This spring, a Russian missile slipped through Ukrainian air defences and crashed into a three-storey building, killing 13 members of an extended family, save for a young girl who was pulled free from the wreckage.

When I arrived a few weeks later, an area the size of two tennis courts was flattened into rubble, the windows of every apartment looking out into the blast zone were blown out by the explosion and now boarded with plywood, parked cars were mangled out of shape, the paint burnt off their chassis. Somehow, amidst all this wreckage, a few walls of the building were still standing, wallpaper intact, fittings still protruding from the upright surfaces.

On a small rectangle of grass, not far from the blast site, neighbours had assembled a small shrine to the dead: photographs, bouquets of red plastic flowers, two basketballs scribbled with messages of condolences, dozens of stuffed toys, and a large plastic flask of drinking water.

Around the corner on Aviakonstruktorska street, where aeronautical engineers once lived in the Soviet-era apartments and worked at the nearby headquarters of Antonov (makers of the An-225 Mriya, the largest aircraft ever built), Kyiv felt like any other Eastern European city awakening from the winter.

The city was beautiful in the spring; the chestnut trees were in bloom, their silken seed pods hung in the air like snowflakes, enshrouding the city each time the wind blew. People went about their lives – running late for meetings, buying groceries, cursing at traffic, enacting their rituals of the everyday, knowing all the while that at any moment some inventive new munition could whistle through the air and detonate their lives on impact.

Each night of my visit, and sometimes in the day, Russian forces launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Kyiv. Most were shot down by the city’s air defences, every now and then, one made it through.

The war wasn’t always visible, said Anatoliy, a young man who lived in one of buildings that looked out into the blast zone, describing the surreal experience of awakening each morning in what was recognisably a warzone, descending through a staircase of broken windows, walking past past mounds of rubble and mangled metal, before turning a corner into a fully functional city en route to university where he studied cybersecurity.

“But the war is never far away,” he said. “It is always close.”

My companion on this visit was Volydymyr Yermolenko, an essayist, journalist, podcaster, the president of the Ukraine chapter of PEN (a world-wide association of writers), and a philosopher who has spent the past three and a half years thinking about how experiences like Anatoliy’s – where the war is both distant and proximate – are playing out across his country.

“In 2022 there was this, you know, adrenaline, that whatever Russians do, we will mobilise, we will beat them,” Yermolenko had told me when we met in 2024 at Zeg, a storytelling festival held annually in Tbilisi, Georgia. “Now, primarily because of the death toll on the front line, people who volunteer for the army, they understand that they will probably never come back. So this, this makes things a lot, a lot tougher, there are more fractures in the society, like, who does what? Soldiers are asking, why I am on the front line, when you are not on the front line? Why did you leave Ukraine?”

A year after that conversation I was in Ukraine to understand these cleavages; these cracks and fractures between bombed out neighbourhoods and treelined boulevards, between frontlines in the east and cities in the west, between those who stayed and those who left, between Europeans and Americans who insist this war is an existential battle between Good and Evil (but are still open to striking deals with both sides) and the rest of the world who see it as yet another proxy war between Great Powers.

I was here to witness how Ukrainians were negotiating these fissures, even as they navigated the daily horrors of war and considered the prospect of a supervised dismemberment of their nation.

To survive this war, and the dirty peace that will follow, Ukrainians will probably need to re-imagine and re-constitute themselves with a fifth less territory and the loss of tens of thousands their people, in the backdrop of decades of headspinning revolution: the Revolution on Granite in 1990, which set the stage for Ukraine’s departure from the Soviet Union; the Orange Revolution to overturn the stolen election of 2004, the Euromaidan protests and the loss of Crimea to Russia in 2014, which metastasized into this current conflict.

This spring, signs of collective reimagining were everywhere. Active duty soldiers, grieving parents of the dead, poets, writers, young Ukrainian emigres, senior officials at the Ministry of Culture, philosophers like Yermolenko, each spoke of the urgent need for new solidarities and forms of kinship, without which the relentless exposure to death would strip everyday life of meaning and would make it impossible to dream of the future. Each conversation carried the weight of living through a historic moment as if the ideas that emerged from the present would shape the future of Ukraine, and much of Europe, for many years to come.

“If I think of a Ukrainian identity, I think of a palimpsest,” said Iryna Starovoyt, a poet, essayist and a scholar of cultural studies, one evening as I accompanied her on a walk through the centre of Lviv, a medieval city in western Ukraine that was settled by Galicians, raided by Mongols, gave refuge to Armenians fleeing war in Central Asia, and was taken by the Soviets as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that divided Poland between the Soviets and the Nazis.

“Like a palimpsest, every new power writes their story but leaves traces of what was before,” Starovoyt continued. “There is a new Ukrainian identity; but I don’t know if I can translate it. Not from Ukrainian into English, but from intuition into language.”

Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

“A country is not only a ‘piece of land’, but a narration about this land,” Renata Salecl, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, writes in Spoils of Freedom. In her book about the fall of Yugoslavia and the rise of post-socialist societies, Salecl describes a country as a collective fantasy with land, and the myths and narratives that link people to that land as its constitutive elements.

Salecl was writing in the mid-1990s, but her insights from that period offer a useful prism to understand the crisis unfolding in Ukraine today.

The aim of a war of aggression, she wrote, is to shatter the very way a people perceive themselves and formulate their identity.

“When Serbs occupied a part of Croatia, their aim was not primarily to capture Croatian territory but to destroy the Croatian fantasy about that territory,” Salecl wrote. “The Serbs forced the Croats to redefine their national identity, to reinvent national myths and to start thinking about themselves in a new way, without linking their identity to the same territories, as they had done before.”

Something similar is underway in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin insists that Ukraine itself is a Soviet creation, that its lands have always been Russian, that the Ukrainian national identity has no historical basis and is a ruse to divide Russians and Ukrainians who, in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, are “a single whole”.

Russian soldiers and munitions have killed at least 55,000 Ukrainians since the invasion began, of which 12,654 are civilians, according to figures released by the UN in February 2025, and the remaining 43,000 were soldiers according to a December 2024 Telegram post by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with another 400,000 injured. Over six million Ukrainians have left the country as refugees and an estimated 3.7 million people had been internally displaced by the war as of March this year according to the International Organisation for Migration.

At present, Russia’s armies occupy nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s land area. Death, displacement and outward migration have meant that Ukraine, which had just over 50 million people when it gained independence in 1992 and about 40 million people prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, has a population of about 31 million today in areas controlled by Kyiv. That is a lot of people and territory to lose, and a lot of grief and trauma to process.

Today, Russia demands almost all of eastern Ukraine, including lands it does not yet control, as a precondition to halt its military aggression. Lands that, the Kremlin insists, were never Ukrainian to begin with.

So Russia’s war in Ukraine is about territory and the various geostrategic imperatives described by foreign-policy experts. But it is not just about territory, much like the bloodshed that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia was not simply about who got what piece of land, but what it meant for a particular parcel to be designated Serbian, or Croat, or Bosnian, or Kosovar, or – in this instance – Ukrainian.

“Russia does not need more land. It is the largest country in the world by land,” Yermolenko told me. “This is a war about identity.”

“Ukrainian identity, we cannot find it in the past. We can find elements of this identity in the past, but we need to make a kind of patchwork of something new,” he said.

This patchwork, Yermolenko surmised, could even serve as a model for other communities and peoples struggling to hold on to their sense of self at a time when questions of national identity have never felt more urgent, or divisive, and military skirmishes along long-disputed borders are increasingly escalating into full-blown wars.

“None of us Ukrainians are thinking about returning to a Golden Age, because what is our golden age?” Yermolenko said, “We’ve only had 30 years of independence. Wow. Incredibly deep history but just 30 years of independence. So it is an identity in the making.”

Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

It is important that ordinary people, wherever we are, understand this war on our own terms. Unless we are careful, the sleight of hand of ‘national interest’ nudges each of us to role-play as international statesmen speaking on behalf of our countries, our militaries, and our oligarchs, at our own expense.

We live in a time of extraordinarily unrepresentative political leadership: In the Middle East, flotillas of concerned, unarmed, civilians sought to intervene in the Israeli genocide in Gaza by dodging Israeli military barricades at sea just to deliver baby-food to dying Palestinians only to be turned back, even as our own leaders struck arms-deals with Israel and wrung their hands when the Israeli military used those same weapons to bomb schools and hospitals, and continues to kill with impunity despite a ceasefire.

In Ukraine, the war has led supposedly resource-strapped governments in Europe and the United Kingdom to shower their defence industries with largesse even as their citizens are forced to make do with less; it has prompted the Indian government to insist that buying crude oil from Russia is a strategic necessity that outweighs all other risks to the economy; it has normalised an old-fashioned colonial resource-grab in which the US now sells arms to Ukraine in return for access to its minerals. Each of these trade-offs has been sold to us, wherever we live, as the sacrifices we must endure to preserve ‘our way of life’, or as Salecl would put it, to preserve the sanctity of our respective national myths.

We are all shaped by our myths, but we needn’t be bound to them. We are all born into our respective national identities, but we can each choose to reinterpret what they mean to us.

One morning, at a museum in south-western Ukraine, I glimpsed how two Ukrainian women from the city of Odessa, born 50 years apart, each painting in her early thirties, had both strived to make sense of a time of cataclysmic change, each making art and myths for her people to comprehend history’s long arc.

Few cities are better suited to such thinking: Odessa is built on lands that, over 2,000 years, have been claimed by the Greeks, the Tatars, the Ottoman Turks, the Russians, and, of course, the Ukrainians. The palace that houses the National Fine Arts Museum was built in the 1820s in the Russian classical style, when Odessa was a major Black Sea port of the Russian Empire.

The city has been repeatedly targeted by Russian airstrikes since 2022, so when I arrived, the museum’s most treasured collections were sequestered away in crates in bomb shelters; a video projector displayed photographs of these artefacts on a darkened wall near the entrance, in much the way that museums across Africa and Asia must make do with facsimiles of their stolen treasures now on display at the British Museum in London.

Even so, two halls of the museum had been turned over to the work of Liuda Yastreb, a Ukrainian modernist who graduated from the Odessa school in 1964. Yastreb was trained in the prevailing style of Soviet social realism at a time when the regime viewed art solely as a weapon of class struggle.

But the work on display was from Yastreb’s days in the Soviet underground art scene in the 1970s, when artists in Moscow, Odessa, Leningrad, displayed their most interesting and transgressive work in so-called “apartment exhibitions” in the relative privacy of each other’s homes.

The figures in Yastreb’s work occupy much of her canvases: Eve, naked and voluptuous, looks over her shoulder and smiles knowingly at the viewer as she holds a tiny, cherry-sized apple, and a cheerful serpent peeks out from behind a tree. Three naked women, their tangled limbs create the illusion of a three-headed four-armed many-legged creature as they run through a riotous watercolor cityscape in joyful abandon, an enormous winged female figure hovers in midflight over toy-like apartment towers.

The final exhibit was a translation of Spiritual Stoicism of the Artist in Soviet Society, Yastreb’s 1979 essay, in which she described the psychic dislocation of selfhood and identity during Ukraine’s Soviet period.

“People's souls must be brought back from the emptiness caused by the revolution, war, famine, and destruction that accompanied them for so long,” Yastreb wrote. This task, she said, fell to artists such as herself to act as “rubbish collectors” gathering the discarded relics of her time: Churches, icons, sculptures, ancient books, painting, engravings, folk art.

“All this was being dusted off, cleaned, as if it were seen for the first time, but known long ago.” she wrote. “There was an urgent desire to revive despised traditions” in service of creating what she described as “real works of art appeared, reborn, radiating light and power.”

Across the hall from the Yastreb exhibition, I visited an exhibition by Anastasiia Kolibaba, a Ukrainian artist born in 1994 – three years after the dissolution of the USSR.

On her website, Kolibaba describes her practice as documenting events in service of “the creation of an elementary modern myth.” Her paintings of the current war look like photographs washed by a blur-filter to create an effect eerily reminiscent of Soviet-era imagery updated for the age of Instagram.

Where the figures in Yastreb’s work occupy most of her canvases – the individual self striving to take up space – Kolibaba’s work tries to claim Ukraine’s vast empty landscapes from threats that originate just beyond the horizon.

In Combatants, the exhaustion of three soldiers and their dog on patrol seeps through the canvas; in a series of three watercolours titled Trophy, the artist offers three perspectives on a destroyed tank; in a work titled Air Defence, a distant flash of light illuminates a darkened sky along a desolate shore.

My phone buzzed with a notification for an incoming air strike as I left the museum for my next meeting. “Usually it is nothing,” said the taxi driver, gesturing out of his window to people sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe. “Usually.”

Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

After two weeks of sheltering from Russian air raids in the corridors of the apartment complex where he lived in Kyiv, the anarchist looked into the eyes of his spouse and children and thought, “It cannot go on like this. We cannot keep living like this.”

He signed up to join the army the next day, and has been rotating in and out of the conflict’s shifting frontlines ever since.

“If there is anything I can take from my anarchist self, I think it is to resist the feeling of powerlessness,” he told me over a patchy WhatsApp call from somewhere in eastern Ukraine. “When you drive through destroyed cities, when you look inside bombed apartments, you see the remnants of people’s lives. And you tell yourself, ‘I will stand against this.’”

In the years before the war, the anarchist was a keen observer and lucid interpreter of the ideological undercurrents and debates animating Ukrainian society. In the years after the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, human rights organisations in Ukraine tracked the rise of volunteer paramilitaries who embraced far-right politics and Nazi imagery, opposed LGBTIQ rights, and embraced Christian nationalism in a manner increasingly visible in far right movements across the US, the UK, and Central Europe.

Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, the members of these paramilitaries have been absorbed into the Ukrainian military where they fight alongside a wide cross-section of Ukrainian society who have thrown themselves into the war effort. As a consequence, the anarchist said, the classic divisions of left and right are becoming much harder to parse because the world has changed so much that it has ceased to make sense.

“We have all kinds of people in my unit. The far-right, far-left divide is completely irrelevant now, ” he said. “Right now, the blunt reality of things is that I am killing Russians. And I’m trying to get better at it. Does that make me a right-winger? I don’t know.”

When the men in his unit spoke of identity, he said, “we speak about emotions.” And for now, the Ukrainian identity at war is defined by one pure emotion: A defiance shared by 30 million people united by extreme circumstances. “It is the simplest emotion of ‘What the fuck? Get out of my space.’”

But the longer the war goes on, the more it is changing him. War coarsens, war bruises, war scars. War warps your perception of reality and stretches the boundaries of what is normal. Sometimes, the war makes it impossible to imagine peace.

“For me, as a writer, it is crucial to be able to feel things. My job is to feel things, to keep my emotions attuned to what is happening in front of me,” he said. “But right now, I’m in survival mode. Right now, I need to shield my emotional self.

“Am I becoming someone else? Who will I become? I want to preserve my ability to listen to people,” he continued. “And from the level of an individual, imagine this process going upwards to the level of a country.”

Ukraine’s future, he continued, will be determined by who and what survives the war. “It will be shaped by what survival means for me versus my comrade,” he said. “Right now we are riding a tsunami of emotions to who knows where. If we are lucky to live, we will have a very interesting period of identity building and we will each be in a position to shape what emerges after.”

For much of 2022, three-quarters of Ukrainians favoured fighting on until victory was attained. Three years later, polls indicate nearly 70% now favour a negotiated end to the war, even as they doubt the fighting will end anytime soon. But as much as many in Ukraine, in Europe, and around the world, yearn for a ceasefire, some of the soldiers on the front fear a temporary pause in the fighting almost as much as a war without end.

“Sometimes I feel the worst case scenario is a ceasefire, the army is dismissed, we all go home. And then two years later, the Russians go again,” he said.

Right now, 30 million Ukrainians are sacrificing their lives, their careers, their mental health, their ability to feel, as if four long years ago, the entire country took a deep breath and is yet to exhale. Right now, it is impossible to predict if the experiences and traumas of war will shift Ukrainian society to the left, the right, or what these labels will even mean.

When I was reviewing my notes and transcripts, I noticed how often the people I met on my trip said “Right Now”, as if the war had trapped them into fossilised amber of the eternal present: Right now is not the time to ask how the war is going; right now is the time to fight the war. Right now is not the time for divisive talk. Right now, we can only think about the right now.

Or, as a senior adviser to the Ukrainian government put it when I asked him about his department’s plans to deal with the PTSD that would inevitably follow the war, “Right now, there is no trauma. Right now there is only life experience.”

A mantra to survive the Right Now, as narrated to the author on a late night taxi ride in Lviv:

Live in the moment.Ask yourself:Is this a catastrophe?Or is this just catastrophic thinking?Remind yourself:Before the waryou and all your friends could still have died in a road accident,or some other unforeseen calamity.

Tell yourself:Before this, it was almost like this.

Poet Halyna Kruk | Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

When her young son died on the front, a woman stopped talking to her sister.

She stopped talking to her sister because her sister has many children and grandchildren.

And her sister always has news to share of her children, but the woman has no news to share of her dead son.

Halyna Kruk heard this story from a woman who walked up to her after a poetry reading. This is, as Kruk noted, only one of hundreds of thousands of such stories. This is what a war feels like.

Kruk is a poet, writer, and professorof medieval literature, who has volunteered along the grey-zones in east Ukraine since the 2014 invasion when Russia took control of Crimea. She met her future husband on one of these trips when she stopped to distribute medicines, supplies and books at a military camp not far from Marioupol.

The day we met at a coffee shop in Lviv, her husband had just returned home from what he hoped would be his last deployment at the front. After our coffee, we walked out into the street where Kruk bumped into an acquaintance she hadn’t met for many years. When Kruk asked about her family, the acquaintance said her son had died on the front.

“There are these new divisions emerging in society,” Kruk said, recalling the grieving woman at her poetry reading.

“In the first year of war, families were broken because the distance in experience was so vast that the connection was broken,” she said. “In one family it was hard for people to speak to each other.”

Since the outbreak of war, Ukrainian men of fighting age have needed special permission to leave the country. The law was very recently relaxed to allow men aged between 18 and 22 to travel. Meanwhile at least 6 million mostly women and children have left Ukraine in 2022 in search of safety. With every passing year, they become less likely to return according to data gathered by Centre for Economic Strategy, a Ukrainian think tank. And however and whenever the war ends, Kruk expects a sizable number of people will want to leave the country, if only to start on a clean slate because they have lost so much.

This dynamic was visible on a long bus ride from Chisinau, Moldova to Odessa. The travel restrictions meant all my co-passengers were women, children and a solitary white-haired man. Beside me sat a young Ukrainian woman from Odessa, who was only 19 in 2022 when her mother bundled her into a car with a distant relative and shipped her off to Germany when the war began. This was her first trip back home.

“My mother was terrified I would be posted to the frontlines,” she said, explaining she was training as a paramedic when the war began. “I haven’t told her I’m coming to see her, because she is sure they will draft me.”

In the three and a half years since, she had learnt German, enrolled in a German university and was now a handful of examinations away from becoming a qualified nurse. Nearly four years of war and devastation have meant that nurses are in great demand in Ukraine, but eighty years of peace and prosperity have meant that nurses are also in great demand in Germany.

In her first year away, she said, she was desperately homesick and worried for her mother especially when Odessa was repeatedly hit by Russian air strikes. But as the war settled into a grim pattern in Ukraine, she built herself a life in Germany. “Now I know the language,” she said. “Now I have a career. Now I have a boyfriend.”

These aren’t trivial things to want; these are arguably the most important things — life, community, love, freedom and dreams for the future.

“I don’t know if I will come back,” she said. “Just for short trips. Just for holidays. Just to see my ma.”

For Kruk, leaving Ukraine was not an option she considered. She has continued to write poetry. It is one of her ways, she said, to survive the war. But she said she has struggled to write prose.

“For prose, I need more inner space. I need greater distance from reality, and I can’t do that now.” she said. “But I feel alive here. I feel more alive here than elsewhere; I feel I live in history; and I know many people feel it.”

Bogdan Dubovic, soldier | Aman Sethi, openDemocracy

In the summer of 2023, Bogdan Dubovic was in the trenches, working as a sapper clearing the way for his unit as part of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, when he was transfixed by the sudden appearance of a Russian drone followed by a deafening explosion.

Once the smoke and debris cleared, he was rushed to a hospital where surgeons were forced to amputate his left arm. His unit members told him he was lucky to be alive, but they all knew that Bodgan was not an ordinary man, he was a Leshy, a forest spirit, an enchanted protector of the forests, who as per legend could either aid or hinder travellers lost in the woods.

“When I first signed up to fight, my unit said, ‘Everyone has to have a call sign, what is your name?” Bogdan recalled. At the time, Bogdan was working as a forest ranger in eastern Ukraine. “I said, I am a man from the forest, call me ‘forest man’.” But that call-sign was taken, so he said, “Call me Leshy.”

In his new identity, his first assignment was to assist in the exfiltration of civilians and soldiers from Marioupol, in the days after the city fell to the Russian forces. Thereafter until he lost his arm, he operated in some of the most gristly theatres in the war. In his previous life as a forester, Bogdan had learnt that the way to survive in the wild was to take every chance to turn the odds in his favour, and that is what he taught his unit of young volunteers.

With every passing skirmish, his unit came to believe that he really was a magical being, a forest spirit who would protect them in the face of dangers, and slowly Bogdan came to embody the Leshy.

“We never lost control of ourselves as a team, we were confident in our decisions, and that saved us every time,” he said. “My team trusted me as if I was not someone real, but from a legend.”

Yermolenko, the philosopher, and his wife Orgakova had first encountered Leshy when they were delivering supplies to his unit. Since then, they had struck up a deep friendship and met whenever Leshy was visiting Kyiv.

On the day we met, he sported a satyrid white beard, his eyes sparkled, and he constantly pulled on cigarettes that enshrouded him in a plume of smoke; the absence of his left arm lent him an aura of an otherworldly being who can be hurt but not defeated.

Leshy is from the Pontic steppes, a region known in Ukrainian as dyke-pole (literally “wild fields”) the vast grasslands that stretch across southern Ukraine, past the Sea of Azov, all the way into central Asia.

“This is not a place of nationalities,” he said. “It is a place of geography. It is a particular state of the soul; it is a place where people from different ethnicities, different histories, different nationalities, are drawn to a particular feeling of freedom. It is a freedom that forms your character and your perception of the world.”

The Ukrainian identity, Leshy said, was drawn from the steppe grasslands, from that rolling landscape of freedom that had long served as a battleground for armies, a hunting ground for raiders, and a refuge for men like him.

This war, much like those that came before it, he said, was not so much about territory as it was a clash between two world views. Between those who lived in freedom on a limitless frontier, and those who sought to destroy what they could not control.

“The next time you come to Ukraine, I will take you to the steppes.” He said, “If you stay there just a while, you will want to live there for the rest of your life.”

On one of my last days in Kyiv, Yermolenko dropped me off at the PEN Ukraine office for a conversation with his colleague Vakhtang Kebuladazhe, who looks exactly as one would imagine a middle-aged, Heidegger-quoting East European phenomenologist who plays bass guitar, and has written both a thesis on Kant and a rock opera inspired by a poetic play written in 1911 by Lesya Ukrainka, a Ukrainian feminist poet.

I started, as I did for much of my trip, by asking Kebuladazhe how he thought the war was shaping Ukraine’s national identity. We argued for a while about national identity, language, power, colonialism and decolonisation: Russian in the case of Ukraine, English in the case of India; language as simply an instrument, versus Heidegger’s description of “Language as the house of being”; and then he told me a joke.

“It is like the boy and the salt,” Kebuladazhe said, when I asked him to describe his conversations about identity with his students at the university.

“There was once a boy who would not speak. His family took him to the finest doctors in Kyiv, but to no avail. He didn’t utter a word.

Then over dinner one day, soon after he turned five, he said, “Pass me the salt.”

His mother was astounded: Why didn’t you say anything until today?

“Until today, dinner always had enough salt.”

“We are that boy,” Kebuladzhe said with a wry smile. “Now Ukraine is in an existential crisis. Now, my students are immersing themselves in philosophy and history and the humanities. Now they are speaking, now they are asking, ‘Who are we as Ukrainians?”