One morning last month, while I was waiting at a bus station on the western edge of the western city of LVIV, I had a conversation with a man in the early 1940s named Mikola Heronian. On the other side of the bus station was a bombing museum. I asked if he knew what happened to that. He said, “I was hit by a Russian drone.” McCula was wearing black and black pants with a hood. He told me he was a soldier. He was wounded last summer, not far from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine, when an explosion of a hand bomb was broken his right shoulder, and a bullet hit him directly below the bone of the right collarbone, another torn across his left shoulder, and a third of a third of sides. He withdrew his phone, Lerini, a series of pictures of his injuries. He said, “I am lucky to be alive.”
McCola lives a few miles south of the old town of LVIV, on the seventh floor of a residential building in the Soviet era, with his wife, the first of which is, and their two children: Artur, 11, loves cooking, and Katraina, at the age of fifteen, is shy and the British speaks useful with almost an American. “I saw a lot of” Dora the Explorer “when I was younger,” she explained. I visited one of the evenings, and we sat in the family’s living room, which doubles with two bunk beds in the corner, while Kateryna and Artur’s Bedroom are multiplied. Kateryna was on the lower bed, her legs extended in front of her and a normal cover version of “” “Eat, pray, love“In her lap Maniki Niko The cat was distinguished from the shelf next to the window, the actual cat, the Maine Kun family, lying next to the Katerra. “Her name is Bonnie,” said Mikola. “Like Bonnie and Claide.”
When Russia launched its large -scale invasion to Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, Hryhoryans soon decided that he was not safe to stay in the apartment. Near the building, on the other side of a small garden, there is a maintenance facility for military vehicles. “We knew that it might be a target,” he said. Certainly, about a month later, the attachment was hit by Russian missiles. By that time, the first, Katraina and Artur went to stay with the mother of the first in a small town twenty -five miles east of Lviv, while Micolas joined a newly formed battalion. Olha and children returned to LVIT a few days after the missile attack. (I thought the first that the Russians would not target the facility again, at least not any time soon) The only lost thing is McCola.
Mykola became a kind of Jack everything during his time in the foreground and near the foreground. He started as a comments, and then served later as snipers, mortars, and hand grenade operator. He spent one day in the position of TM-62 anti-vehicle mines near the Russian border. Recently, it was a machine gun. He remained in contact with his friends who are still fighting. He said that many of them are exhausted. He knew the feeling. During nearly two and a half years before his injury, he was the longest time at home fourteen days. The first, which runs a private school that provides lessons in the English language for children and adults, was buried at work as a distraction from his absence. She said, “I didn’t know when we will see it again.” “That was one of the most difficult parts, only uncertainty.”
When Micolla was far away, Artur began to embrace his role as a young man. (“I have a special recipe for baked potatoes,” tell me.) Children did not return to the personal school until September 2022. They left them autumn and winter, the continuous power outage and the alerts of the air raid draining and at the edge. They once spent seven hours in a shelter for bombs, and they carried many nights without sleep on the floor floor in their apartment. The first of which had met both with a psychiatrist at school, but after a few visits, Artur did not feel the need to return.
McCola arrived in his pocket and pulled the tobacco stick “a good heat.” He went out to the balcony to take some visits. When he came back, I noticed that he was rubbing his right arm. He worked with a physical therapist in the months after his injury. His deadline was two weeks ago. He was now waiting to undergo a series of medical examinations that would determine whether he was appropriate to return to service. He said, “I don’t think they will send me.” However, with the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces, the competing, Olha was not sure. She said, “I don’t want to raise my hopes.” She also did not want to start relying on the war that ended any time soon, despite President Donald Trump’s promise to the opposite. “Everything he says is nonsense,” she said. “It is only for the offer.” Mikola was more generous in his evaluation of Trump. “He was only president for a few weeks,” he said. “We have to wait and see.” Trump’s reputable call with Vladimir Putin was still three days away, saying something about the diplomatic stampede that followed and still play.
McCola focused on recovering and enjoying his time at home. He said, “Let’s take a break and eat.” “Do you like sushi?” When sitting around the kitchen table, we got to the subject of the Ukrainian language. I said I was taking individual lessons twice a week, and I was shaking some simple phrases. “I am talking a little Spanish and Polish,” Katrina said. “I am taking French at school.” Mikola and the first of them, who grew up in the Soviet Union, have learned when they were children. But they had no interest in teaching him to Kateryna or Artur. Not that either of them wants to learn it. “After all that happened, Katrina said,” I cannot even stop hearing Russian. “
The names of the months of the year in the Ukrainian language are a delightful descriptive. April is Kviten, which is derived from the word root for “Venus”. August is Serbin, who rooted, SerpentIt means “sickle”. November is Lystopad, craft translation is “paper fall”. And the word February, Lylement, means “fierce”, which tells you everything you need to know about the weather in Ukraine at this time of the year. Mikola told me on Saturday, a few days after his first visit and his family, when I went back to walking around their neighborhood: “The winter used to be more cold.”
We headed north along a paved path, previous rows of gray residential blocs and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with a golden dome. A young woman walked by pushing a vehicle, causing a scatter of crows. The first school was in the same neighborhood, on the ground floor of another residential building. While Mikola was in war, Artur was sometimes cooked for his mother and took him at work. “Children have helped a lot,” said Mikola. “I know it wasn’t an easy time for them.”
When we continued to walk, I put the invitation between Trump and Putin. On the previous day, I spent several hours, with the help of an immediate translator, and conducted interviews with amputee at the rehabilitation center where Mikola exchanged. Many of them told me that they felt treason due to Trump’s apparent readiness to negotiate the end of the war on Putin’s conditions and the President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zellinsky, retreated to a supportive role. A soldier said, “Trump does not care about Ukraine or the Ukrainian people.” “It seems as if we live in the nineteenth century” – the time when the great forces were divided into the world as they saw appropriate.
Mikola understood why some of his colleagues from the soldiers may ask, after three years of war, themselves, what were we fighting for if we could not restore our borders? But he said that they had a lot to be proud of, and that he had long stopped trying to predict a date and how the war would end. He said: “If you do not have any expectations, you will not be disappointed.” This does not mean that he was not worried. It was sure that if the peace agreement did not include sufficient security guarantees for Ukraine, Putin will eventually try to seize the rest of the country. He said, “Russia will re -assemble its ranks and attack them again.”
We crossed a street and stopped coffee. On our way back to the Mikola apartment, we passed a two -story children’s playing center. The interior was trampoline, foam drilling, giant slices, and endless objects to climb. “I loved Katina and Artur coming here when they were younger,” said Mikola. “They are very old so far.”
Several weeks after the beginning of the invasion, Yivhin Klopotenko, the head of the most famous chef in Ukraine, opened a restaurant emerging in the ancient Lviv town, in an empty cafe for a seventeenth century monastery. He named the Inshi, Ukrainian restaurant for “others”, and began to provide free meals for the two displaced people who resorted to LVIV or were passing through their way to countries such as Poland, Germany and Spain. He is famous for the creative fluctuations on the classic Ukrainian dishes – Borscht with plum jam and smoked sour cream, potato pies with catfish and fermented lemon – since then became one of the modern restaurants in the city. The place where Artur, who became something of Klopotinko fans, wanted to go on his ninth birthday, in September 2022. Mcola returned on vacation, and so the entire family went together. Artur was pleased, but Katrina was jealous. In July, she had to celebrate her thirteenth birthday without her father.
Last Sunday, I met the Herroerene for dinner in Inschi. Previously, Russia launched two hundred and sixty -seven drones in Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian officials have said it was the largest unmanned unmanned attack so far. But Fif was quiet – the war felt remarkably far. “War is just our reality now,” said the first. “It is sad, but in many ways we are used to that.”
Unless they attack it, at least not yet, he is a barrage from the news coming from Washington. Since I saw the last time Mcola, Trump blamed Ukraine for the start of the war and called Zelinski a dictator. Katerrea tightened her and derived her grip when she mentioned this. “He is a fool,” she said, referring to Trump.
The first said that she felt more hope last year at this time. She said, “It seems as if now we have no control of what is happening.” “It is frightening. I don’t see how it will end.”
Artur was playing a video game on his phone. I felt tired of having to think about war. Ukraine was almost fighting Russia throughout his life. (In March of 2014, when Putin included the Crimea, he was only seven months old). The background on his phone was a picture of Lockheed Martin SR-72. “Six times can fly the speed of sound,” he said.
After dinner, we traveled to a military cemetery not far from the restaurant to attend the protest. There were hundreds of people, as they were assembled in thick coats, winter hats and red glass lanterns at the palm of their hand. The next day was the third anniversary of the beginning of the war. A row of lights shone from the back of the cemetery, throwing silhouette from crosses and flags that stood on top of the graves. A military division played the Ukrainian national anthem, and tens of priests took alternating on prayers. A woman gave her husband a speech. “This is a war, first and foremost, not for the sake of land,” she said with her voice shaking. “It is a confrontation between two ways of existence: the Ukrainian way of freedom, democracy, the Russian way of dictatorship and slavery.” Katina bowed her head and reached her mother’s hand.
Among the hundreds of soldiers buried in the cemetery are three Mikola friends. When the protest ended, we went to visit their graves. McCola is appointed lantern next to each one. In the last grave, we met the widow of the man who was buried there. Mikola presented himself and said that he fought with her husband in the name of Oblast. His name was Vasil Stepanuch. He died in Zaporizhzia on July 12, 2023, at the age of fifty. He was a teacher of history before the war. In addition to his wife, Halina, he survived by two children. “I can’t understand it,” Halina said. “I was ready for anything that happens, but not that.”
“Is a history teacher born for war?” He asked Mikola. “Or Era? He was working on that Vora was electric.” He was referring to his other friends who were buried there.
Halina said: “They could have done a lot of good things.”
The first, Katraina and Artur listened quietly while Halina and Mikola spoke. On the way back to the car, three of them barely said a word. ♦
