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I was running on a beautiful trail in Northern Vermont when the air raid siren went off. It was late afternoon in that magical alpenglow light, and it was difficult to imagine a more peaceful scene.
Until the air raid siren exploded on my phone. I stopped, breathing hard, trying to make sense of it. “Attention … Air Raid Alert … Proceed To The Nearest Shelter … Don’t Be Careless … Overconfidence Is Your Weakness.”
In Ukraine, I had downloaded the air raid app that seems to be on every Ukrainian smartphone. On the app, you specify a region and get a loud warning when Ukrainian defenses detect incoming missiles or drones. I had forgotten to delete it when I left Ukraine, and now in the hills of Northern Vermont, a voice was warning me to take shelter. It was like a hand reaching out to pull me back into a world where mothers were waking up their children to hurry them to shelters, and death came suddenly from the sky.
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I recently traveled to Ukraine to assist with an aid project that provided medical and other non-lethal support to Ukrainian troops. It’s a joint Finnish-American effort that evolved quickly after the full-scale invasion. The group acquires vehicles — ambulances, four wheel drive vehicles, trucks, cars — and fills them with much-needed supplies. We met in Warsaw and drove the 800 kilometers to Kyiv, where the aid was distributed.
The first impression of Kyiv is no different from visiting Prague or Budapest: a beautiful and bustling European city that is very much alive and thriving. Kyiv does not feel like a besieged capital barely hanging on in the third year of a war. But when you look closer and venture out from the center of Kyiv, which is the most heavily defended, you find the ugly scars of a genocidal war against a civilian population. A high-rise apartment looks like a giant fist crashed into the top floors, leaving a gaping hole. A neat row of suburban houses is interrupted by the bombed-out shell where, not long ago, a family once lived. Carbon pieces of drones are stacked in neat piles next to raked leaves waiting for disposal...
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