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It is a crisp autumn morning in downtown Kyiv and Yuriy Vitraniuk is in high spirits, even though his day has begun with an argument. Someone parked their car in a bus lane and Vitraniuk, a 34-year-old parking attendant, was embroiled in a heated discussion about whether the infringement warranted a ticket. In this case, it didn’t. “There are unwritten rules,” he explains. “If someone is a veteran, we often let them go. There is a war on after all.”
Vitraniuk dispenses 680 hryvnia ($19) fines to illegally parked cars in a country in conflict. His job is rarely invoked when anyone wants to convey the intensity of Ukraine’s war effort. Yet given that Russian president Vladimir Putin wants to trash the country, the fact that daily life continues is a minor triumph. Twenty months into Russia’s full-scale invasion, and with no end in sight, its very mundanity also offers a hopeful approximation of the country’s “new normal” — at least in cities like Kyiv, which are far from the frontline.
The capital’s streets are surprisingly vibrant. Before the midnight curfew, they buzz with young bar-hoppers. New restaurants have opened. At the Pepsi Cup café, which opened in March in a quiet residential neighbourhood, Ilya, the barista, says he is pleased when people “come and sit on the deck chairs outside, to laugh and have normal emotions”. The Pechersk international school has also reopened, although so far only Ukrainian families have returned to classes.
Western-gifted air defence systems have played a key role in securing this fragile normality. One Ukrainian friend, whose high-rise apartment is on the 24th floor, told me how safe he now felt watching the Gepard, Iris-T and Patriot air defence systems take down the drones and missiles of Russia’s almost nightly barrages. The biggest threat from these macabre firework displays is falling debris. Although these can be deadly, “nobody pays attention to the air raid sirens anymore”, he says.
That same tentative return to normal life is also in evidence in Odesa. Its Black Sea beaches reopened in late August and, when I visited the port, couples and families were stretched out on the sand enjoying some late seasonal sun. “It’s like a civil war in your mind,” said Ana Zelik, whose Airbnb business is now idled for lack of tourists, as she tried to explain her mental confusion about taking a recreational dip in the sea during Europe’s biggest conflict for 80 years.
It makes for a disturbing dichotomy, especially when compared with the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, when Russian warships came so close that Odesa residents could see them from the shore. Back then, the war had a terrible moral clarity. Russians were advancing, millions were fleeing — and Vitraniuk, the parking attendant, was clearing cars abandoned outside Kyiv’s train station.
Today, Ukrainian lives are more fractured. Tens of thousands are fighting on the frontline, and everyone knows someone close who has been killed or wounded. More than 6mn refugees also live abroad. Yet inside this giant country, millions of people lead apparently normal lives, going to work, to the beach, to nightclubs and to bars.
“How do we present this in a correct way?” Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, mused at a Kyiv conference last month. “I think it’s a sign of our resilience,” she said, answering her own question. “It’s about our desire to continue to live. You can’t ban people from celebrating life. But how to explain that to a foreign audience?”
With US aid to Ukraine potentially in jeopardy, it’s a question that goes to the heart of what the country is fighting for. Like Zelenska, human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, leader of the Center for Civil Liberties, which won the Nobel peace prize, sees in Ukrainians’ pursuit of small pleasures a form of resistance. It is, she tells me, part of the country’s fight for freedom “in all its senses. For the freedom to be an independent state, not a Russian colony . . . for freedom [in who] you love, what you say and where you go and what you die for.”
Masi Nayyem, a former army officer who lost his right eye while fighting the invaders this summer, was pithier still. “The Russians want Ukraine to suffer, so if you are laughing that is great,” he says. “We need to learn to be happy, even during war.”
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