First-person perspectives on 3 years of war in Ukraine
Five-minute piano breaks + opening doors (Issue #276)
Monday marked three years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia still occupies 20% of the country. Every day, more missiles and drones hit Ukrainian infrastructure and monuments. Over 1 million people have been killed or injured, and the war shows no signs of stopping — despite failed attempts to resolve it through UN sanctions.
Beyond the headlines, it’s easy to lose sight of what the war means on a human level.
For that, I want to share two first-person perspectives I found on Medium by Ukrainian writers. First, there’s Anton Kutselyk, who’s been writing consistently from Kyiv since 2022. A few weeks ago, he gave us a tour of his city on an extraordinarily sunny day — just a normal slice of life, the kind of quotidian perspective you can’t get elsewhere. A few months ago, he published a rundown of some of his favorite new bookstores (they’re all gorgeous, too) that have popped up in Kyiv.
To me, this is very inspiring proof that humans will keep learning, growing, and starting beautiful new businesses, even under trying and uncertain circumstances.
The growth of bookstores in Ukraine is also a response, in some ways, to the invasion. Kutselyk writes, “Cafes in Kyiv still occupy an important place in social life. But since Russia invaded […] people started to gravitate towards something more potent […] Ukrainian culture is finally getting freer and fuller in its expression.”
Anastasia Lebedenko — a native Ukrainian who moved back home in 2020 after a few years in Canada — reflects on the grief of war. “Acceptance of war means accepting the most horrific sides of human nature,” she writes. Ukraine tiptoed into war when she was eighteen, during the Donbas conflict — which wasn’t called a “war” at first, but an “anti-terrorist operation” to root out Russian-backed separatists. It never grew as intense as what she’s living through now.
For some history, I recommend Economist correspondent Noah Sneider’s The Empire Strikes Back from the Medium archive. Sneider grew up in Moscow and spent a week in Ukraine during the Donbas war in 2014. His perspective is more nuanced because he has family and friends in both countries, and he reaches back in time to tell the thousand-plus-year history of Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, both of which descend from the medieval slavic state Kievan Rus. Each nation interprets its relationship to this shared history differently. Sneider writes: “Two nations riding fundamentally incompatible historical narratives have crashed. The stakes could not be higher, and not simply because Russia fears NATO expansion, but because Russia fears losing its brother, losing its family, and thus losing itself.” I highly recommend reading the full story for more on the deep, deep roots of this war.
What else we’re reading
- Don’t wait to care about something before you start working on it. If you spend enough time, each day, on a project… you will eventually begin caring. (Rhiannon James)
- “You work for yourself before you work for the company that has hired you.” — CTO Amanda Southworth
- If you work from home, there is nothing preventing you from taking five-minute breaks to reset your focus with a few cathartic scales on the piano (or whatever your creative outlet of choice might be), as Zach O'Leary does.
✨ A top highlight on Medium last week
“Remember that when one door closes. There will be more doors open, but you have to be willing to search for those doors.” — Ripton Green
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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