On the night before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vlada Somka had a fight with her boyfriend, Anton. They were 22 and at home in Kyiv. Russian tanks were about to roll over the border into Ukraine, triggering the largest war in Europe in 80 years.
“We argued a lot that night, and he said no-one in the 21st century would take up weapons, it won’t happen. They said we would have to flee the country, but it won’t happen,” Vlada recalls.
But the war changed everything. For Anton, it became a countdown to his 25th birthday. Ukrainian men between 25 and 60 are conscripted into the army, and few exemptions are granted. So he enlisted instead, joining a special forces unit.
He packed his AeroPress coffee maker and film camera, and in January was dispatched to the Sumy border region, one of the hotspots of the war.
Vlada, meanwhile, has continued life in Kyiv. On her hour-long commutes to university, she’ll record voice messages for him: updates on the coffee date with his mum, struggles with her coursework, where did he put the screwdriver and what’s the password for the electricity account again? Out in the trenches, Anton registers the text bubbles coming through. He’ll save them for later, to listen to in his bunk: little salvos of ordinary life narrated in her voice.
They’ve been doing this for a few months now. “It’s a process,” Vlada says. “We’re getting used to the situation.”
They met seven years ago at a school dance. He blew her away with his moves, and at the end they stole away for a kiss.
That was just the start: enrolling at the same university, taking ski trips and flights criss-crossing Europe. A few years ago, they moved in together. They got a cat, and then a dog.
That’s how the neighbours found out he’d gone to war. Anton had always been the one to walk the dog. “They asked, ‘What happened? Where is Anton?’,” she says. “And you know, every time you tell it to someone, they are trying to hide their eyes.”
Especially when it’s other men, she says, men who should probably be off fighting. She senses their apprehension, how they drop the subject when Anton’s name comes up. She wishes they would just ask her what life is like for him, for her.
“Probably they don’t want to dig this hole in my heart again and again,” she says. “But I’d rather you ask me. Because if you don’t ask, it feels like you don’t care.”
In the fourth year of fighting, Ukrainians are weary. The ongoing conflict has hardened a population where almost everyone knows someone with a loved one away at the war. Male conscription is enforced – men can be taken off the streets, rounded up from bars. But women do go to war, too. Anton’s unit is currently made up of himself, an 18-year-old girl who volunteered, and three men in their forties. One of them was taken while en route to his honeymoon. The officers asked his wife if she could drive.
Anton didn’t want to run, and felt it was his duty to fight for Ukraine. “He didn’t actually have a choice, but he did his best in this situation. He tried to take as much control as he could,” she says.
Even with US president Donald Trump trying to force a ceasefire this year – one that would have seen disastrous concessions for Ukraine – for most Ukrainians there’s no end to the war in sight.
It has ground on with little advancement from both sides. Drones strikes and advanced troop surveillance have made it largely a war of attrition. There’s been a huge toll. Neither side provides official figures, but president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in February more than 46,000 soldiers had died, with 380,000 wounded; many analysts consider this an underestimate. (For Russia, the BBC calculates there have been up to 237,000 combat deaths.)
And Russia is increasingly targeting civilians. In April, Moscow killed at least 210 people at a dozen locations across Ukraine. I travelled that month to Kyiv, which is seen as far safer than the eastern war zones. Still, 30 people died there in strikes that month.
Moscow claims to only ever attack military targets. But on April 4 a ballistic missile landed in a playground in Kryvyi Rih, a city hundreds of kilometres from the frontline. Twenty people were killed that sunny Friday evening, among them nine children. The youngest was three. I was on the night train heading out of Ukraine when my phone flashed up with the news.
Vlada and Anton got married in March, joining an institution they’d never considered before. They wanted Vlada to have the right papers “to show in the worst-case scenario”.
In Ukraine, the frontline is referred to as “zero”. When Anton’s out there, he’s in a unit monitoring Russian troop movements where there’s often little cover. He and Vlada have set up rules for themselves. “If I get a message from the very beginning of the day and then at the very end of the day, then everything is all right,” she says. He also calls her most mornings just to be her alarm clock.
But one day he didn’t ring. Vlada knew his unit was moving positions into open space, and likely to be spied on by Russian drones. She felt a rising panic, a churning terror. She wanted to call his mum but felt she couldn’t worry her. “In that moment, you’re very much on your own,” Vlada tells me. Her voice is steady as she recalls the event, but in her hands she quietly shreds a paper coffee cup. (Anton was fine; he texted the next day.)
I meet Yuliia Kotova, 29, in a cafe with her sister Anya, where they’re fundraising on their laptops over salad bowls and green juices. Both their husbands are in the military – Yuliia’s husband, Oleh, since 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and claimed parts of the Donbas region; Russia currently occupies 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory. Of course, Yuliia wishes her husband could be around. Particularly now – she touches her belly under the table – as she’s five months pregnant.
It was a surprise – “I feel too young to be a mother,” she says. They’ve planned a gender reveal party in a few weeks. Oleh has to apply for special leave to attend. For their wedding last year, he negotiated 10 days off. They honeymooned on the Mediterranean, and then he went back to his unit.
We’re interrupted by the wail of a siren, meaning a Russian drone has crossed into Kyiv’s zone. But the sun is streaming down on this leafy street, and people are lounging around with iced lattes. The alarm is ignored. Yuliia tells me that she longs for her child to grow up without air raid sirens.
In many ways life feels robustly normal in Kyiv. People stroll into bookshops and boutiques, and attend bottomless brunches. They go on date nights in wine bars, lit by candles (for the vibes and also the not infrequent power cuts). But they also buy flowers in subways, which double up as underground shelters. Posters advertising skincare and techno raves are pasted next to recruitment for the elite Azov unit.
One night, I’m cutting through the riverside Khreshchatyk Park to get home before the midnight curfew. People are out walking their dogs, joggers lope past. The boom of explosions – the Patriot air defence system intercepting Russian drones – starts up in the distance. But I’m the only one picking up the pace.
Still, reminders of the war are everywhere. I’m with Yuliia when we come across a convoy for a fallen soldier moving down Kyiv’s central avenue. It’s headed towards the war memorial at Independence Square, where thousands of framed photos are planted in a field of blue and yellow flags. An Australian flag flutters next to a boxing kangaroo – foreign volunteers who died fighting for Ukraine’s democracy are remembered here too. The procession makes traffic crawl to a stop and people emerge from their cars, some getting down on one knee. Organ music is playing, and over the loudspeaker an announcer says: “This is the price we pay for freedom.” Yuliia is standing by, watching as it passes. She turns her head away and silently she’s weeping.
Love, romantic love, in the time of war can feel near impossible to find, some young Ukrainians say.
Yehven Siroshenko, a charming 29-year-old soldier, says there’s certainly no romance on the frontline. We meet at the central railway station while waiting to board a train heading to Kharkiv, a battleground city in the east. Soldiers in fatigues wait next to families on the platforms, but they’re almost all on their own. Some are injured and heading home. But Yehven’s going the other way, after a month studying in Kyiv. He’s already been fighting for two years, a baby-faced veteran of conflicts in Kramatorsk and the Donbas. He flashes a smile and tells me his own “unhappy love story”.
Right before the war broke out, he met a woman – Katya – in a yoga class. When the fighting began, he thought about death a lot. “I felt in my heart, the reason I will regret about death is because I didn’t get a date with the girl.”
They did meet up in the end – “Thank God we did” – and dated for a short period; she even went out to Kramatorsk. But that visit was strained, weighed down with worries and miscommunication. “After that, she moved to Germany and I went to Donbas.” They stopped talking. “That’s the story of what happens during the war,” he says.
But he’s ready to go back to fighting, where he’s “needed more”. Some of the older guys see him almost as a son. “They’re waiting for me there with their whole heart.”
Dating is fraught for civilians too, says Marsha, a 23-year-old model. We’re at a packed cocktail bar on a weeknight in the last hour before curfew. The Ukrainian flag is draped over a chandelier above the bar and there are stickers and murals on every wall, lights strung through the trees. Young people spill out onto the street corner.
The dating scene is “really sad”, Marsha says. Men are afraid to build relationships because “they’re traumatised, and scared they could be randomly taken into the army”.
“Women have options; they can leave the country, do whatever they want” – she just came back from a three-month modelling contract in Japan. “But the men don’t. So they have this fear inside.”
She mentions an ex-partner and how he closed himself off to her. They couldn’t plan a future in the shadow of war. “It’s hard to help the person you’re with when he doesn’t know how his life is going to be. And then you lose your connection to them.”
She pauses, and then tells me she had a friend last year who had to join the army. Not someone she was terribly close to, but a fun guy at parties. When he was killed, she found out on Instagram. “Just three months ago,” she says. “His girlfriend – they were married by then, so his wife – she was pregnant, five months.”
Ukraine’s government now sponsors the cost of IVF treatment for civilians, a policy that kicked in last year.
“Right now, we have a catastrophic demographic situation. There’s this understanding that there needs to be something done,” says reproductive specialist Dr Halyna Strelko. A baby, a “new life”, is “the opposite of death, opposite of war”, she says. “It can help people get through this difficult situation.”
When I visit her clinic one morning, the foyer’s full of waiting patients. Mostly it’s the women who convince their husbands to come, Strelko says.
I later find out that Vlada and Anton live a five-minute drive away, and they’ve walked through those clinic doors. Anton was reluctant at first. “His first answer was no,
I don’t want you to have to start this family without me,” says Vlada. “And I said, ‘You decided to join the army, now I ask you to do just this one thing for me.’”
Strelko says: “We have had couples who have produced an embryo, transferred it to the woman and then probably the man has died or disappeared. Probably. But we don’t know for sure.”
Vlada is proud of her and Anton’s choices, and their sacrifices. She’s scathing of those who think differently. She tells me about a high-school teacher she’d once idealised, who had inspired her with tales of protesting during the 2014 Maidan democracy demonstrations.
Up to a million Ukrainians took to the streets to protest against the government’s push for closer ties with Russia instead of Europe; Russia invaded Crimea shortly after. The former teacher, whom Vlada regarded as a mentor, contacted her this year, criticising Anton’s decision to go and fight.
She called it a shame to see the young couple sacrifice their lives. There’s steel in Vlada’s voice as she recounts this; her eyes are blazing.
Last year, she says, was the worst year of her life: “Half of my friends went to the war and the other half left the country.” She has not kept in touch with those who fled, struggling to accept that they chose this way out.
“They don’t want to lose their youth, I can understand this,” she says.
But what about her and Anton, she says, and every other Ukrainian fighting for their way of life?
“Because there are some who are willing to sacrifice their age, their years, their life,” she says. “It’s here you verify the values of your life.”
Later that day, I visit their apartment and sit beside her during a video chat with Anton. Anton is sweet and attentive, cracking jokes through the screen. Vlada is beaming.
Is he scared out there?
“To die is not as scary as to live without doing something that matters,” says Anton.
“That is my real fear.” His wife sits a little taller. Throughout our chat, her eyes haven’t once left his face. She says in a strangled voice that her husband is someone who can actually stand by those words. They both have a dream for after the war, although it’s mainly Anton’s fancy: to do up an old Soviet-model car and road trip around Europe.
“I love that we want to be free,” says Vlada. “It was our dream to travel the world, to see as many countries as possible. But I think we wouldn’t have continued our relationship if he decided to flee the country. I wouldn’t have joined him. “Sometimes you have to adjust to the catastrophe.”
In May, Anton’s unit was hit by a Russian drone while changing positions. The driver of their vehicle was injured and taken back to Kyiv, where he is recovering; Anton was unscathed. He and Vlada hope to reunite in Sumy soon.
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