On a bright February day, over cups of coffee, my team gathers for a strategy meeting at our office in Lviv, 80km from the border with the EU. Our cultural and research institution – an NGO called Index – documents Ukrainians’ experiences of the war. The coffee is important: our charging station can power a coffee machine during electricity outages. A member of our board from Kyiv, which has suffered most from Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter, delights in this luxury. She is used to climbing 14 flights of stairs with water canisters and boiling coffee on a portable stove in her frozen apartment.
As we speak, our screens flash with an alert: a Russian ballistic missile is heading our way. “What shall we do?” a colleague wants to know. I want to finish both the coffee and the discussion. In a minute, we hear the sound of an explosion not far away. The missile has been intercepted. We resume our pondering about how to ensure long-term justice by sharing individuals’ stories of wartime Ukraine.
“Tell me that funny story about your injury,” I ask a soldier friend the next day and, laughing, he does. We have adopted a peculiar sense of humour: it is a story about running for his life from a Russian drone with a wounded comrade on his shoulder. In Ukraine, most of us have funny stories to tell: about injuries or displacement, airstrikes or long-distance relationships with partners in the army.
We have normalised war. We have normalised loss. We have normalised resistance. Many of us have accepted that these abnormal things will stay with us for however long we manage to survive Russia’s genocidal onslaught.
Four years and four lifetimes ago, there was a moment when we believed that this horror would be short-lived. We were convinced the world would not tolerate Russia brutalising a sovereign state while in effect dismantling international law and security. But Nato – or any other international entity – did not close the sky then. It is not closing the sky now, as Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy system, including substations supplying electricity to nuclear power plants.
Back in 2022, we Ukrainians told ourselves and each other that the world would stand with our country if we showed that we were willing to defend ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of civilians volunteered to join the army and ousted the occupiers from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. The film 20 Days in Mariupol won the Oscar for best documentary in 2024, and the Nobel peace prize 2022 went to Ukrainian human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk. Yet the international community has raised its levels of horror tolerance, compromising the safety of civilian nuclear infrastructure and making the planet a less safe place.
