September 6th, 2025: On Shevchenko Boulevard, plums are being sold by old women clad in anoraks and scarves in spite of the September sun. Every time I come to Kyiv, I can sense the mood of the nation through the military posters. Female soldiers are more prominent this time and there are images of soldiers playing wheelchair basketball in an attempt to show war injuries in a positive light and reflect a peaceful future. At the Wall of Remembrance, bells are ringing out and there is something celestial in the air. Sunflowers are tied to the lamp posts and trees, their golden fringes bowed. A man on a step ladder is replacing a bleached photograph of a dead soldier with a fresh one. A teenager is sitting on a bench wiping away his glistening tears. One thing to clarify is that I’m here not only to witness the war but to feel it and listen to people’s thoughts on peace.
A mangled combine harvester has been added to the display of military vehicles in front of St Michael’s Monastery. It showcases Russia’s tactic of targeting civilians in order to coerce Ukraine into accepting their peace conditions. I head to Veterano Pizza, which was established by a veteran of the Donbas war. I sit down at a table with bullets under its glass veneer and am next to a photograph of a priest eating with twelve war-grizzled soldiers in a mock-up of the Last Supper. It is a salient reminder that the war is violently continuing elsewhere.
September 7th: Arriving in Odesa off the overnight train, I’m immediately beguiled by the boulevards, arched gates and leafy courtyards, not to mention the Potemkin Stairs looking out to the harbour cranes. It’s only when I head down steep steps towards Langeron Beach that I see the first destroyed building. It’s an example of Stalinist architecture, and the decorative cladding and white pilasters have been blown off to reveal plain brick. It is as if the war is tearing down the city’s past and the latter-day dictator, Putin, is destroying the influence of the old.
At my hotel, the receptionist tells me she was kept awake most of the night by a Russian bombardment of rockets and Shaheds. Odesa is resilient, however, and the streets are seductively alive. I bump into a Turkish man, Mehmet, and join him for Turkish tea in an outdoor restaurant. He works in construction and emigrated from Istanbul to Mariupol twenty years ago but left as soon as the Russians invaded in February 2022. His Ukrainian wife refused to abandon the flower shop she owns and still lives in Mariupol with their children.
‘The war split up millions of families,’ says Mehmet ruefully. ‘I think the war will go on for one more year. When I was in Mariupol I saw with my own eyes how strong the Russian army was. And the Russians want to fight for their country more. There’s no real nationalism in Ukraine. The problem is there are so many different ethnicities.’
‘Summertime Sadness’ is blaring out of a café as I stroll back to my hotel.
September 8th: One of the many issues with travelling in this country is that some street names deemed too Russian have been replaced with Ukrainian ones that Google Maps haven’t yet updated. Fortunately, I manage to reach my minibus departure point and am ferried through the Steppes past the cities of Mykolaiv and Kryvyi Rih. The only soldier on the minibus is a woman of my age. We pass fields of stooped sunflowers, their heads lowered like supplicants, and endless fields of brown earth covered in blanched stubble.
I arrive in Dnipro and my translator, Alexei Stoyanovsky, drives me to Zaporizhia to meet the staff of News Agency South, formerly based in the now-occupied Melitopol. They specialise in bringing news from the Russian-occupied territories. Back in February 2022, the Russians tried to persuade News Agency South director, Svitlana, to write for them, but she refused.
‘Their eyes went huge when I told them my husband fights for Ukraine,’ she recollects. ‘I knew I had to get out of Melitopol before they arrested me, so the next day I dressed up as a nurse, borrowed my sister’s foreign passport and escaped in an ambulance.’ Her colleague Maria also managed to flee. She was only seventeen and told the Donetsk border checkpoint officers she was going to study in Warsaw. ‘You shouldn’t be studying in the West,’ the officers told her. ‘Haven’t you heard there are three genders there?’ Fortunately, they let her through.
Another journalist, Oleksandr, reveals how the Russians found out that his ninety-six-year-old grandfather was a World War II Red Army soldier and kept interviewing him for their Victory Day propaganda. They overworked him so much he died two weeks later.
Svitlana and her team find it difficult to communicate with the occupied regions because of the need for online security codes, but manage to relay vital information. For instance, on September 1st the Russians stopped teaching Ukrainian in schools and parents who complained are now placed under extra surveillance. Svitlana is optimistic that the occupied territories will eventually return to Ukraine, no matter what is agreed in an initial peace deal.
During the night, lightning forks and flickers. I wake up to what sounds like a giant prison door slamming in the sky and I know instantly it isn’t thunder.
September 9th: In the morning, Alexei tells me that several houses were struck by Shaheds overnight, with one person injured. He drives me to Myrove where I hear from Iryna, Victoria and Maryna about the situation since my last visit in April. The internet in the nearby village of Vyschetarasivka keeps being cut by Russian agents. Over sixty houses were damaged on the seventh with one man killed. ‘The only way to gain peace,’ insists Iryna, ‘is through having European forces on our territory.’
We head to Olena’s house, where aid is sitting out in the yard under a tarpaulin. Bunches of green grapes tinged with pink hang down from an overhead trellis. Olena is a swarthy ball of energy, her young grandson perched on her shoulder, and she’s ready to help the soldiers 24/7. She has been a volunteer since 2014, driving out to the most battle-scarred regions, but terms herself modestly as ‘the wife of a military man’. She stresses that she’ll take risks delivering aid herself rather than endanger the soldiers. ‘Safety for the boys first,’ is her motto.
While I don’t come to Ukraine to gather information on war crimes, shocking accounts keep emerging. Olena tells me the story about her student daughter, Olga, who was staying at her friend Dasha’s home in a village in the Prymorsk area when the Russians invaded. Over the next weeks, Russian soldiers stole every item of food from their house, even the dregs of a jar of honey. Dasha’s mother already knew that Russian soldiers were looking to rape young women so she rubbed ashes into Olga and Dasha’s faces, cut their hair and made them wear her grandfather’s glasses so that they looked as unattractive as possible. Whenever the Russians banged on the door, she told Dasha to get into a wheelchair. She did everything she could to protect the two girls.
One afternoon, Dasha’s parents left the village to collect some wood. Olga and Dasha were alone in the summer kitchen when four Russian soldiers barged in. They raped Dasha and shot her in the head, her blood splattering over Olga. At that point Olga fainted, which must have saved her life, as she later woke up to Dasha’s mother cradling Dasha’s head, weeping, crying and screaming.
‘Olga had never heard such screams before,’ Olena recalls, trying to stem her own tears. ‘She couldn’t even imagine a wounded animal making such sounds.’
Olena lights a steadying cigarette before recalling the nightmare she and her husband underwent to rescue Olga. They paid a driver to retrieve her from the occupied area only to be cheated out of their money. Olga was eventually taken on a nine-hour drive from Melitopol through countless checkpoints. She was extremely lucky as a Russian soldier checked her phone, finding an SMS that had just arrived from a friend criticising Russia, and allowed her to wipe it before letting her cross into Ukraine.
When I ask Olena about peace, she says, ‘I don’t want a frozen conflict. In reality we gave up Crimea and the Russians used it for a further offensive. More land will just be used to attack us. As for Trump, he’s only interested in himself, and the war is too big to stop quickly.’
September 10th: The war feels closer than ever. In Vyvodove, we can hear explosions from the direction of the Kakhovka reservoir. The school principal, Iryna, is disappointed that her underground shelter can’t be opened for classes because of drones on the road. She explains that after an attack, children either retreat into themselves or are hyperactive.
‘I would give up all the riches in the world,’ she says, ‘to just comfort the children in person.’
In Zorya I meet an ex-soldier, Gregory. He is a singer/songwriter who used to sing in Russian until the war sullied the language for him. He wears dark glasses, is in his late forties and walks with a crutch. He was mobilised on October 23rd, 2023 and sent to the Avdiivka area to evacuate wounded soldiers. ‘In the training camp, we were taught three priorities on our missions,’ Gregory says. ‘1) Stay alive 2) Complete an assignment 3) Try to carry any wounded out.’
He was only a rookie, but he and his unit captured a Russian conscript who said he’d been a factory worker and refused to kill men like himself. Gregory went on his first logistics mission to rescue soldiers from the battlefield. A military vehicle delivered him to Area 1 on the front line from where he walked to Area 0, less than 100 metres from the Russians. Gregory kept coming across injured soldiers one of whom looked ‘like a piece of meat’ and regretted jolting him whenever he had to drop the stretcher during artillery strikes.
One day, his commander sent him and a comrade on an offensive mission. ‘The commander promised that if we made it back alive, we could have a few days leave, but the shelling was breaking huge trees in half like matches. We kept conquering one spot, then advancing, one spot, then advancing, and I would shoot so the Russians knew we were there. We didn’t sleep at all over two days. A ‘bird’ [drone] kept watching us. I asked by walkie talkie, ‘Is that ours?’ ‘We don’t know,’ they said.’
They finally reached a T-shaped trench where ammunition was stored. Gregory looked out from under the tarpaulin and saw a Russian soldier 10 metres away, about to throw a hand grenade. ‘I used my machine gun to convince him not to finish us,’ he says darkly.
He pauses, clasping his chest, and uses his inhaler, but is anxious to continue his story. ‘When we were retreating, we heard a bird overhead. We scattered, but the bird laid two ‘eggs’ [munitions] beside me and injured my legs.’ With both legs tourniqueted, he moved on, only to have two more ‘eggs’ drop on him. One hit his back and he couldn’t help shouting out, ‘Hey, I already have a back problem. Don’t fuck it up any more!’ Another egg hit close to his head. ‘At that moment, I could feel some substance leaving my body, but I thought of my wife and kids, prayed to God, and the substance came back into me.’
Gregory still has eleven pieces of shrapnel in his body, including his neck and head. He requires injections twice a day for pain and can’t sleep without drugs. The date of his injury was December 4th, 2023 and, regardless of his daily difficulties, he appreciates the miracle of surviving. ‘Now I have two birthdays,’ he says with a smile.
September 11th: I arrive at my Kyiv hotel at 6.30 am and the receptionist explains that only the top floor is free for early check-in. ‘Do you still want it?’ he asks.
I snap it up straight away even though top floors are always at more risk from missiles. During war, you have to prioritise rest over safety. Later, I take a taxi into the city and the Georgian driver tells me, ‘Dreams of the Soviet Union are in every Russian’s blood. Even if we get peace, Ukraine and Russia will never be free of each other. Unfortunately, it will be like Israel and Gaza.’
I meet my friend Natalya, who has been staying in the outskirts of Kyiv during the summer, avoiding the attacks. Her husband was called up last November to serve in radio electronic warfare and she’s very glad he’s stationed 60 km from the frontline. She says that the latest joke in Kyiv is ‘Why bother listening to the news when it comes through our windows every night.’ ‘My big hope is for new arms technology,’ she tells me, ‘so that Ukraine can win back land before any peace deal.’
To me, it seems that Europe is so consumed by their own information war between left wing and right wing they cannot agree to back Ukraine to defeat Russia. As for Trump’s wish for Ukraine to send its under-twenty-fives into battle, Alexei insists it should be on the condition that the US gives them the best weapons. Peace talks are in their infancy, however, and it’s worth remembering that it took 22 months to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement.
At the Opera House, I pass a statue of poet Taras Shevchenko, boxed and sandbagged for its safety. Three and a half years of war and the poet’s head is peeping out of the sand, trying to emerge into the light. As autumn arrives, it’s surely a symbol of hope.
28/10.2025
Rosemary Jenkinson is a short story writer and playwright from Belfast. Her collection Love in the Time of Chaos was published in March this year by Arlen House
