A surreal summer in Ukraine
I’ve visited Ukraine twice during the war. This June is different from last September. The heat of June brings up the worst of fears.
The overlap of the counteroffensive, the risk of nuclear disaster on ZAES, the blown up Kakhovka Dam, and the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London — juxtaposed against the scent of linden trees and overheated asphalt outside my home.
The air raid sirens do not bother me, I sleep right through. If the ZAES blows up, I do worry about being locked up at home, — they say you should not leave the house, but rather stay in underground shelters.
I don’t know what exactly I’d do with my potassium iodide — it only lasts 6–8 hours to protect the thyroid glans from absorbing radioactive iodine. And then what?
I worry about some 37 million people getting exposed to radiation. Some on Twitter would call me a coward, because who am I kidding? I worry about very specific people — it’s too hard to comprehend the figure of 37 million at once.
It’s even harder to imagine being in the shoes of those living in Energodar or Zaporizhia — at the doorstep of the nuclear power plant mined by the Russians.
Indeed, whom am I kidding? Lviv is safe, though it’d be hard to convince any of my Aussie friends to travel here with me. The promise of good coffee and only very rare missile strikes doesn’t do the trick.
I doubt I understand myself — why did I choose to come home? My reference point — of safe and boring Aussie Adelaide — makes the risk calculus irrational. I rate the risk of nuclear disaster at higher than 20% — my estimate from last September. Not that I know much about risks when they are in real life, not in spreadsheets.
Perhaps I’m seeking to inject reality into the sleepy comfort that’s so easy to fall into when abroad. In Transcarpathia, I talk to a man from Bakhmut, — he lost his house and had two surgeries. We chat in the kitchen — he bought wild strawberries, and asks my mum how to wash them.
In a Transcarpathian resort, formerly a castle of Shenborns, kids from Ukraine’s East attend a summer camp. They walk in pairs among the greenery of old terraces that used to belong to Austro-Hungarian aristocrats. I overhear a familiar talk of missile strikes, and counter-strikes. No need to open my Twitter feed this time. I’d rather learn the news the old-school way — by hear-say.
Unlike last year, Lviv is hardly full of foreign journalists. I do not hear much English on the streets. The soldiers are rather few as well, — they must be on the front lines. I read more stories in Ukrainian — about how it feels to lose a loved one, or wait for one’s husband from the front.
I feel lucky not to have a brother or a husband. Or do I?
Perhaps I’m feeling guilty. Between me and the war, there are at least two degrees of separation. Tonight, somebody from our apartment block died in combat. They write about these things on notice boards.
Last autumn, my mum was at a military funeral. Her classmate’s son died in combat. I looked at photos realising that Viber has no proper bandwidth to convey that degree of pain.
In Lviv, the June heat has always made me want to escape the city. My dad shows me photos from the island of Dzharylhach in Kherson region— we used to go to nearby Lazurne for summer vacations. My dad used to take mud treatments from Dzharylhach for his knee problems.
The Russians occupied the area around Lazurne and Dzharylhach, and ruined the island’s unique ecosystem. Not that anything compares to the Kakhovka Dam disaster.
My mum is more keen than before to tell me stories of great-grandparents who were detained in Soviet prisons for decades. One could be called an “enemy of state” for anything back then — just like in modern Russia.
The crime — in my great-grandparents’ case — was that a stranger opened fire at their daughter’s wedding. The provocateur (according to the family’s version — an undercover KGB officer) shot the chief of the collective farm who was among the wedding guests. The hosts, and every single guest were imprisoned and sent to the Gulag.
After his parents’ detainment, my granddad narrowly escaped being put in an orphanage. When soldiers came to arrest his parents, he simply ran away to relatives in a neighbouring village.
In a recent Ukrainska Pravda blog, I read a story, by an 18yo soldier, who went through the Ukrainian orphanage system. His descriptions spare the reader of too much detail, yet my heart aches at what he has endured. He argues the system of state-run orphanages must be overhauled, and replaced with foster care. I recall a similar argument from a recent conversation with a Sydney-based Ukrainian businessman who runs a charity to do just that.
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