December, 2021. 

It was a freezing day in my dorm room and I was seated at my desk by the window with a blanket over my lap and dressed in multiple layers of clothing. I had my notebook in front of me, pen and pencil at the ready. My Russian language tutor was a minute late and when she logged on, we began our greetings and small talk. I asked her about Kharkiv, the city in Ukraine where she lived. She asked me about Cleveland. It was nearing the end of the small talk that she had asked me.
“I know in the US they say that Russia will invade. I don’t think so,” she tells me. I didn’t have her confidence. But the sudden subject led me to believe she didn’t have that confidence, either. 

I remember being hesitant with my response, but I was worried. “You guys don’t think anything will happen?” I had asked, and it was answered with a definitive no. But the no wore shifty eyes. 

We didn’t speak of it again. Not for another month and a half. 

At home is a similar scene. The space is heavy. We don’t want to talk about it. No one does, really. The news is telling us everything is going to go to hell any day now. Any week. Who knows? All we know is that it will happen. War is coming. 

January, 2022.

The news stays on, the phone is constantly ringing. But my relatives in Ukraine are unconvinced. They laugh at the worries we have. 

“War? Here? Don’t be ridiculous.” 

“You are not here, you don’t know anything. There will be no war, you’re scaring people for no reason.” 

It is frustrating, really. I see the reports. It doesn’t feel fabricated. I know in my heart it is not fabricated. There are troops massed around the borders. It isn’t just a show of force, is it? I have my fingers crossed, but I know better. My family have all begun to crumble, nerves picking at our sanity and making us short-fused and sensitive. We take comfort in shared spaces and light conversations. Everyone is afraid to point out the obvious. 

I was planning on going to Ukraine for the summer. I wanted to see my grandmother and my mom’s side of the family. My mother told me something that I’d never forget. 

“I’m sorry to say, Lidia, but I don’t think Ukraine will exist by summer.”

I wanted to be angry, but how could I? She was exhausted. After everything the Russians have done to her, now they wanted to take her native land, too. 

No generation of my family has seen peace.

 

February, 2022.

My weekly Russian lesson came around and I logged on once again. I had been feeling weird about learning Russian. It was the readily available language with most material, and so it was just convenient. But then, I was deeply uncomfortable with continuing while troops were massed along the Ukrainian borders. It seemed my tutor felt the same about teaching it to me. 

She was ready to go with a song on YouTube when we connected. Ой у лузі червона калина (Oh, the red viburnum in the meadow), a Ukrainian patriotic march. We listened to the song, then she went through the lyrics with me and we translated. I realized then that something had changed with her. Not only was she playing a Ukrainian song during our Russian lesson, but she was now teaching me Ukrainian and Russian side by side that day. It felt incredibly solemn. 

I tend to journal fairly consistently, but February has only two entries. 

On the 18th, I wrote:

…The situation in Ukraine has escalated significantly. There are now about 190,000 troops on three sides of Ukraine…Thinking of the possible consequences of an actual invasion kind of kills me inside. Babusya would go to Poland if she can, if it’s not too late to leave. Rivne is 3 hours from Kyiv. I’m afraid to think of what happens if she can’t get out…

For all of February, there was no place I could go to find peace. And it was the night of my 20th birthday. I was sitting with my best friend and got the notification. The troops were moving into Ukrainian territory. 

Entry from February 28, a recollection of the official Russian invasion of Ukraine: 

I had a UN Security Council meeting live pulled up. The Ukrainian Ambassador called for the Russian Ambassador to take his troops and leave Ukraine…“There is no purgatory for war criminals, ambassador. They go straight to hell.”

It was late here, maybe 4am in Ukraine. I was refreshing Twitter. I saw the news first. Reports of bombing…I will never forget this. I threw up. I stayed up for so long, afraid to go to bed, because I was afraid of the news I’d wake up to.

I had never felt a feeling like that before in my life. I watched the clip of the border near Kherson get taken. The last clip of footage before it went dark. How chilling it was to see that Russian soldier. I went to find live street cameras across the country, to see what was happening. To see if I could spot the missiles. 

I had called my mother, and asked her if she had called my grandmother. If she had heard from her, or anyone. The entire country was lit up from air strikes and troops were marching toward Kyiv as we spoke. They were coming from all sides. I was worried. I knew people from numerous cities but I couldn’t reach everyone at once. 

The worst story was from an acquaintance in Odesa. She was in the middle of sending a video message on WhatsApp, and the rockets hit her apartment building. You cannot ever erase screams like that from your memory. 

My birthday party was two days later. It felt almost like a funeral. My immediate and extended family were present and despite everyone’s best efforts to stay cheerful, it was a somber event. Tears shed on numerous occasions and the prayer before the meal consisted of tears and pleading with God to save our family in Ukraine. 

For the Croatians in my family, this was something out of their nightmares. The parallels were eerily similar. But they were the most vocal supporters. “If we could do it against an enemy that was greater than us, so can you” was the attitude. It was more necessary than they realized, for us Ukrainians to hear those things. War stories recounted, victory remembered. That’s what we wanted for ourselves, too. 

We all tried to do our part. My language tutor, after a few days, I was able to get in touch with again. She was stuck in Kharkiv. I helped give her the name of the church in my mother’s city that would take her in. It was far enough away from the fighting where she’d be safe. I gave the same information to others in the south of Ukraine, also stuck with nowhere else to go. It was infuriating to do so little while I had cousins on the front lines. But what else was I supposed to do? I was here, in the US. This was all I could do. 

February, 2025. 

I turned 23 this year. Ever since 2022, my birthday is a somber affair. The energy shifts when the date comes closer. It has not gotten easier. And my body remembers. It remembers the stress, anxiety, and the fear that kept me up at night. It revisits me year after year. But resilience is a Ukrainian strength. 

Ukrainians have been fighting for survival for centuries now. We have never known peace. We have always had to fight for our right to exist as humans. We have fought to end the serfdom, we have fought for our right to own property, speak our own language, print our own journals, our national identity, our very existence. Russians have forever been our aggressors. Nothing has changed, and yet, everything has. 

Balancing hope and grief will never become easier. I should not have to educate people on the importance of Ukraine, or argue for a Ukrainian’s right to exist. My grandmother and my family should not ever have to wake up to air raid sirens. No one should wake up to the sound of their apartment being shelled. 

Despite this grief, we continue to hope. We hope for a better future in which our loved ones will return home from the concentration camps, the front lines, or far off places they’ve escaped to. There is this hope that Ukraine will be rebuilt to be as beautiful, and better than she was before. We hope that the rest of the world can see that Russia is not the untouchable foe it perhaps once was, and that might doesn’t make right. 

It was said that Russia would take Ukraine in three days. Here we are, three years later, still standing. Ukrainians are the true heroes of Europe. We are called the Borderlands for a reason. We are the border, the wall between the rest of the world and utter destruction. 

Three years have passed since the day my life and the life of my family changed forever. There is only before and after the war started. And despite the resilience, there is also so much suffering. The absence of family members, the funerals, the fear, everything. It becomes a lot. And it is times like these when community is so important. To be with those who understand, or do their best to sit with you in your grief, is invaluable. 

And I sit in mine more often than I’d like to admit. I have countless stories and I am only in the United States. It breaks my heart to know what stories the rest of my family can tell. And to imagine the ones that they refuse to share.

So as much as my birthday is a celebration of a personal milestone, it is also a reminder of the personal and national tragedy that began in its full force in 2022. We are still hurting, but we are still here. 

Even now, I find I don’t know what to write, but I know that I have to. It is important to continue the conversation about Ukraine. To remind people that we are still fighting for our survival, for our right to exist. 

Do not forget about Ukrainians. We are fighting for the survival of not only ourselves, but the rest of Europe, too.

From Rivne to the River Neretva

• My 23rd Birthday and Ukraine’s 3rd Year at War
• My (disappointed) Onyx Storm Review
• Challenges of Coming Out in a Slavic Household: A Personal Story
• About Me