The war in Ukraine is in its fourth week, and as of yet shows no signs of slowing down. As a matter of fact, the opposite appears to be the case. The shelling of cities is relentlessly continuing, with devastating results for the many people that still remain. There are some glimmers of hope offered by the repeated efforts at negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian officials. Yet efforts to establish so-called ‘humanitarian corridors’, through which civilians can escape the violence, quickly turned sour when Russia offered only safe routes that led directly to Russia or its ally Belarus. The past few days, the Russians and Ukrainians managed to agree upon a couple of routes through which civilians can escape without fear of attack, although there are reports of Russians attacking evacuation routes.
After their repeated failures to capture Ukraine’s major cities, the Russian army is hoping to turn the situation to their advantage by switching from attacking military targets to indiscriminately bombing residential areas, with the clear goal of creating as much destruction and suffering as they can. One proof of this can be found in the Russian army’s use of cluster bombs, which are bombs that open up mid-air to release hundreds of smaller bombs.
I have personally been to Laos, which the United States bombed with cluster bombs during the Vietnam war. One planeload of bombs was dropped every 8 minutes for 9 years. Of the 270 million cluster bombs that were dropped, around 80 million failed to detonate. Since that war ended at least 20,000 people have been killed or maimed by unexploded cluster munitions, with 40% of them children, who mistake them for small toys (they call them “bombies”). I have visited the organisation that tries to help people maimed by these bombs and their families, and that tries to track down and dispose of the unexploded bombs, which cover at least one third of the jungle-rich country. They told me that at the present rate it would take at least 100 years before they are all cleaned up. Cluster bombs have been banned under international law since 2008, but countries like the United States, Russia, and China have so far not signed it. They are still being used in the horrific ongoing war in Yemen, and are now being deployed in Ukraine.
I am mentioning this because it affected me personally when I saw the lasting impacts of a war that was fought a generation ago, and which hurts people that weren’t even born when the war was fought. The people who decide to detonate weapons like these over residential areas know this full well, and that should tell us something about the way they view this conflict. As fears of potential chemical or biological weapon attacks are rising—although it remains to be seen whether they will actually be used—the question of when and where this whole conflict is going to end is still as urgent and frightening as ever.
Over the course of this series on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we spoke with the 21-year-old Ukrainian xenia, who was living in the city of Kharkiv at the time of the Russian invasion. Forced to take shelter inside the city’s metro tunnels, like so many other of her fellow Ukrainians, she described in great detail what she was going through. In case you have missed these, here you can find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Several weeks on, the city of Kharkiv is left “devastated” by Russian air attacks, with “streets after streets […] destroyed, filled with rubble, bomb craters and twisted steel after heavy Russian shellings”. Since the last article, xenia managed to escape the city and make it to the west-Ukrainian city of Lviv. What follows now is an account of how she got out of the city, how she is doing, and what she is going to do now. A large part of her responses to my questions has been sent through voice messages, and has therefore been edited and shortened, with the express purpose of improving the flow of this article and making it easier to read.
What’s your current situation?
xenia: “Right now we’re in Lviv. When we were in Khmelnytskyi, we stayed there for a couple of days with some others, I have no idea who those people were but they were very nice. We managed to take some showers, we slept, and we ate some food that wasn’t canned or soon to be expired. We rested there for a couple of days. Our original plan was to go to a different part of Ukraine, where my mom’s colleague had found us a room somewhere in a tourist city in the countryside. But on our way there another thing opened up, and now we can stay in the apartment of a relative who is leaving the country.
We haven’t even heard any air raid sirens in the three days that we’ve been here. Damn, that’s new.
So that’s our current plan. We are waiting for that apartment to be vacated so that we can move in there. That’s probably going to happen in a couple of days. Things still might change over the next couple of days, but I’m not worried about it. Either way, a lot of people are offering help with housing and stuff and I’ll be fine. It’s me and my mom, a woman with her two kids and another woman with a kid, and we’re all staying here in this one apartment. It’s okay for me, but my mom is really stressed. The woman with two kids literally had a child a week ago. One of those kids is a literal newborn and she traveled with them in that crowded train! It’s a whole mess, but it’s fine here. It’s calm. We haven’t even heard any air raid sirens in the three days that we’ve been here. Damn, that’s new.
Coming to Lviv was very strange for me. It has always been a holiday type of city. I only visited it for special events. There’s these ‘Lvivske beer’ ads they ran on tv around Christmas that somehow cemented Lviv as this sort of unreal magical place. So many times I was in Lviv either on holiday, or passing through during a holiday. It’s hard to explain, but I just never imagined my next visit here to be under such awful circumstances.
Right outside the train station there’s a tent city of refugees. Volunteers are giving away food, there are burning barrels everywhere for warmth, medical tents and just so many people. One day we were walking in the city and happened to cross the famous market square and it was just empty. All year round it has something going on, it’s a prime location for restaurants at least. But not now. Even the fountain statues are wrapped up. All these memories of being in summer and winter camp. It’s weird remembering that while I’m now in this city hunting for bananas that aren’t stupidly overpriced. Those memories should’ve been the only ones in this city for me, but now I’ll also have war memories here. I guess that’s even more true for Kharkiv but that city was more mundane for me I guess, worn down by familiarity and routine.”
How did you escape the city of Kharkiv? How was the train journey from Kharkiv?
xenia: “Since one of the metro stations leads directly into the train station, my mom and I could just walk through the tunnels where the trains usually go and get to the station that’s connected to the actual on-land trains. We wanted to arrive at the train station very early so that there wouldn’t be so many people, because we assumed that a lot more people would be arriving closer to the middle of the day. So we left our metro station at 05:00 and we got to the train station about an hour later. It was only two metro stations, so it wasn’t that long of a walk.
When we got to the train station, we decided to just stand in line in a huge crowd. The train schedule is announced the day before in the evening. You don’t know when any other trains are going to arrive, it’s only the next day or the current day and that’s it. We didn’t have a plan, we just knew that all the trains were moving away from the fighting, so we would board pretty much any one of those and then figure it out from there. We stood around there for like two or three hours just waiting for things to happen.
At one point, I was forced out of the train station building, because people started going out and when you’re in that crowd you just have no control, you just go with it and hope you’re not crushed. It was pretty scary, but no one seemed to have got injured.
My mom and I had got separated, but managed to get out alright and find each other again. After that we decided to stay on the platforms, so that we could see what was happening. There was a train going from Kharkiv to Lviv, which is the hotspot for leaving the country, because from there people are going to Poland and other neighbouring countries. So, obviously a shit ton of people were trying to get on the train. It was pretty much impossible for us to get on, because every train door already had a crowd in front of it. Even when they were letting people on, it was strictly monitored so that only women and children could get on [red. The Ukrainian government has prohibited men aged 18-60 from leaving the country, “in order to ensure the defense of the state, maintaining combat and mobilization readiness of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other military formations”]. They literally told the people they assumed to be men to “fuck off”. Because I am trans I didn’t really want to attempt it, since I don’t really pass as a woman because of my voice, and even if I did manage to get past, I would then be on the train talking, and then… It’s just a fucking shitshow for me.
I feel that the gender segregation is absolutely pointless, because if I were able to help in any way, I would stay, right? And that I can’t help has nothing to do with my gender, absolutely nothing. I can’t pick up a fucking rifle because I’ve got Tourette’s Syndrome, I am actually literally liable to shoot someone I’m not intending to shoot. I don’t know how my tics are going to manifest under that kind of stress, especially since my tics react to loud noises and shit.
So like I said, my mom and I were just hanging around, because we wanted to see what would happen to the people that did not manage get on and what we could do next. Then all of a sudden, on the platform right across us, another train pulled up, and they weren’t monitoring anything! Anyone who was close could just get on, it was just a free for all. We were pretty close and we decided “fuck it, let's get on”. It wasn’t even clear where the train was actually going, because the screen told one thing and the people that worked on the train told another, so it was very chaotic.
When we got on the train, they stuffed us into a compartment that’s usually for four people and they put twelve or thirteen of us there. So some of us were sitting on the top bunks, and there were cats there, and also some people in the corridor. I expected it to be worse because of the stories we’d heard from scared people in the metro. They were warning us, they were telling us “don’t go there, it’s too dangerous, there’s too many people, there’s no reason to go there”. I mean it was obviously shit, we were on the train for like 17 hours, I think, and obviously you can’t sleep or lie down because there’s so many people. But I had been expecting it to be way worse than it actually was.
I wish it wasn’t a threat for me to interact with people. God, isn’t being trans fucking fun?
We were in a compartment with mostly young people. There was another woman in her 40s I think, along with my mom, but everyone else was in their 20s, I think. And again, there was somebody travelling with their cat. As much as I did want to talk to people and connect and play some games, I didn’t, because again, I didn’t know how people were going to react to me being trans. I just didn’t need that additional stress if things went bad. In Russian or Ukrainian, the grammar is different. It’s gendered much more. In English, it’s just pronouns, or maybe a name that has a gender associated with it, but in Slavic languages gender plays a much larger role. If I talk about my day, I will have to gender myself or work really hard to try to avoid those words and structures. So if people are listening while I am talking to my mom, they will hear me referring to myself as a woman. Nobody was interrupting our conversation and doing anything about it, though. Also, since I’m constantly switching between Russian, Ukrainian and English, I did hear some people talk about how they’re envious of the level of English that we have, that was pretty fun. But we didn’t really talk, I didn’t even know the names of the other people in the compartment and that kind of sucks, I wish I had talked more. I mean, I wish it wasn’t a threat for me to interact with people. God, isn’t being trans fucking fun?
When we got to Khmelnytskyi around 03:30, we got off. It was the middle of the night, so it was really cold. Some people were immediately getting onto other trains to go to Lviv, but we decided to stay there, because while we were on our way to the city some relatives had found us accommodation for a few days, so our plan was just to fucking sleep, have a shower and then move on from there.”
What did it feel like to be leaving Kharkiv behind?
xenia: “I didn’t really feel anything. I’m still trying to come up with some words about how I feel about leaving the city that I was born in and that I grew up in, but nothing comes to mind. Part of that is that I didn’t really have a great attachment to the city. I was homeless in the summer, and even though I did have a sort of permanent place of residence for like half a year, I never felt like I was actually at home. But also it’s because I’m just emotionally numb. I don’t think I have processed the weight of the shit that was happening and is still happening around me. So maybe I can come up with something in a couple of months when I work this shit out (hopefully) with a therapist?
What I do know is that I care about the people that I had a connection with and most of them got out of the city. My mom is with me, but my grandma is still in Kharkiv. Her brain is rotten and she’s saying a bunch of stupid shit, even though her windows are either cracked or completely gone because of the explosions. Well, I love her. My best friend went on a vacation to Western Ukraine right before the war, so he hasn’t even been back in Kharkiv. He’s still there, in the same region as I am right now, but we’re still like 100 km apart. I also have another friend who is still in Kharkiv. That really fucking sucks, because she’s sick. I keep telling her to leave the city. We were supposed to call today, but she said that she’s feeling worse and it’s hard for her to talk.”
Do you have any idea what you’ll be doing this month?
xenia: “The first thing to do is to move into that vacated apartment and settle in, and then I don’t know. The thing that I do know is that I need psychological help because I’m not doing okay. It feels fine, but it’s very, very much not okay. Coincidentally, my therapist that I have been going to for a long time is also in this city, so maybe I’ll even go to my own therapist and I won’t have to look for another one, I don’t know. I’ll need to work through that and then see, I don’t know. The vague plans that I have are that I need money, again, because you always fucking need money in this system. I don’t have clothes. As soon as it gets warmer, I don’t have shoes for example, because mine are winter boots and that’s it. I don’t have shampoo, I don’t have a bunch of other stuff, I don’t have a computer. So long-term I’m probably going to have to do a little bit of international fundraising to get some sort of computer going so that I can work. Because I can only work online and I don’t know what that’s going to look like, it’s going to depend on a lot of things. I was thinking about how I can contribute to helping refugees and stopping this war and doing the good stuff, but I don’t trust myself to be productive just because I feel fine now, when I very well may break down at any point. I don’t know, I need to restore myself, at least to a degree, until I start thinking about doing something useful and that should include also making money and buying a computer and whatever. The first thing on my mind is therapy, if possible, and if not, shit, I don’t know.”
Yesterday, we got word that xenia has moved into the vacated apartment in Lviv. According to her, “it’s alright, there’s no baby screaming here.”
—> Stay tuned for more on the current state and future prospects of the peace process
—> To read more about what the 21-year-old Ukrainian xenia has been going through since the Russian invasion began, go the articles below.
—> Read more about the complicated historical context of NATO and Russia's relationship:
→ Want to help? Donate to organisations that are providing humanitarian assistance and evacuation:
The International Rescue Committee is providing food, medical care, and emergency support to families in Ukraine, as well as in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen.
Ukraine Take Shelter is an independent platform connecting Ukrainian refugees with potential hosts and housing.
The World Health Organization is providing urgent healthcare to people across Ukraine and to refugees in neighbouring countries.
CORE, the Community Organized Relief Effort, is a crisis response organisation that brings immediate aid and recovery to communities in emergency situations. They are currently providing cash assistance and other vital help to families fleeing Ukraine to Poland.