Written by: Sasha Dovzhyk
On a bright February day, over cups of coffee, my team gathers for a strategy meeting in our office in Lviv, 80 kilometers from the EU border. Our cultural and research institution – an NGO called Index – documents the experiences of Ukrainians in the war. Coffee is important: our charging station can power a coffee machine during power outages. One of our board members from Kiev, which has suffered the most from Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter, enjoys this luxury. She is used to climbing 14 flights of stairs with water bottles and boiling coffee on a portable stove in her freezing apartment.
As we speak, our screens light up with an alarm: a Russian ballistic missile is heading our way. “What are we going to do?” a colleague will ask. I want to finish both the coffee and the discussion. A minute later, we hear the sound of an explosion not far away. The missile has been intercepted. We start thinking again about how to ensure long-term justice by sharing the stories of individual Ukrainians from the war.
“Tell me that funny story about your injury,” I asked a fellow soldier the next day, and, laughing, he did. We have acquired a special sense of humor: it’s a story about running for your life from a Russian drone with a wounded comrade on your shoulder. In Ukraine, most of us have funny stories to tell: about injuries or displacement, airstrikes or long-distance relationships with partners in the military.
We have normalized war. We have normalized defeat. We have normalized resistance. Many of us have accepted that these abnormal things will stay with us as long as we manage to survive Russia's genocidal onslaught.
Four years and four lifetimes ago, there was a moment when we believed this horror would be short-lived. We were convinced that the world would not tolerate Russia brutalizing a sovereign state while in effect dismantling international law and security.
Looking back, I remember a demonstration by survivors of the Mariupol siege that took place in the center of Lviv in mid-March 2022. The protesters had barely escaped the industrial port city after enduring weeks of Russian bombing that had begun in February of that year. Some had left relatives buried under the rubble of collapsed high-rise buildings; others had lost contact with their loved ones. Holding hand-drawn banners that read “Mariupol is on fire,” they chanted “NATO, close the sky!” Then, working as a “fixer” for international media, I stepped out of the group of journalists filming the scene and shouted with the demonstrators in high spirits.
But NATO – or any other international entity – did not close the skies then. It is not closing the skies now, as Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy system, including the substations that supply electricity to nuclear plants. The compromise of the security of civilian nuclear infrastructure – from the seizure of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant to the intrusion into nuclear units in other parts of the country – is a consequence of the international community’s increasing tolerance for terror. It has not made the planet a safer place.
In 2022, we Ukrainians told ourselves and each other that the world would stand by our country if we showed that we were ready to defend ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of civilians volunteered to join the army and drove the invaders from the Kiev and Chernihiv regions in the north of the country. Within six months, the Ukrainian army had also liberated the Kharkiv region in the northeast and Kherson in the south. Through determination and ingenuity, Ukrainians proved that they were capable of military combat.
Civilian victories followed. The film “20 Days in Mariupol,” which captured the first weeks of Russia’s assault on the city, won the Oscar for best documentary in 2024. In his acceptance speech, director Mstyslav Chernov called on the Academy Awards audience to “make sure history is set right” and that the truth about Russian atrocities triumphs.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Ukrainian human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk. Her Nobel Prize lecture exposed the collapse of the international system of law and security in the face of Russia's criminal war. It was titled "Time to Take Responsibility."
The international community really took its time responding to Russia's aggression. With aid to Ukraine too slow, too limited, and too fragmented, the country was left to fight a protracted war of attrition. Ukrainians have been left with no choice but to normalize defeat, war, and resistance.
I revisit the statements from the early years of the full-scale war because it helps to recapture some of the moral clarity that prevailed then, before public discourse became clouded by talk of compromise and concessions. Even more revealing are the words of those who did not live long enough to become accustomed to the horror.
In 2023, I traveled to the liberated Kharkiv region with a group of authors and volunteers and saw the devastation left behind by the Russians. We stopped at a mass grave of local residents in a pine forest near the liberated town of Izium. Wooden crosses marked human-sized holes in the sandy soil – 447 of them. From one of the graves, the body of a fellow executed writer, Volodymyr Vakulenko, had been exhumed. In the final entry of his diary, written under occupation, Vakulenko predicted Ukraine’s victory.
Another writer I traveled with, Victoria Amelina, researched Vakulenko’s murder. She planned to include his story in her nonfiction book “Watching Women Watching War.” Two months after our trip to the Kharkiv region, a Russian precision missile strike took his life. I was part of the editorial team that saw her book published posthumously. Uncompromising in the face of horror, Amelina’s testimony documents and embodies the Ukrainian thirst for justice.
The words and lives of those whom Russia took from us are like bees in amber: they capture the unspoiled essence of Ukraine’s war. They are a flame that the fatigue, betrayals, and accumulated horror of the ensuing years are powerless to extinguish. As the war enters its fifth year, we must pause and look back to see the way forward. Compromises that fuel Russian impunity will not lead us to lasting peace. The political imagination to envision Russian accountability may give us a chance.
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