James' World 2

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Many Ukrainians — even those born after the country gained independence from Moscow’s rule in 1991 — grew up with much of the same mythology of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine, which was under German occupation for most of that war, lost some 10 million people. Mila’s surviving grandparents, like mine, celebrated every anniversary of that war’s end but almost never talked about what they had experienced. After the war, the Soviet authorities sent thousands of Ukrainians to the gulag for suspected collaboration with the Germans — in many cases, as what amounted to punishment for surviving the occupation. Ukrainians never forgot that injury. Both of those World War II stories — of the heroism of Ukrainians and of the cruelty of Moscow — inform the way Ukrainians think about the war they are fighting now.

Newer works of history reframe the period as two sides of a coin: German and Soviet occupations of Ukraine, two empires that aimed to enslave Ukrainians — Germany during World War II, the Soviet Union before and after. And yet, the number four has continued to loom large in collective memory. Now Ukraine’s patriotic war, against Russia, has crossed that threshold, with no end in sight. Russia’s offensive appeared to speed up in December. In February, Ukraine recaptured ground, in its most successful counteroffensive in more than two years. But on the whole, the front line has remained largely static for more than three years. Russia’s apparently overwhelming superiority in manpower and military resources didn’t bring about a swift victory, but neither have the resolve of the Ukrainian people and the Western aid they have received proved enough to stop Russia’s aggression.

Whatever lies ahead feels as if it will last forever. Ukrainians have organized their lives accordingly. They are living this war in their work, their social lives, their waking and sleeping hours. It is a fundamental orientation of time, values and social relations that will define many future generations of Ukrainian life.

By any measure, Ukraine is a profoundly different country now than it was four years ago. At the start of the full-scale invasion, excluding regions that were already occupied by Russia, it had a population of perhaps 36 million people, according to Tymofii Brik, a sociologist and the rector of the Kyiv School of Economics. (Other estimates tend to be higher.) Since then, Brik says, six million have been displaced inside the country and some four million — mostly women and children — have left Ukraine. More than 100,000 Ukrainians, troops and civilians, are estimated to have been killed. Millions of people live under occupation in areas Russia controls.

When people were fleeing the Russian offensive in the winter of 2022, squeezing onto overcrowded train cars headed west, few imagined that the war would go on for a long time. Either Russia’s tremendous military might or the West’s firm resolve would dictate a fast resolution, it seemed. But four years after that — and 13 months into the presidency of Donald Trump, who promised to bring the war to an end within 24 hours of his inauguration — there is no safe home for Ukrainian war refugees to return to. And there is less and less reason even to think about it: The people who stayed in Western Europe have adapted to their new homes, and to the separation from those they left behind.

“What kind of relationship can we have, with them over there and me back here?” Taras Viazovchenko said when I asked him about the state of his marriage. He got his wife and two children out of Irpin, one of the Kyiv suburbs, then under Russian occupation, on March 3, 2022. The wife and kids live in Switzerland now. He has visited once. “She’s built a life there,” he said. “The kids speak French to each other, and I don’t understand.”

Like many Ukrainians who remained in the country, Viazovchenko has lived several different lives in the past four years — lives that he has shared with his parents and some of his friends, but not with his wife and kids. Before the full-scale invasion, Viazovchenko was a yoga instructor and a member of the Irpin City Council, a position he still holds. During the weeks in 2022 when part of Irpin was occupied, he spent every day helping people escape the town. When Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region, Viazovchenko joined the effort to identify the bodies of people killed in Irpin and neighboring Bucha, which has become synonymous with Russian war crimes.

People killed during the occupation had been buried in private yards, in group graves, in town parks, often after their bodies were left for days wherever the killing had occurred. Viazovchenko and others exhumed the bodies, interviewed loved ones and witnesses, and tried to match remains to descriptions. After several months of this work, Viazovchenko became obsessed. He and his colleagues had been able to identify more than 400 bodies, but several dozen remained. Viazovchenko couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t think of anything else. He kept unzipping the black bags in which the bodies were kept — or what remained of them after several months in morgues that didn’t consistently have electricity.

It took the intervention of visiting mental health professionals for Viazovchenko to get help. He worked on setting up therapy centers for survivors of Russian aggression in different parts of Ukraine. And then last year, at the age of 46, he enlisted. He thinks that everyone should.

To be clear, not everyone agrees. After an initial wave of volunteers immediately after the full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian armed forces have struggled to conscript enough people. People who enlisted four years ago and who are still physically able to serve have been unable to leave the service. Meanwhile, enlistment officers stage daily raids in Ukrainian cities, apprehending potential conscripts and delivering them to military bases. Some escape. At the same time, on this visit in particular, I heard many stories of people who either chose to enlist or submitted to a conscription raid and found peace in the service — and in no longer trying to evade it. Viazovchenko thinks this is as it should be, and that those who cannot serve at the front should join the war effort in the rear. He complained that, after several years of pooling money for the war effort, parents’ groups have resumed collections for gifts and flowers for teachers. That strikes him as frivolous, as does any pretense of peacetime life. As an example of proper, realistic adjustment, he cited the schools of Kharkiv, many of which have permanently moved to underground bunkers.

Underground schools have become symbols of Ukrainian unbreakability, along with warming tents set up in the shadow of unheated high rises. I visited the Kyiv School of Economics, a small, ambitious private university that has managed to draw some outstanding academic talent from both Ukraine and the West. Brik, the rector, excitedly led me to the basement, where the university has created several classrooms, complete with whiteboards. The school schedules only as many classes as can simultaneously convene in the bunker, so that whenever the air-raid alarm sounds, as it does on most days, classes can move down below. Then Brik showed me something else he was proud of: a classroom equipped for a vocational training program, this one in soldering — a skill newly in demand in the growing drone industry.

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Ms. Tereshkova is a Ukrainian photographer and filmmaker based in Berlin.

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