Guardian culture writer Charlotte Higgins, who has traveled regularly to Ukraine since 2022, offers a deeply personal answer to the question "What was it like?" after a month-long reporting trip. She recounts not the frontline movements or political statements, but the fleeting, haunting images that define life under war: a father squatting low at Lviv railway station, hands on his son's knees, the boy pale and holding his expression as his mother and he boarded a train to Poland while the father, of fighting age, stayed behind.
The Compression of War Experience
Higgins describes layers of incompatible experience crushed together: visiting a ruined museum where a director cradled an unharmed ceramic jug, then attending a literature festival with photographer Julia Kochetova. She recalls Kochetova's face as they drove between the two, asking, "How long will it go on? Until Kyiv is all rubble, all of it? And until how many of us are left?"
In Odesa, a woman sunbathing by the sea was killed by shrapnel from a drone. The Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv, one of eastern Europe's holiest sites, was on fire after a drone hit. Every morning, the civilian death toll crept up, while Ukrainians also laughed at memes of exploding oil refineries in Moscow and celebrated unexpected frontline success.
The Mundanity Amid Crisis
Higgins notes the strange ordinariness: it was peony season, and flower stalls were full of pink, cream, and scarlet blooms; young people bought them for sweethearts from old ladies who had come in from the country. A friend talked about needing to update her emergency backpack because she kept eating the emergency food in non-emergency situations.
She cites Ukrainian poet Iryna Tsylik's poem My Day, which captures this compression: "At 4am the air-raid siren woke me./ My son and I hunkered down in the corridor,/ I listened to the rockets flying over us –/ that unmistakable eerie thrum./ But we won that round of Russian roulette./ I dozed another hour./ I read the news of how many killed./ I made pancakes for my son."
Hauntings as Answers
Higgins recalls a journalist who reported from the Balkans in the 1990s and whose memories 30 years later were not of frontlines or politicians, but of vivid images: a hotel manager in his suit and neatly knotted tie amid bombed-out wreckage; the look in the eyes of parents who had not contacted their child for months. These, she says, are not stories in the journalistic sense—they are hauntings, the true answer to "What was it like?"
She also references Oksana Maksymchuk's poem The Fourth Wall, which describes war life as "no collapse,/ just a gradual shrinking/ of the present" and ends with the feeling of hearing an air-raid warning: "We stop what we're doing/ stand by the curtain, our eyes/ on the sky, fearing/ how normal it all now feels/ how boring."
Imagining a Future
Ukrainian artist Stanislav Turina wrote a series of 10 poems all titled My Perfect Day, imagining a future beyond the painful present. One includes: "The war ended a year ago. Rebuilding time. / We remember the fallen. Internal wounds heal. We recall the disa-/ ster of the war. But pain and fear no longer rule us. Any of us." Higgins reflects that these poems may be either optimistic assertions of hope or desperately speculative fictions.
Higgins concludes that the personal answer to "What was it like?" is often too private to be spoken—it is the diary entry, the flicker of images before sleep, the fugitive layers of memory that may resurface years later.
