Rosemary Jenkinson writes: On April 16th, 2026 at 3 am I’m on the sleeper train to Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine when there is a loud rap on our four-berth compartment door. The conductor speaks quickly and the one word I can pick out is ‘documenti’, so I assume I have to bring my documents. I’ve been forewarned that trains are now stopping abruptly due to drone threats.
We troop out, bleary-eyed, on to the platform of a country station. Rail workers herd us farther back, on to a mud road. The local dogs are barking loudly. The night is cold and most of us walk around in silence, cowled in our maroon blankets. When I look up through the greening trees, the clusters of bright stars are so beautiful it’s hard to believe the sky can carry something so malign. The frost is twinkling on the ground in a simulacrum of the stars.
After an hour and a half we’re allowed to board the train. My friend Alexei Stoyanovsky messages to say we were delayed because of a drone attack on a power plant in Cherkasy. A few hours’ sleep and I finally arrive in Zaporizhia. The Ukraine national anthem happens to be playing on the platform as if in celebration that we’ve made it.
I’m keen to reconnect with the people I’ve forged deep bonds with over the course of five trips, so Alexei drives me out to the village of Myrove. We stop off at the remembrance square and meet Alla, who ties fresh flowers to the images of her husband and brother killed on the frontline. The loss is intergenerational – she’s here with her daughter whose husband is missing in action. By the Palace of Culture we bump into some recent refugees from Vyschetarasivka village. Victor and Lubov are struggling on their Displaced Person Pension from the government but ‘don’t want to wave their hands’ about it during the war. They did their best to stay in their home despite living opposite the occupied Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant used by the Russians as cover for attacks. They passionately wish that Ukraine had mined the plant in February 2022. ‘We should never have let the Russians have it,’ Victor says.
At the kindergarten in Myrove, we’re given a warm welcome. I haven’t visited since last September and, although the security situation has worsened, the community is full of smiles. As we tuck into homemade cake, Lera, a young law graduate, tells us the roof of her family home in Dobra Nadiya (Good Hope) has been destroyed by a drone. She can’t risk going there, but her father has ventured by motorbike at night. ‘People living there are like ghosts and leave no footprints,’ she says. Olena, a volunteer living nearby, confirms how bad it is. ‘A volunteer was going to Dobra Nadiya to feed the abandoned dogs but he was killed in his car by a drone. Now the dogs are eating each other just like in Kherson.’ Olena is so fluent on the subject of war Alexei can barely keep up to translate her. She runs the drone-warning system for the locale, and hopes that technology will soon provide ‘a new type of detector that could identify some of the smaller drones’. A Russian drone recently chased the aid car she was driving in to the front line, though thankfully her life was saved by a Ukrainian interceptor drone. The experience has left her wary.
There is good news, however, as Ukrainian forces have cleared the Russians from the Dnipropetrovsk region. ‘I saw for myself that the light is back in our soldiers’ eyes,’ she says enthusiastically. The wind is blowing against the UNHCR tarpaulin covering the aid in her back yard. She shows us a dead Russian’s walkie talkie that is going to auction. ‘Must have been on drugs,’ she says. ‘He had no armour. The Russians are just cannon fodder, though every year they become better equipped. If you want success, never underestimate your enemy.’ When we return to our car, the villagers are raking their gardens in the sunshine. The red tulips are wide open like mouths eager to speak as we head back to Zaporizhia.
April 18th, 2026: The next morning we call in to News Agency South to see Svitlana, Maria and Oleksandr and hear the latest on the Russian-occupied territories. Svitlana is refreshed from her visit to the US where she spoke out about fellow journalists imprisoned in occupied parts of the Zaporizhia region. She informs us that Russia is having trouble with mobilisation after promising it wouldn’t be mandatory. In Vasylivka, for instance, they’re trying to recruit an acquaintance of Oleksandr’s in spite of his neurological disability.
From Zaporizhia we head northeast to the small city of Vilniansk in the Dnipropetrovsk region. We meet the mayor, Nataly, who tells us that Russian drones have been tracking down soldiers to their lodgings thanks to informers who ‘surface like worms after the rain’. The issue with accepting a large number of refugees is that informers may equally arrive under that guise. She also lost her much-loved executive secretary, Svitlana, in a double-tap drone attack on January 11th. A piece of shrapnel went through Svitlana’s heart.
Today, Festival Park is deserted in the sun and a damaged road is being swept as a precursor to being fixed. At the flag-filled cemetery we pay our respects to Svitlana and Nataly’s son, Igor, who died on the front line, before we survey a destroyed district. One sole triangle of planks is all that remains of a roof, strips of red tile peeled from it like spring petals. Burnt paint on metal shines in the sunlight like a silver snakeskin. We meet Igor’s crippled dog, Isar, a German Shepherd who was injured in a bomb blast. He howls pitiably when we leave.
Our last stop is the Free River Volunteer Centre. By the door there is a large collection of spent shells and fallen drones. The plan to display them in a museum feels a long way away. Konstantin and Svitlana, who run the centre, bring us into a room with boarded windows, showing us large frames where camouflage nets are being made to order; some for vehicles, some for helmets. ‘These are spring colours,’ explains Konstantin, ‘but the base is always earth.’
There are concerns that the centre might have to close within a few months due to a lack of funding, but for now they take pride in their work in this frontier city. Konstantin is adamant that they will keep going and uses the Ukrainian saying, ‘the responsibility for drowning rests with the drowning people’. The walls are emblazoned in signed banners from brigades; one from Avdiivka is covered in the blood of an injured soldier who happily survived, though many of the signatures are ‘from ones no longer with us’, Konstantin says. We sit around a table of salo and pampushka and toast the future, discussing how the traditional left in Europe still refuses to see Russia as a colonial power. Svitlana foresees the post-war future of Vilniansk as having a peace-keeping force.
Alexei and I tell the group about yesterday’s meeting with drone pilots who took us to their forward position near the Kakhovka reservoir. We were able to observe their test reconnaissance mission over Russian-occupied territory. Oksana asks: ‘Do you like the adrenaline?’ ‘I suppose that’s a yes,’ I reply. ‘And you must like adrenaline too staying in this city throughout the war.’ ‘That’s probably true,’ she nods.
It’s good to have these honest moments and this eight-day trip is nothing compared with living full-time in a warzone. When asked why I’ve come, I say the Ukraine-Russian war is the biggest since the second World War and it’s natural I should support them. My grandfather was an air raid warden during the Belfast Blitz and used to watch for German bombers from the roof of the Ulster Bank. Shortly after I was born, the Troubles began and it seems I’ve always been in the shadow of war, so much so I can’t abandon Ukraine in its darkest years.
Back in Zaporizhia that night, the drones are buzzing loudly in almost musical countertones punctuated by percussive explosions. Red tracer bullets fly vertically and horizontally in the sky. Alexei phones me and suggests I drop to the floor from my bed if a drone comes too close. It’s impossible to know if they are aimed at Zaporizhia or destined for elsewhere.
April 19th, 2026: At a coffee kiosk we order vanilla-infused drinks recommended by Andriy, who works there. Last August his kiosk was hit by an explosion wave from a missile targeting a power transformer factory. The female vendor in the café next door was killed and now, nine months later, the noise of a loud bus passing makes him shake.
With difficulty we manage to find the Baptist church that was glide-bombed the previous day. It’s in the industrial Shevchenko district that has undergone so many bombardments that some Zaporizhians actively avoid it. The church has cracks through its bricks like jagged lightning bolts. One congregation member, Ruslan, was killed, his body dashed against a column. Outside, a leaf blower is removing the debris from the grass. Dark leaves indeed.
Over dinner we talk to a journalist, Anna Chuprina. During the long winter where the war came closer to Zaporizhia she tried to protect herself from bad news, but is about to take up a new job with her employer, MIG. She’s certain that the fresh challenge will reinvigorate her, no matter what the future brings.
April 20th, 2026: I head north to Sumy by minibus, a six-and-a-half-hour journey, and the grey sky yawns open in the early morning. The driver swerves around heavily potholed roads, the small triptych of saintly icons attached to his sun visor his only protection. As we near Sumy, barbed wire and dragon’s teeth start to proliferate across the ploughed brown fields. The wire reminds me of a never-ending Slinky. Newly unearthed trenches zigzag alongside the road.
In Sumy I head for Petropavlivska Street where, on Palm Sunday 2025, a Russian Iskander (a short-range missile system) attempted to obliterate the staff in the city administration and failed. A second Iskander, however, killed thirty-five people nearby. The ornate buildings are badly scarred. Cornices seem to teeter perilously as people walk past. Uneven bricks on the verge of toppling look soft as a pink Victoria sponge.
Sumy is surprisingly lively on a wartime Sunday evening. A busker is singing in English in the central park. On the way back to my hotel I pass a café called Be Happy, as distant booms reverberate from the northern front. In Independence Square a mural stops me in my tracks: it shows a soldier forging the iron trident of Ukraine in a red-hot furnace. As I stand there I think about the Ukrainians I’ve met who have expressed hope that Russia will invade the Baltic states and open up another front, giving Ukraine relief. I doubt the Russians will be so foolhardy. Ukraine must rely on itself and the symbolism of the mural is clear. In spite of being under increasing fire, Sumy and Zaporizhia are staying strong.