Dispatches from Ukraine: anxiety and Kharkiv

A very self-obsessed post about facing up to how anxious I felt in Ukraine, and how I started to move through my fears in Kharkiv

I appreciate this post is very self-obsessed – honestly, who can GAF about MY anxiety when around me people are dying and losing everything. I thought a lot about the purpose of writing this, especially as who cares about me - *my* story is not *the* story. But decided I wanted to write it anyway because I found writing about my anxiety helped me move forward from it and because I felt so many powerful emotions in Kharkiv that I wanted to articulate… and because I don’t want to forget what it meant to be there, in July 2023.

I want to write about Kharkiv.

The night before we went to Kharkiv, I panicked when the sirens went off as we were drinking in Buena Vista. This was the second time there had been an air raid alert, and I wasn’t used to it. I felt so anxious, partly because while I knew what to do if there was an alert in the hotel, I didn’t know what to do when it happened a few minutes before the bars close for curfew, with where we were staying a 45 minutes-walk away.

(the answer is, obviously, get an Uber like everyone else)

The anxiety stayed with me the whole night, when the sirens went off again, leaving me with around two hours sleep before having to get up at 5.30am to get the 7am train to Kharkiv. In a fractious cab drive to Kyiv’s central station, I thought the stomach-clenching, throat-tightening anxiety was going to make me burst into tears… or vomit.

And yet, as I kept telling myself, nothing bad has actually happened, not to me, not while being here. The bad things have happened elsewhere. I am so anxious and I have no real reason to be.

Of course, part of the anxiety was the realisation that I was travelling to a place that had endured heavy bombardment, where the surrounding villages and suburbs had been flattened by Russian shelling, the residents subjected to torture, rape and arbitrary killings, and that I was going to be staying 30 kilometres from the Russian border.

This is not an unreasonable anxiety. But letting it paralyse me and worse, lead me to making minor mistakes, was unreasonable.

I got out of the cab, I got on the train, and six hours later arrived into Kharkiv – the first sign of the city the blue and yellow flag fluttering against a backdrop of a golden cathedral dome.

On every street in Kharkiv, the signs of war are there. There’s no escaping its violence. The buildings half collapsed; the shattered glass in the shelled McDonalds; the wires and pipes hanging uncanny from mangled metal frames; the criss-crosses of tape over remaining windows; the gaping holes like screaming mouths where windows should be.

Alongside the destruction, there are green shoots of hope. People are returning to Kharkiv, having fled when the Russian shells first hit in February last year, and when occupiers took over the homes of Ukrainians in the surrounding areas. Refugees from those occupied villages and towns – towns like Izyum where the most terrible war crimes took place – are making a home in the city. Drinking craft ale in a pop-up bar, surrounded by young people playing table tennis and tapping on MacBooks, the talk was of hope, of change, of building a new cultural and creative scene from the devastation of war.

The next morning, the sirens went off around 10am, just after breakfast. Unlike two days before, my chest didn’t clench, my throat didn’t constrict. Something had shifted. My meeting that day was not until 2pm, and so I went back to my hotel room to write.

I wrote this:

I am writing this while sitting on the closed toilet seat in the bathroom of my hotel room because, just as we finished breakfast, there was an air raid alert. There is not a shelter nearby and so the advice is to take refuge in a place where there are two walls between you and a possible shell impact – i.e. the bathroom in my hotel room.

The bathroom smells of cigarettes, despite this being a non-smoking room, and every now and again a waft of sewage, but not now because the seat is down. The bedroom also smells of stale fags, and reminds me of some of the more garish furniture you can buy at Dunelm. The bath itself, a sort of sparkling white gold colour, is one of those sloping Victorian-style models with silver claw feet – plastic – and the bedroom has a huge mural of Marilyn Monroe above the bed. Everything is gold and cream, with satin pillowcases and a sateen coverlet that I have pushed to one side so I can sleep under the cotton duvet cover. The wardrobes have silver plastic knocker handles and the hallways are decorated with photos that alternate between classic movie stills (Marilyn in the Asphalt Jungle among them) and fashion shots of 1990s models in their underwear. The cardboard cover holding my door-key is Marilyn again, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in a clinch with Mr Eisman.

In there, I started to write down my anxiety – how I felt about being so scared and feeling like a failure all the time. And as I wrote, admitting my deepest and ugliest fears in a profoundly self-obsessed way, those fears disappeared. I realised, typing away on the toilet, that I had heard the siren and I was ok, I wasn’t panicking. I knew that when the alert ended, I would leave the hotel and walk into town to my meeting with confidence. I was not over confident – I absolutely believe in a dangerous place that a healthy amount of anxiety is needed. But admitting how much I was struggling allowed me to overcome some of those more paralysing fears and episodes.

What changed?

Partly I think that use is another nature, and if I was going to freak out every time the siren went off, I was going to end up in a complete mess. The second night in Kharkiv there were three alerts plus the one in Kyiv, and a huge thunderstorm where the bangs are not dissimilar to rockets. I followed the advice; went and curled up on the bathroom floor, taking the sateen blanket to wrap around me, the bathmat doubling as a mattress, my grab-bag, boots and water tucked up next to me.

Partly it was seeing much more closely the impact of this war on a city. What right did I have to be anxious, when people living here had endured what interviewee after interviewee described to me as an ‘evil’?

And it is evil, this war.

It is evil to kill civilians – to shell restaurants where children eat and play; to occupy villages and rape and murder and torture the people living there. It is evil to target homes, the buildings that once gave sanctuary now abandoned, the former residents either dead or fled, all that is left of them the debris of life, the discarded teapot, the abandoned clothing on the floor. It is evil to use cluster bombs in a residential city; to shell apartments that look out over a playground.

The signs and sights of destruction and pain were upsetting. We should be upset by them. We should be upset when we hear people talk about having to flee, or how the Russians occupied their homes. We should be upset when we listen to stories of residential buildings being attacked, of war crimes, of whole families dead.

Part of it was the endless respect I felt for the women I was interviewing every day. Sure, I was allowed to feel anxious in my first ever visit to a warzone. But my god, the work these women were doing – reporting from the frontline, having their offices shelled, being put on lists by Russians as targets… the bravery and courage and determination of the people I was speaking to in Kharkiv and Kyiv, let alone the values they were living by to tell the truth about this evil. They were doing the hard work. There is no space to feel anxious about my work, when listening to their stories.

And part of it was Kharkiv itself.

A city that has endured evil and pain. That has had its safety taken away. Where, months after the region was liberated, the sirens still blast out with alarming regularity. Where people cannot return to work, or to their homes – where almost every family is grieving. Apartment blocks where Russian bombs wiped out three generations of families – granny, parents, aunts, children. Blood on the pavements, pockmarked buildings, empty homes, shattered windows; boarded-up shops and closed down restaurants. A population missing.

Alongside all this legacy of horror, is a city where people talk about hope. Of creating a new kind of society, one built on progress and human rights values, rejecting the Russian influence that demanding more for Ukraine. A city where kids ignore the sirens as they go to the zoo; a city where young people have birthday drinks over Prosecco, as we all wait for the siren that tells us the alert is over.

Upset, yes. Angry, yes. Empathy, yes. Hope, yes. But anxious? My anxiety had no place here. My feelings, my reactions, they needed to be for other people, not for myself.

What I’m reading

Oxblood by Tom Benn - absolutely devastatingly brilliant and unapologetic in its ugliness and brutal honesty about poverty and class and race

Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess - I did enjoy this but I wasn’t crazy on the style, there was so much dialogue

A Village in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel - interesting insights into German life in WW2 but, and maybe it’s because I am in a place where war crimes are happening, I did struggle a bit with some of the ‘good German’ framings. I get there were good Germans in WW2 but most were complicit.