At Home in the War

“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”

I am moving out of my apartment in Kharkiv today. While I drink coffee and wake up, I stare out my bedroom window for a long, last time. It overlooks a narrow street five stories below where I can see three tattoo parlors, a hipster barbershop, two coffee shops, a post office, a shawarma stand, a pharmacy, and a skate shop that specializes in custom skateboards and Carhart apparel.

There is also a bridal boutique that sells beautiful designer gowns. The front of the boutique doubles as a café, where three young women are currently sitting. They will sit there for most of the day. The women change daily, but their routine is always the same. They will nurse americanos, smoke e-cigarettes, and scroll their phones. Eventually a young man in military uniform will arrive. One of the women will kiss him passionately and the whole group will enter the store. An hour later they will all leave, and there will be one less gown in the window. As I watch the shopkeepers and the people walking their dogs before they go to work, it is hard to remember that Kharkiv was being evacuated six months ago.

Russia’s second offensive on Kharkiv Oblast started on May 10th of this year. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the objective was to establish a “sanitary zone” in the northeast of Ukraine. One did not need to be a military strategist to understand why he said this. The first battle of Kharkiv had been a great embarrassment for the Russian military. They attempted to occupy the city of Kharkiv in February of 2022, but despite months of fighting, they never took control of it. They changed tactics a bunch of times. Nothing worked. In the small towns that they did capture, the resistance was fierce. In Izium, some old Ukrainian ladies fed poisoned cake to their Russian “liberators.” In Velykyi Burluk, resisters car-bombed the Russian-appointed administrator. The Ukrainian army took back the whole region in September of 2022. Now, in spring of 2024, the Russian military was not going to risk being embarrassed in Kharkiv again. There would be no occupation. They were going to rubble the whole place. Within a week of President Putin’s “sanitary zone” announcement, the government of Ukraine began evacuating the region.

When the news broke, my unit was at a training facility, getting ready for our next rotation at the front. We were sent to Kharkiv as soon as the evacuation was called. When I got to the city, my Belarusian roommate, Mischa, and I hired a realtor to help us find an apartment. It felt odd to be haggling with a realtor in a region that was being evacuated, but we knew it was the best way to find a good place when our unit moved to a new sector.