There were children and families walking the cobbled streets. Young Ukrainians sipping cheap espressos and hammering at laptop keyboards. Couples lounging on chairs, drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes. The soothing notes of an accordion danced atop the high-summer air, and misting machines fixed above bars and restaurants took the sting out of the heat. It was a scene plucked from any European city in the summer of 2024, and I could easily have been sat in London or Budapest, Vilnius or Bratislava. But then the air raid sirens sounded. 

I panicked. I’d only been in Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, for a few hours. Though I knew what to expect, when it happened, I lost all sense of reality. Oddly, though, no one else was panicking. “What do we do?” I asked a young girl sitting at the table next to mine. Her reaction was delayed as she finished doing something on her phone, and as she turned to face me, her expression took on a patronising shade. “Nothing,” she said with a smile. “It’s your first time here, yes?”

I was in Ukraine to see a journalist friend in Kyiv, though she wasn’t yet back in the country. I’d already booked my tickets long before and thought it a waste not to go. I would meet with some of her friends instead. It was a trip only meant to last a week. It lasted a month.

Against expectations, I found a country where people were living life to its fullest in spite of, or perhaps because of, a war that had been forced on them. A people who sang and danced in the streets. A people who knew that each night might be their last. 

Much has happened in Ukraine since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022. More than 1,000 days have passed and tens of thousands of lives have been lost. The next few months will likely witness even more bloodshed as Russian President Vladimir Putin pushes to advance the frontline before US President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated in January 2025, and potentially pursues a ceasefire. The situation is more uncertain now than ever, and Ukraine stands at a crucial crossroads. Whatever happens in the coming months will shape the country for years to come.  

Lviv

In Lviv, the scars of war weren’t obvious — at least not as obvious as in the East. A beautiful city, its leafy thoroughfares were lined with Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture, sometimes accompanied by more exotic styles like the Sphinxes on Zelena Street. 

Walking its wide avenues was like walking through a lost European kingdom. On every corner, someone sang or played an instrument, young girls danced to old Ukrainian songs as young boys coyly watched, people stayed out to the very limits of the curfew. It was easy to forget that it was a city in wartime. 

But death’s call was always in the background. Each morning, trumpets bellowed from below the room I was renting. Melancholic notes — sad in nature, military in tone. The first time I heard them I asked my host what all the noise was about. “Go and see for yourself,” she said.

On the street, a solitary coffin was being marched by men in military fatigues away from the ancient Church of the Most Holy Apostles Peter and Paul towards a car draped in military insignia. Behind them stood three women. The eldest, her face tightly wrapped in an old scarf, dropped to the floor as she sobbed, and the younger woman held her as though the ground may swallow her up. Next to them stood a little girl, only about five years old, wearing a pink t-shirt emblazoned with a cat. She stood quite still and silent, staring at the ground past her untied laces. 

There were similar funeral services every day in Lviv. Some pulled thousands onto the streets, grand displays of public support and military pomp. Men and women’s sprightly faces always lay inside frames on coffins — some agonisingly young.

“They’ll end up lowering the conscription age again soon,” a local barista told me one morning after a service had finished. Maksym* was 24 and had moved to Lviv only just before the war to study. He was a “mature” undergraduate student, and though this title exempted him from being drafted, he wasn’t sure things would stay the same for long. 

In April, Ukraine lowered its conscription age from 27 to 25. Officials in US President Joe Biden’s administration recently admitted to pressuring Kyiv to further lower the age to as young as 18. 

“Next year, I think I will go for a long holiday somewhere,” Maksym told me, “Maybe I will go to the doctor and try and get myself a note.” It’s no wonder he wanted a way out, for everyone knows what awaits them in the event of a call-up. High above Lviv stands the National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes — a reminder of what can happen when imperial-minded neighbours win.

It is here in the 20th century that Ukrainian political prisoners were held by the Soviets, the Nazis, and then the Soviets again. Atrocities took place relentlessly, and the arbitrariness of life was laid out in cruel detail on the many information boards that lined its walls. One recalled how prisoners were only allowed to bathe once every eight months, but that those who succumbed to illness through uncleanliness were executed.

It was deathly silent when I arrived. Apart from a few volunteers, I was the only one inside. “It’s very sad, our history,” said Christina*, a volunteer. She spoke perfect English and was angry with the West, which I at that moment embodied. “There’s no way you didn’t know what was coming with all your intelligence services,” she said. 

Her son had fought on the frontline for two years as a soldier but had moved to help develop Ukraine’s world-beating drones. “I worry about him everyday. But he knows how important it is to fight. He was there on Maidan Square in 2014,” she said. “He knows what is at stake.”

I had been in Lviv for two weeks, and it was time for me to go. I arrived at the central train station to a medley of travellers, almost all of them weighed down by large plastic carrier bags overflowing with food. Inside, police were breaking up a fight between some blood-stained Romani people. Children ran around their mothers. There were few adult men in sight.

Smoking my last cigarette before the 7-hour journey on the fast train, a soldier approached me with an open hand. I offered him a cigarette and he told me he was on leave from the frontline to attend his mother’s funeral. I gave my condolences. “It is life, my brother,” he said. “Anyway, shall we go and find some whores?” It was 4pm. 

Kyiv

With five minutes to spare before curfew, I found my apartment in central Kyiv. It overlooked the Soviet-era People’s Friendship Arch, renamed the “Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People” in 2022, in the same year losing its statue of a Russian and Ukrainian worker standing side-by-side. “Why would we want that shit in our city?” a local later told me when I asked about its disappearance. For some, the vision of brotherhood that had united these two nations was an illusion all along.

Blackouts are part of normal life in Ukraine, and when I arrived, everything was dark. November 2024 saw some of the most intense power outages of the war yet, and an estimated 200 missiles were fired at energy grids across the country on November 28 alone, plunging one million Kyvians into darkness. Still more will brave the harsh winter nights without heating, some regions plunging as low as -21C.

Naturally, as the capital, parts of Kyiv are extremely resilient. “They say this area is the most heavily protected from everything,” Valeriia Voschevska told me as we walked through a part of the city where many embassies and, oddly enough, hipster bars are located. “You have to protect the foreigners, right?” 

I met Val and her work colleagues at a bar that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Berlin. They are part of a young generation thrown into a field they had little to no ties with before 2022. Now, they find themselves at the forefront of the information war against Russia. 

United24Media, the outlet they work for, is part of an initiative set up by Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky that accepts donations from around the world to help the country fight without picking up arms. They clearly need the money, for when I met them, they had arrived not from their nearby office but a faraway coffee shop with working electricity and WiFi. “Power cuts,” Val said with a roll of her eyes. 

Throughout the night, I was struck by the extent to which external forces had changed the paths they had envisaged for themselves. Dreams of rich creative careers had been replaced by the urgent need to fight the enemy online. It was hard to know what to say, even harder to imagine how generations of young Ukrainians will adapt to life after the war. Many will never forget what has happened. None that I spoke to can forgive. 

There is an understandable absence of foreigners in Kyiv. Tourism is one of the many sectors that has taken a battering since the war, and tax revenues have plunged by 30 per cent. Yet, each day I walked down the steep Andriivs’kyi Descent, which passes the baroque St Andrew’s Church, the former Romanov’s residence, vendors and hawkers pushed their tourist tat. Their business focused on the influx of foreign workers and domestic tourists, and Ludmila*, a 60-something-year-old, spotted me from a mile off. 

She worked as a tout for a nearby restaurant and was extremely good at her job, luring in almost everyone who passed with her sweet smile and wide eyes. “I am an aggressive marketer,” she told me with a wink. It was only on our fourth meeting, as I was on my way to a military fundraiser, that she told me about her son. 

“Before the war, he looked after me. Now, I must work here to make myself enough money to live,” she said. She raised her earth-blackened nails. “I don’t need much as I grow all my own food. But I take a marshrutka here every week from my village.” 

Where was her son now? Abroad? “No, no,” she cast a downwards glance. “He… died on the frontline. My Danylo*. He was a good boy.” It was the only time I saw her hopeful exterior crack, and just as soon as it did, her attention pivoted to some potential customers across the street. 

The military fundraiser was perhaps one of the most unique I had heard of, and I wasn’t entirely convinced when I was first told. A rave? In a war zone? The venue was a semi-decrepit former Soviet brewery in a backwater part of Podil district, one of Kyiv’s oldest neighbourhoods. A queue of scantily-clad young people snaked from the entrance, some with heavy chains slung across their bodies. None looked ready to take up arms. 

Each weekend the hosts, K41 Community Fund, throw parties for young Ukrainians to come and let off steam, but also to fight against Russia. All proceeds at the pay-as-you-can event go to various battalions in the Ukrainian military and have procured drones, monitors, and tablets for soldiers to use on the frontlines. “You could say we are beating Russia with bass,” the doorman told me. To date, it has raised more than half a million pounds. Nowhere else in history has electronic music partnered up with the war machine in such a way. 

The music thumped as I navigated the dimly lit corridors, and I could already hear a high-pitched ringing inside my ears. Waiting at the bar, I struck up a conversation with a group of young Ukrainians. “Coming here, I feel like I can do something when ordinarily I feel hopeless,” one young woman told me. “The fact that I can dance to some of the world’s best DJs is just an extra.” Another, a 22-year-old man, declared Trump Ukraine’s saviour. “He is the only person in the world that can stop this war,” he said. When I asked him what he thought about Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin, he shrugged and danced away into the distance. 

I woke up the day after and felt as though a bomb had gone off in my head. I avoided eye contact with everyone on the way to Kyiv Central Station for my train to Odesa, and when a military conscription officer asked for my passport, my shaking hands dropped it at his feet. He stared at me and picked it up. In the distance, some men were being taken into a large black van. “Sorry, Mr Joel,” he said after seeing the coat of arms on my British passport.

Odesa

Odesa is aptly known as the Pearl by the Sea. It is filled with classical buildings of colours so bright you might think impossible to forge into brick; cluttered with history, much of it rooted in Catherine the Great’s expansion of the Russian Empire in the late 18th century. 

It hasn’t lost the significance it held back then, and is today one of Ukraine’s most strategically important cities, acting as a departure point for goods and a vital lifeline to the outside world. Russia wanted to choke this lifeline. Now, it is hellbent on destroying it. Since 2022, more than 100 civilians have been killed in strikes on the city, and just days after I left, missiles hit civilian infrastructure near the centre, killing three people. 

All along Odesa’s Black Sea, promenade signs warned me not to take photographs. Ships were docked stocking up on goods, and massively complex structures encased giant vats of oil and gas. Above them all stood a lone, bombed-out building, the Hotel Odesa, slowly crumbling into the sea.

For a moment in 2023, and despite the dangers and constant air raid sirens — they were the most intense anywhere I had been — Odesa became a top choice for Ukrainian holidaymakers. News stories showed men and women lounging on beaches, while others sat outside bars sipping cocktails and enjoying the sea air on Derybasivka Street.

But walking along Derybasivka in June was like walking through a British seaside town in winter. Conscription squads are widespread in Ukraine but especially in Odesa. Few eligible men of fighting age go outside anymore, and an increase in pedestrian footfall coincided with an increase in military officers prowling the streets. “My brother doesn’t go out now,” Berislav* told me as we watched Switzerland trounce Hungary in the Euro 2024 group stages at a bar. “If he wants something from the shop, he’ll call a taxi and be as quick as he can: in and out, that’s his motto.”

I wasn’t surprised by Berislav’s story as much as I was by his retelling it in the Russian language. Everywhere I had been in Ukraine, people refused to speak Russian. “I used to, but never again,” one woman told me in Lviv. But almost everyone I encountered in Odesa used it as their first language. Why? “It is complicated,” Berislav admitted. “Yes, I can speak Ukrainian, but not as well as Russian. Why should I stutter and pause and sound like a stupid person when I can be fluent?” Ironically, his English was almost perfect. 

Chernivtsi

The week before I arrived in Chernivtsi, a waiter in Kyiv had told me how beautiful it was. Nestled in a corner near the Romanian border, he said I must visit. I suggested he come with me.“I’d love to, but conscription officers wait at the station. Maybe we can swap passports for the day and I can visit alone?” 

Though Chernivtsi has been spared the mayhem of the war, even here, almost 500 miles from the frontline, it can still be felt. Countless Ukrainians passed through the city to enter Romania in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, and according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 100,000 domestic refugees have permanently settled in the district, or Oblast. 

It is a sleepy, backwater city, a place that up until 1940 belonged to Romania, alluded to by the old but bright Romanian language signs on many buildings and the Latin script sometimes even scribbled in cafe and restaurant menus.

Despite the air raid sirens, things were calm. People enjoyed walking the city’s streets and admiring its ornate buildings, and buses regularly spewed out tourists visiting the Austro-Hungarian Empire-era residence of the Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Things here seemed a world away from Odesa, Kyiv, and even Lviv. But there was a different kind of war going on. 

“You know what they’re doing to our heritage, don’t you?” Adrian*, a man in his 70s who had lived all his life in Chernivtsi, asked me at the bar while Ukraine played Slovakia on a TV in the background. “They’re stealing it, destroying it bit by bit.” I nodded along and thought I knew what he was talking about, but then he said something about the Romanian language.

Ukraine is home to an estimated 400,000 Romanian speakers, most of whom live in Chernivtsi Oblast. But in 2017 members of minority languages were stripped of their right to continue learning their ancestral tongue past primary-school level in public institutions.  

Then, in August of this year, the management of Chernivtsi’s city cemetery cut the locks and sealed the burial chamber of the Bukovina Metropolitans, essentially banning the right to worship in Ukraine’s first Romanian-speaking parish. “Not only are we being persecuted by our neighbour, now we’re being targeted by our own people,” sighed Adrian. 

He finished his beer and was oblivious to the raucous cheers on Ukraine’s 80th minute winner. On the sound of the final whistle, the bar lit up, its patrons becoming one with the chant: “Slava Ukraini, Heroiam slava!”, “Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes!” Just what Ukraine they were talking about I wasn’t sure.

Chernivtsi bus station lay in a run-down part of town. The former Soviet Union’s presence was stronger here. Brutalist architecture and sharp lines dominated streets that apparently hadn’t undergone renovation since its fall. 

My bus was going to Suceava, a Romanian town a stone’s throwaway from the border which, since 2022, has seen its Ukrainian population balloon. At the station, women and children wandered around. Some packed into rusting marshrutkas, others sold their wares to onward passengers. 

A young boy and girl stood outside the doors of the bus, holding each other tightly. Tears streamed down their faces and when it was time to go, they kissed in a way as if it was their last. The boy, now on the bus with his Romanian passport resting in his lap, was saying goodbye to his Ukrainian girlfriend. “I don’t know when I’ll see her next, if I’ll see her next,” he said to me. He stared out of the window for the remainder of the journey as the rolling Ukrainian countryside sprawled out into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about leaving. A month in normal life is deceptively short. But in a country on the edge, it felt like a lifetime. I wondered about the futures of the people I had met, where they might go next, what they might do. Life in a war zone changes fast, and some of the places I had seen just weeks before like Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital are now gone. I promised people I’d come back to see them. But maybe they will be gone soon, too. In a place governed by external forces, life takes on a certain pessimism.

The words of a lawyer I had met in Kyiv echoed in my mind as we approached the Romanian border. “Ukraine is plagued by an illness that is sometimes invisible. Even after this war, I fear its symptoms will continue. But we are hard people, used to strife. And whatever happens, whenever it happens, we’ll always come out standing.” And though the tide is against Ukraine, I believed him. 

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[*] Names have been changed to protect identities.