We woke up at six, but without water, there was no chance of a shower. We set out for a small town near Izyum in the Kharkiv region. The word we used as a kind of morning password was one that holds great meaning for me, and, naturally, it gave me a boost.
As we drove, the landscape slowly transformed: the bushes along the road were turning yellow and red, some stripped bare as if shedding their skin. The ruins, silent and black, seemed to carry the weight of all that had been lost. The road from Lyman to Izyum was a scene of devastation, with few houses left standing and even fewer trees still upright.
In the town just beyond Izyum, where we stopped, people spoke Ukrainian. I overheard a group of workers in a shop—men and women of different ages—discussing fishing. One of the guards, a burly figure, proudly showed off pictures of fish on his phone. It was clear that once his shift ended, he’d grab his rods and head straight to the lake. The simplicity of it felt oddly comforting, a small reminder of life’s persistence amidst so much destruction.
“Fishermen, mushroom gatherers, and hunters—they’re all obsessed,” one cashier remarked.
“They just want to escape home,” said another.
I buy a coffee for eighteen hryvnias and pay.
“When I was a student, I went to Donetsk and Luhansk regions to conduct a social survey, and in the villages there, everyone spoke Ukrainian,” Alex Becker, my comrade from the 2nd International Legion, began. “The cities were Russian-speaking because they had been populated by people brought in from all over the Soviet Union. In my town in Dnipropetrovsk, there were even people from Altai. There were also Germans, Jews, Tatars. Four German families lived in my building alone. When I was little, Crimean Tatars even used to gather for the qurultay. I remember one story they told—that a Crimean Tatar had brought a horse into his third-floor apartment. The horse was too scared to go back down, so they had to butcher it for meat right there in the flat. It’s probably just a bizarre story, though.”
As I drive through Izyum, my thoughts often turn to Volodymyr Vakulenko’s diary. His body was discovered in a mass grave after the Russians withdrew. I recall how frequently he wrote about the local “servants of the Russian world.” I can’t help but wonder where they come from in these otherwise entirely Ukrainian towns and villages. To truly understand this, one trip probably isn’t enough. For some, perhaps even a lifetime wouldn’t provide the clarity needed.
We pass a building where an entire entrance has collapsed after an impact. Just outside the city, I try to capture a photo of the steppe, where the grass has been scorched by the sun, turning it a dry yellow, with grey hills in the distance. But the phone can’t do it justice—the camera struggles to capture the vastness of the space and the depth of the sky. It’s something you have to see for yourself.
