It’s a nice little café, with a sign that says “I love Kyiv” at the entrance, and primitivist flowers painted across rough “cottage” walls. The morning is quietly sunny, and I’m waiting for a meeting I had been looking forward to. Now, my mood has changed.
I’m going to meet the mother of my friend. I miss the guy — he’s such a funny, adventurous teddy bear who worked with journalists in the army for many years. We had been hoping to get him freed from Russian captivity one way or another, along with other seriously ill prisoners of war, who should be repatriated or accommodated in a neutral country according to the Geneva Conventions that Russia routinely ignores.
We meet, hug, she shows me pictures from his childhood, and a postcard he sent her from the war. All I can manage is a neutral expression, a poker face.
She notices and reassures me. “It’s going to be alright, Lera,” she says. “He’ll come back, and we’ll . . . we’ll have a barbecue!”
I want to believe in that barbecue with the fervor that people reserve for God. The problem is that last night, when I was trying to get to sleep ahead of an early start for this meeting, a colleague contacted me.
It was a message that, like many others, had been pieced together, jigsaw-like, from information gleaned by contact with freed prisoners lucky enough to be exchanged. It’s the only way we get news about those being held by the Russians.
It was short and stark: “He’s dead. I’m sorry.”
And now I’m sitting in front of his beautiful mother, with all her warmth and optimism, despite this nightmare. And I say nothing.
There’s no body — so there’s always at least a 1% chance it’s a mistake. There’s no body — so she can still smile and feel at least partly alive for another month. A year. I don’t know how long she can still hold on to hope. There’s no body — so I don’t have anything close to the moral right to say otherwise. So I smile back. We’ll organize a barbecue.
For many, many days to come, this will haunt me like a PTSD flashback — I’ve been a soldier, so I know a bit about flashbacks. I’ll space out and find myself back on that mild sunny morning, with my probably-dead friend’s mother sitting in front of me saying, “It’s going to be alright. He’ll come back and we’ll have a barbecue.”
But he won’t. Not alive anyway. Perhaps his body will be one of those repatriated by Russia in recent exchanges of the dead — some 6,057 have arrived home this month, although the Kremlin’s indifferent minions have seemingly included some of their own men among the body bags.
We Ukrainians live our daily lives with some element of horror and gut-wrenching uncertainty. Take my own lover. He’s on the frontline, an infantryman, and for 15 days, there’s been no word from him.
He usually jokes that he’s Schrödinger’s partner — alive and dead at the same time during his times away. He will come back to the safe house on day 15, emotionally numb, and will say it was very hard, and that he can’t feel anything at all at the moment, but he knows he loves me.
Then, after a few more days, it’ll all be fine again. He will go, not back to normal, but on another mission. And I will start feeling numb too, as if there was any other way to survive. It’s a kind of Schrödinger’s love — I know it’s there, I know he’s the man I want to live my life with, but I can’t feel too much for him while he’s protecting a hole in the ground from Russian attack.
Facing my emotions would mean breaking down, and Ukrainians can’t afford to do that. It would be a constant state, with no space for work, raising children, or walking the dog — all of which we still have to do.
It’s night, and I slept through the air raid alarm. I missed a lot of explosions, but woke to one nearby. They are expected but always unexpected.
I roughly rush my six-year-old son out of bed: “Come on, come on, quickly, go to the hallway.”
The hallway has no windows, so it’s slightly safer. Though I’m usually calm, this time I’m visibly stressed, and he doesn’t want to go. He’s sleepy. Carrying a blanket and whatever else we need, I yell: “Don’t you understand? We could die. Move!”
He looks at me and translates into words what I seem to have conveyed through years of calmness and my fake carefree vibe amid all the missiles and drones.
“It’s OK, Mom. It’s alright if we die. Chill,” he says.
But he moves, and we quickly fall asleep in the hallway. Work and school tomorrow.
Later, I’m on a call with foreign colleagues, and at the very end, as if apologizing for this not being the sole topic of our discussion, one asks: “How are things in Ukraine? How are YOU?”
“We’re good, I promise. We are used to all this happening. We really are,” I tell her.
“I can’t imagine getting used to something like that,” she says, and I softly smile in return. Without any bad intention, I reply. “We couldn’t either, but we did.”
I immediately regret this answer, as I think of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s warning just a few days earlier that Russia could be ready to attack the alliance within a few years. I don’t want to scare her. I don’t want to scare anyone.
I want to remain the person who smiles at my friend’s mother and talks about barbecues. Who jokes and laughs when the man I love vanishes into the trenches again. Who shows my son the kind of zen where it’s OK to die, but not OK to be scared to death.
Any other way, and we wouldn’t be able to go on.
Lera Burlakova was a Democracy Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She is a Ukrainian journalist and former soldier who served as an infantrywoman from 2014-2017 after joining up following the Russian invasion of Crimea. Her war diary ‘Life P.S., received the UN Women in Arts award in 2021. She lives in Kyiv and works as the Media and Campaigns Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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