need to have people to train and serve in the armed forces; we will need to recruit both women and men to constantly guard this buffer zone and prevent our being attacked again.
That’s the reality of it. We learned that we will no longer be able to be at ease. This war will continue my whole life, and the life of my parents, and of my brother.
Never could I have imagined it, but that’s how it is.
Kateryna Kibarova is a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha.
Translated from the Russian by Julia Sushytska and Alisa Slaughter. This transcript has been edited for concision and clarity.
About the Translators: Julia Sushytska was born in L’viv and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Occidental College. Alisa Slaughter is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Redlands. They recently co-edited and translated a selection of essays and lectures by Merab Mamardashvili, A Spy for an Unknown Country (ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart, 2020).
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Translators’ note: YAKTAK (Yaroslav Karpuk) and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk are Ukrainian singers and songwriters.
Iranian-supplied suicide attack drones used by Russia in air raids on Ukrainian cities.