Member-only story

Ukraine, January 1: Drones instead of fireworks

Celebrations of some with the suffering of others in the background

Anton Kutselyk
EVROPA
3 min readJan 1, 2025

--

I wake up at 7 am from a hearable drone explosion. It’s becoming a new new year’s tradition — droneworks instead of fireworks. But they don’t paint the sky in a colourful sequence of bursts. They are loud and terrifying, they blow up and leave traces of audio terror in my ears.

When a fear of dying wakes my body up, I find it hard to persuade my body to go back to sleep, especially if the air raid alert is not over. What if it comes close and explodes here? What if it busts out my window and acupunctures my body with shards of glass? A deadly massage. But it’s more than that — my body and mind are intolerant to ignorance. We just can’t ignore when something is fucked up, and so we react. After three years of war, I, of course, can’t react to every stimulus. I have a pyramid of threats in my mind and a new learned intuition, but I don’t think it has been seriously tested yet, and I hope it will never will.

My body and I refuse to sleep — in solidarity — and I go to a living room to sit on a couch. It’s a wonderful morning. The clouds look like pink cotton candy. The sound of the ambulance signals the news of another damage caused, another number to to add to the toll of war.

--

--

EVROPA
EVROPA

Published in EVROPA

A Medium publication about everything European

Anton Kutselyk
Anton Kutselyk

Written by Anton Kutselyk

I live in Kyiv and write about local culture, life, war and signs of inevitable peace.

Responses (3)