One morning last month, while I was waiting at a bus stop on the western edge of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, I struck up a conversation with a man in his early forties named Mykola Hryhoryan. Across from the bus stop was a bombed-out museum. I asked if he knew what had happened to it. “It was hit by a Russian drone,” he said. Mykola was wearing jeans and a black parka with the hood pulled over his head. He told me that he was a soldier. He had been wounded last summer, not far from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine, when a blast from a grenade fractured his right shoulder blade, a bullet hit him just below his right collarbone, another tore through his left shoulder, and a third broke three ribs. He pulled out his phone to show me a series of photos of his injuries. “I’m lucky to be alive,” he said.
Mykola lives a few miles south of Lviv’s Old Town, on the seventh floor of a Soviet-era apartment building, with his wife, Olha, and their two children: Artur, an eleven-year-old who loves to cook, and Kateryna, who, at fifteen, is shy and bookish and speaks fluent English with a nearly flawless American accent. “I watched a lot of ‘Dora the Explorer’ when I was younger,” she explained. I visited one evening, and we sat in the family’s living room, which, with a bunk bed in the corner, doubles as Kateryna and Artur’s bedroom. Kateryna was on the bottom bunk, her legs stretched out in front of her and a paperback copy of “Eat, Pray, Love” in her lap. Artur nestled between his parents on a couch. A Japanese maneki-neko cat figurine beckoned from a shelf by the window, and an actual cat, the family’s Maine coon, lay curled up next to Kateryna. “Her name is Bonnie,” Mykola said. “Like Bonnie and Clyde.”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the Hryhoryans quickly decided that it wasn’t safe for them to stay in the apartment. Near their building, on the other side of a small park, is a maintenance facility for military vehicles. “We knew it might be a target,” Olha said. Sure enough, about a month later, the facility was hit by Russian missiles. By then, Olha, Kateryna, and Artur had gone to stay with Olha’s mother in a small town a hundred and twenty-five miles east of Lviv, while Mykola had joined a newly formed battalion. Olha and the kids returned to Lviv a few days after the missile attack. (Olha figured that the Russians wouldn’t target the facility again, at least not anytime soon.) Some of the older windows in their building had been shattered, but their apartment was the same as they had left it. The only thing missing was Mykola.
Mykola became a kind of Jack-of-all-trades during his time on and near the front. He started out as a comms guy, and later served as a sniper, a mortarman, and a grenade-launcher operator. He once spent a day laying TM-62 anti-vehicle mines near the Russian border. Most recently, he was a machine gunner. He has kept in touch with friends of his who are still fighting. He said that many of them were exhausted. He knew the feeling. During the nearly two and a half years before he was wounded, the longest stretch of time he spent at home was fourteen days. Olha, who runs a private school that offers English classes to children and adults, buried herself in work as a distraction from his absence. “I never knew when we would see him again,” she said. “That was one of the hardest parts, just the uncertainty.”
When Mykola was away, Artur began to embrace his role as a young chef. (“I have a special recipe for baked potatoes,” he told me.) Kateryna, meanwhile, would spend hours reading books and drawing on her iPad, mostly pictures with cats in them. The kids didn’t return to in-person school until September of 2022. That fall and winter, constant power outages and air-raid alerts left them drained and on edge. They once spent seven hours in a bomb shelter, and they endured many sleepless nights on the hallway floor in their apartment. Olha had them both meet with a school psychologist, but after a few visits Artur didn’t feel a need to go back.
Mykola reached into his pocket and pulled out an IQOS “heat-not-smoke” tobacco stick. He stepped out onto the balcony to take a few hits. When he came back in, I noticed that he was rubbing his right arm. He had worked with a physical therapist in the months following his injury. His last appointment had been two weeks earlier. He was now waiting to undergo a series of medical examinations that would determine whether he was fit to go back into service. “I don’t think they’ll send me back,” he said. But, with the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces severely depleted, Olha wasn’t so sure. “I don’t want to get my hopes up,” she said. Nor did she want to start counting on the war ending anytime soon, despite President Donald Trump’s promise to the contrary. “Everything he says is bullshit,” she said. “It’s just for show.” Mykola was more generous in his assessment of Trump. “He’s only been President for a few weeks,” he said. “We have to wait and see.” Trump’s now infamous phone call with Vladimir Putin was still three days away, to say nothing of the diplomatic scramble that followed and is still playing out.
Mykola was focussed on recovering and enjoying his time at home. “Let’s take a break and eat,” he said. “Do you like sushi?” Sitting around the kitchen table, we got on the subject of the Ukrainian language. I said that I had been taking one-on-one lessons twice a week, and rattled off a few simple phrases. “I speak a little Spanish and Polish,” Kateryna said. “And I’m taking French at school.” Mykola and Olha, who grew up in the Soviet Union, had learned Russian when they were kids. But they had no interest in teaching it to Kateryna or Artur. Not that either of them wanted to learn it. “After everything that’s happened,” Kateryna said, “I can’t even stand hearing Russian.”
The names for the months of the year in Ukrainian are delightfully descriptive. April is Kviten, which is derived from the root word for “flower.” August is Serpen, whose root, serp, means “sickle.” November is Lystopad, the literal translation of which is “leaf fall.” And the word for February, Lyutyy, means “fierce,” which tells you all you need to know about the weather in Ukraine at this time of year. “The winters used to be much colder,” Mykola told me one Saturday, a few days after I first visited him and his family, when I returned for a walk around their neighborhood.
We headed north along a paved path, past rows of gray apartment blocks and a Ukrainian Orthodox Church with a golden dome. A young woman walked by pushing a stroller, causing a flock of crows to scatter. Olha’s school was in the same neighborhood, on the ground floor of another apartment building. While Mykola was away at war, Artur would sometimes cook dinner for his mom and take it to her at work. “The kids helped out a lot,” Mykola said. “I know it wasn’t an easy time for them.”
As we continued walking, I brought up the call between Trump and Putin. The previous day, I had spent several hours, with the help of an interpreter, interviewing war amputees at the rehabilitation center where Mykola had convalesced. Many of them told me that they felt betrayed by Trump’s seeming willingness to negotiate an end to the war on Putin’s terms and to relegate Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to a supporting role. “Trump doesn’t care about Ukraine or Ukrainian people,” one soldier, who had lost his right leg in a mortar attack, said. A physical therapist, who himself had been injured while fighting in Donetsk in 2015, said, “It’s like we’re living in the nineteenth century”—a time when great powers divided up the world as they saw fit.
Mykola understood why some of his fellow-soldiers, after three years of war, might be asking themselves, What have we been fighting for if we can’t restore our borders? But he said that they had much to be proud of, and that he had long ago stopped trying to predict when and how the war would end. “If you don’t have any expectations,” he said, “then you can’t be disappointed.” That’s not to say that he wasn’t worried. He was certain that, if a peace agreement didn’t include adequate security guarantees for Ukraine, Putin would eventually try to take over the rest of the country. “Russia will just regroup and attack again,” he said.
We crossed a street and stopped for a coffee. On our way back to Mykola’s apartment, we passed a two-story children’s play center. Inside were trampolines, foam pits, giant slides, and endless things to climb on. “Kateryna and Artur loved coming here when they were younger,” Mykola said. “They’re too old for it now.”
Several weeks after the start of the invasion, Yevhen Klopotenko, Ukraine’s most famous chef, opened a pop-up restaurant in Lviv’s Old Town, in an empty café across from a seventeenth-century monastery. He named the restaurant Inshi, Ukrainian for “others,” and began serving free meals to displaced people who had taken refuge in Lviv or were passing through on their way to countries such as Poland, Germany, and Spain. Known for creative twists on classic Ukrainian dishes—borscht with plum jam and smoked sour cream, potato pancakes with catfish and fermented lemons—Inshi has since become one of the city’s trendiest restaurants. It was where Artur, who had become something of a Klopotenko fanboy, wanted to go for his ninth birthday, in September of 2022. Mykola was back on leave then, and so the whole family went together. Artur was thrilled, but Kateryna was jealous. That July, she had had to celebrate her thirteenth birthday without her dad.
This past Sunday, I met the Hryhoryans for dinner at Inshi. The night before, Russia had launched two hundred and sixty-seven drones at Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian officials said it was the largest single drone attack to date. But Lviv was quiet—the war felt remarkably far away. “War is just our reality now,” Olha said. “It’s sad, but in many ways we’ve gotten used to it.”
What they hadn’t got used to, at least not yet, was the barrage of news coming from Washington. Since I had last seen Mykola, Trump had blamed Ukraine for starting the war and had called Zelensky a dictator. Kateryna grimaced and clenched her fists when I mentioned this. “He’s a moron,” she said, referring to Trump.
Olha said that she had felt more hopeful last year at this time. “It feels like now we have no control over what happens,” she said. “It’s scary. I don’t see how it will end.”
Artur was playing a video game on his phone. I got the sense that he was tired of having to think about the war. Ukraine had been fighting Russia for almost his entire life. (In March of 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, he was just seven months old.) He perked up when I asked him about one of his latest obsessions: airplanes. The background on his phone was a picture of a Lockheed Martin SR-72 reconnaissance jet. “It can fly six times the speed of sound,” he said.
After dinner, we drove to a military cemetery not far from the restaurant to attend a vigil. Hundreds of people were there, bundled up in thick coats and winter hats and cradling red glass lanterns in their palms. The next day was the third anniversary of the start of the war. A row of spotlights shone from the back of the cemetery, casting silhouettes of the crosses and flags that stood at the head of the graves. A military band played the Ukrainian national anthem, and a dozen priests took turns reciting prayers. A woman whose husband had died gave a speech. “This is a war, first of all, not for territory,” she said, her voice shaking. “It is a confrontation between two ways of existence: the Ukrainian way of freedom and democracy and the Russian way of dictatorship and slavery.” Kateryna bowed her head and reached for her mom’s hand.
Among the hundreds of soldiers who are interred at the cemetery are three of Mykola’s friends. When the vigil was over, we went to visit their graves. Mykola set a lantern next to each one. At the last grave, we met the widow of the man who was buried there. Mykola introduced himself and said that he had fought with her husband in Sumy Oblast. His name was Vasyl Stepanoych. He died in Zaporizhzhia on July 12, 2023, at the age of fifty. He had been a history teacher before the war. In addition to his wife, Halyna, he was survived by two children. “I can’t make sense of it,” Halyna said. “I was prepared for anything to happen, but not this.”
“Is a history teacher born for war?” Mykola asked. “Or Yura? He worked in I.T. Vora was an electrician.” He was referring to his other friends who were buried there.
“They could have done so many more good things,” Halyna said.
Olha, Kateryna, and Artur listened quietly while Halyna and Mykola spoke. On the way back to the car, the three of them barely said a word. ♦
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