Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here.
Some people woke to rumbling – maybe thunder, maybe fireworks, or so they thought. Others were jolted awake by calls from those who’d heard the noise and knew it wasn’t thunder. Then there were those who hadn’t set an alarm that morning, hoping for arare chance to sleep in, not realising they’d wake to aworld turned inside out.
For most, it was like something bottomless, heavy and silent. The news had warned them for months about a “possible full-scale invasion” but they brushed it off, didn’t believe it, couldn’t bring themselves to. They pushed the truth away until it became undeniable. And now: war. Suddenly, the word felt different. Not the kind of war you’d see in movies or read about in heroic stories; not even the distant conflict in the east of the country they’d lived alongside for eight years. This was their war. Something heavy, foreign, spoken with trepidation – its meaning foggy and unreachable, like invisible forces attacking without warning, motives and reasons hidden.
A week before Russia’s all-out assault on Ukraine, Oleh (for this article, I’m only using first names and omitting identifying details) had spoken to his grandmother by phone. They talked about what he’d do “if war broke out”. Half-joking, he told her: “I’ll go to the village, sit in the cellar and live off canned food until it’s over.”
Then came 23rd February 2022. His first-ever date at agay club – and, as it would turn out, his last date with that guy. “Of course, Igot totally wasted in the club,” he remembers of his night out in Kyiv. They said goodnight and went their separate ways. The next morning, he woke to dozens of missed calls, mostly from his best friend. He finally picked up, joking with exasperation: “Have you lost it, calling me at this hour? Everyone knows Ilove my sleep.” But instead of laughter, he heard something else. “Oleh, the war has started,” she said, her voice breaking with tears.
He got up, went to the kitchen and found his mum making breakfast, about to take the dogs out. He asked if she’d heard the explosions. She nodded. “I thought it was thunder.” “No,” he said. “It’s war.” She turned on the TV, and there it was, on every channel. She went to the window and started to cry. That was the moment that got to him. “I can’t stand seeing my mom cry,” he says. “That’s when Ibegan to understand that maybe we were actually in deep shit.”
Oleh grabbed his dog, Balu, and headed to the shop for abeer to clear his head, “to take the edge off and figure out what to do next”. As he stood in line at the checkout, holding two bottles, people around him were buying essentials: salt, matches, candles; needs unchanged since the second world war. By the time he returned home and saw his mother waiting at the window, his decision had been made: “I have to join the fight.”
Other guys his age were already in the thick of it. For Oleksandr, who has been asoldier since 2019, fighting in awar hitherto confined to Ukraine’s east, the day the invasion turned full-scale started early, with a4am alarm at acheckpoint near the “frozen” frontline east of Mariupol, southeastern Ukraine. Aquick call to his mum: “Are you safe?” Her voice was steady but tight. “Everything will be OK,” she replied. “Everything will be OK,” he echoed, hoping to believe it. And then the order came: “We’re staying to defend Mariupol.” Oleksandr’s tasks were to evacuate the wounded, transport fresh troops to forward positions and manage logistics.
“War is astruggle,” he remembers thinking. “For loved ones, for land, for life.” But the deepest pain lay in human losses. “Just moments ago, we spoke, he was running beside me… and now he’s ‘cargo 200’,” he said of acomrade, using Ukrainian army lingo for afatality. “That’s the worst of it.” Despite everything, there was adrenaline. The feeling of fulfilling amission, of being useful, needed. That rush ended after his injury at Azovstal, one of the world’s largest steel production facilities, which became afortress of Ukrainian resistance during the siege of Mariupol. “A flash – white and yellow. Seconds without sight, without sound. Ithought I’d lost my eyes. Then Iremember screaming. Shock, pain. The guys dragged me to the shelter.”
