When I walk back from the supermarket to the apartment we rent in Zaporizhzhia, the city feels almost ordinary.

The apartment costs about €30 ($34) a month. It has peeling Soviet wallpaper layered over the decades, old wooden windows opening onto a sea of green trees, and furniture straight from the 1980s. My partner, a soldier, spends five days on the front line and five days here. I come whenever I can, making the seven-hour drive from Kyiv.

This time, I got the timing wrong. I wanted to surprise him, but arrived the day he left for the mission. Instead of seeing him, I spent five days alone, listening to explosions in the city, and hoping for his return.

As I walk through the market, I stop to read all the handwritten signs beside the vegetables. They don’t simply say tomatoes. They describe them as very sweet, perfect for salad, or especially delicious. Someone has taken the time to make buying vegetables feel joyful.

At the same time, Russian explosive drones hunt civilian cars nearby. Guided aerial bombs carrying huge explosive charges fall on the city streets. The River Dnipro glitters in the summer sun.

This is what prolonged war looks like. Beauty does not disappear. It simply exists beside terror.

Here in Zaporizhzhia, I got a tattoo that reads, “Love is worth it all.” The women at the tattoo studio were warm, funny, and endlessly patient. They talked about their children while air raid alerts echoed outside. Like so many Ukrainians, they had quietly adjusted to a reality that would once have seemed unimaginable.

What struck me most was not their courage but their perception of danger. They believed Kyiv, with its ballistic missile attacks, was far more dangerous than Zaporizhzhia. I believe exactly the opposite.

Neither of us is wrong. We are simply doing what human beings do to survive; comforting ourselves with small truths.

People cannot live every day believing they may die at any moment. To protect themselves, they convince themselves that somewhere else is worse. Parents need to believe their children are relatively safe. Otherwise, how would they get up every morning, send them to school, or let them play outside?

We don’t compete over whose city suffers more. We tell one another to hang on because surely the others have it worse.

The truth is simpler. None of us has enough protection.

Zaporizhzhia is different from Kyiv in one crucial way. Here, the air raid alert barely ends anymore. Now it just continues for the entire day. And then for several days. The warning becomes so constant that it no longer serves its purpose.

Shops no longer close during alerts because they would remain closed almost permanently.

Supermarkets continue operating.

People continue shopping.

Life continues.

The loudspeakers inside still repeat the same announcement: “Attention. Air raid alert. Please proceed to the nearest shelter. Do not panic.”

Do not panic.

Every few minutes.

Twenty-four hours a day.

Seven days a week.

Eventually, those words lose their meaning. They become part of the city’s background noise, like traffic or birdsong. And that may be one of Russia’s least visible victories.

Not because Ukrainians panic — but because we have become so good at not panicking that outsiders begin to mistake adaptation for safety.

Market functioning, children laughing, and conclude that life has adjusted. They see resilience. They often fail to see exhaustion.

One of my closest friends lives in Zaporizhzhia. She is a former army sniper and a single mother of four. She recently bought an old hotel and is slowly renovating it while trying to earn enough money to finish paying for it.

Sitting in her garden, watching her youngest children chase cats through the grass, she casually mentioned that we crossed a street when driving to her home only minutes before a guided bomb hit nearby.

I recognized something in her that I had once seen in myself. A few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion, I bought a tiny cabin near the Belarusian border. Looking back, I think it was my own way of saying: No. This isn’t really going to happen.

Perhaps renovating a hotel in a city under constant bombardment is another version of the same instinct. Not denial exactly, but faith. A stubborn insistence that the future still exists.

This is what prolonged war changes. Not only buildings. Not only infrastructure. It changes the baseline of what feels normal.

Tomorrow, my partner will come back from the front. I hope he will. And that will be enough to make me genuinely happy.

Not because life has become normal.

But because, after years of one endless air raid, happiness is no longer measured by peace.

It is measured by the brief moments when the people you love come home safe. From the military mission. From the market where they sell those sweetest tomatoes. From school. 

Lera Burlakova is 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 Campaigns and Media Coordinator for the new Amnesty International Ukraine team.