This penetrating, low sound cannot be confused with anything else. You may already have been pulled out of a deep sleep by the warning app on your phone. There are now dozens of sirens in the middle of the night, all howling away at once.
It’s one in the morning, and news feeds are filled with reports of an air raid. The Russian military is said to have launched some Iranian Shahed drones toward Kyiv and several other cities in central Ukraine. Then your sleepy brain tries to decide whether to stay in your warm bed or move to the shower room, the only relatively safe space.
Abigail, a three-year-old toy poodle, turns out to be the most responsible member of our family. She has learned the sound of an air raid alarm and now runs around the bed, as if to persuade me to move to a safer place.
The size of the shower room seems to be perfectly designed for my partner Nick, my dog and I. While they catch up on their dreams, I monitor social media and online groups in other cities where air alerts have been activated, scanning for notifications about air defence operations and missile strikes, and—once the siren peters out—listening to the unsettling silence of the Kyiv night.
An hour later, a colleague will text me the news that a power plant near his apartment has been hit—he can see fire and smoke from his window. In another 40 minutes, the mobile app will notify us that the air raid alert has been cancelled, meaning that the threat of a Shahed attack has passed.
I wake up Nick and Abigail and the three of us move to bed. We still have three hours of sleep left, this time, before the morning alarm goes off.
♦♦♦
I remember the moment the fight began on 24th February 2022.
Within hours of Putin declaring full-scale war, Russia was boasting about the infrastructure that it had destroyed. From the windows of our house, I saw the red flames created by the missiles launched at my country and, a little later, the first lines of cars leaving Kyiv.
However, it was the sound of the first siren that really scared me. Before, I had only heard it in movies, so no one—even in our newsroom—knew what to do when we heard one for real.
For the first few days, I had to work from the basement of a house with bad internet and on a yoga mat in the subway, surrounded by dozens of frightened eyes—women, men and children. It was impossible to hide the fear. But along with fear, there was something else. Now I realise that it was the intention to defeat the fear. It was the willpower, the Ukrainian resilience that everyone is talking about today.
♦♦♦
During these 13 months of war, I have felt like Robinson Crusoe, who left marks for every day he lived in order not to get lost in time. And he wanted to survive. It’s vital that Ukrainian journalists record everything: our marks tell us how millions of fellow citizens are managing to survive, even as their country is being destroyed before their eyes.
It was the sound of the first siren that really scared me. Before, I had only heard it in movies, so no one knew what to do when we heard one for real
These past few months I have been thinking about the language of war. How do I talk about it in a way that conveys all the pain and tragedy that is happening here every day? Are there words that can stop the war? Are there words that can describe this grief?
♦♦♦
The people I meet in the liberated towns and villages speak their own language. There is no longer any fear in their voices. There is grief of a kind I haven’t seen before; grief mixed with a sense of confession. Grief in formaldehyde. There is so much simplicity and strength of spirit in their bearing that you are ashamed to cry while listening to them. So you cry later, listening to the recordings.
These residents of liberated cities, and those who managed to escape the occupation, tell horrifying tales of broken limbs, amputated body parts, torture and electrocution, and rapes of men, women and children. Then, tales of the elderly, executed for refusing to cooperate; the shooting of peaceful evacuation convoys; brutal hangings; interrogation with a hammer and sledgehammer.
Yet when you return to the same people, to the same cities, after a while, you notice that their language changes. Their stories about what happened turn into legends. Grief evaporates because life wins.
And I keep my notes only to have documentary evidence that all this really happened to me, my family and my city. So that this story does not become an urban legend over the years. So it doesn’t seem like my compatriots have superpowers and managed to repel the Russian forces like something in an action movie. Because war is really about fear. The type of fear that you have to overcome every second. And, in the end, you succeed.
