After Six Months Of War, The Colours Of Life Are Coming Back To My Ukraine

Kyiv has come back to life. When I left it urgentlywith my two children and a couple of suitcases in March, at the very beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the city looked dark: it seemed to have lost the colours of life, exhausted and terrified to death. At that time, the Russian army was seizing Ukrainian towns one by one, shooting at houses and civilians with tanks and artillery, torturing men and raping women. What terrible things were happening in the territories they seized came to light much later, when the Ukrainian armed forces were able to repel the invasion in the north of the country.

Crowds of people now walk the streets of Kyiv like nothing has happened. Coffee shops and barbershops are open, locals gather in bars and parks. The few things that remind you of the invasion in Kyiv are roadblocks and iron 'hedgehogs' on the streets, monuments covered with sandbags, houses destroyed by Russian missiles, and the sudden sound of sirens that can catch you in line for a coffee-to-go. Also, every time you look at the citizens, you notice the stamp of incredible stress on their faces. Every adult experiencing this war has new wrinkles.

After six months of the war, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is frozen in an interesting phase: the aggressor still maintains control over parts of the invaded territories in the south and east of the country, but no longer tries to conquer new ones. Instead, the Russian army terrorises civilians from the sky: every day rockets, air bombs, and Grad missiles fly into residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Slovyansk. Every day thousands of people flee to bomb shelters to survive - and not everyone survives. And the likelihood of a new Russian offensive against Kyiv is still on the table.

Life goes on, only now, as Ukrainians walk down the street, they imagine that at any moment a rocket could come from the sky and land on their heads - as it did on a four-year-old girl in the centre of Vinnytsia in July and on a mother with daughter at the train station in Kramatorsk in April.

In six months, millions of women with children have left Ukraine. Women are allowed to leave the country, and men of conscription age are not. The exodus of families can be seen in the way the faces of urban neighbourhoods have changed: there are noticeably more single men on the streets and far fewer children. Those women who stayed or returned are now forced to think about bomb shelters in schools and kindergartens, and are less likely to go out with their kids to crowded places. After all, over these six months it has become clear that Russia is not just shelling military targets: according to figures released by Ukrainian officials, most of the enemy's shelling is directed at civilian infrastructure. For instance, more than two thousand schools have been hit by rocket and artillery strikes.

At the same time, millions of Ukrainian women were forced to start a new life in Europe. For most of them it is an impossible burden: many have lost their jobs, their livelihood, and must somehow feed their children and relatives. Many faced severe language and cultural barriers in countries they had never been to before. Managers with high technical skills went to work as waitresses in restaurants, teachers and scientists became couriers and janitors in order to survive. Most of them are sure that soon they will return home to their native country, to their normal life. But this requires victory, and victory will be incredibly hard to come by. In the meantime, as Ukrainians like to say today, Ukraine stands and keeps going.

Katerina Sergatskova is editor-in-chief at Zaborona.com and co-founder of 2402 Fund which helps journalists in Ukraine