From interviews given to a researcher by six Ukrainian women in May and June of last year and provided to Harper’s Magazine. The researcher’s identity has been withheld to protect the women’s safety.

i.

I’m from Kharkiv, a big industrial center in eastern Ukraine. It had been transformed in recent years, before the war—that means good roads, flower beds, lovely parks. It’s beautiful. It hurts me to know that missiles land in different parts of the city and people die. The people of Kharkiv are very tired. They’ve lived through war for more than two years. Kharkiv has filled up with people who came from small towns that were right in the line of military action. We are very close to the stations that launch missiles. So sometimes the missiles arrive first, and only then does the siren go off. No one pays attention to it anymore. People sitting in cafés keep on sitting there; people going to work keep on going to work. It is not normal for an ordinary person not to fear an explosion. People should live in peace, should develop, should go to work, should produce some products, should rest, should bring up children. Many of our children do not go to school, because there are so many destroyed schools. In addition, it is scary to send a child to school. There are only a few schools that have good bomb shelters where children study. They have even set up classrooms in the metro. Inside the subway, the passageway from one station to another is now taken up with desks.

It’s mostly older people, women, and children who ride the metro. There are very few men. It is very rare to meet a man of draft age. Recruiters go around all the places where you can meet people, handing out notices. Markets, stores, parking lots, parks, subways, buses, bus stations. These are all places where they can hand you a draft notice. Men are in the most powerless position. Because the only thing they are allowed to do is to go to war.

ii.

My friend sent me a photograph showing a vehicle belonging to the army recruitment division stopping cars and dragging out the men and taking them away. This is done by force. We call it “stealing people.” Women try to beat them back, mothers come to the enlistment center to get their sons, they make scenes, they fight. It’s led to such consequences: attacking the military personnel who are defending us, thinking that they work for the enlistment centers.

There are horrible things. I know of a situation in which a student was asked by his teacher to come in earlier. This boy was always late, he was always getting yelled at, but this time his mother got him organized and said, “Go, at least you’ll be on time for once.” He went, they took him to war, and he was dead a week later. I don’t think it will happen in the big cities, but it happens in the small towns because they are less able to stand up for themselves, they are more subordinate to the authority of men in uniforms than city dwellers. The trouble is that some small towns already have no men left, and they have very many cemeteries, and the cemeteries are full.

iii.

We visited schools near the front line. In those areas where the line went right through a town, we had to go with the children because they were afraid to go to school. They were afraid of the military, afraid of the air strikes. We simply talked with the little kids. One time, we arrived at a school, and the head teacher, who loved us and always waited for us to come and talk with the kids, was in a very bad psychological state herself. We talked with her and learned what was wrong. The day before, there was a big air strike in the center of the town, and they saw it hit a house; she and her husband ran over to see if anyone was alive in the house, if they could help. As she was running, something squished under her foot. She shone her flashlight on it and saw that she had run atop the remains of her old schoolmate. One minute she had been talking with friends and the next she ran over the body of a friend she had known since childhood and had just been talking to. Just the thought was horrifying. This woman came to the school the next day to help us organize help for the children—but who was there to help her?

iv.

If there is a man at war in a family, that adds a burden on women. Every day is filled with fear that there will be bad news. They live under regular air raids and experience extreme emotional tension, fear, and trauma. I often think about how women will have to restore Ukraine, because we are losing men. But women are so exhausted now that they may not have the strength.

Of course, there are also women whose men are not fighting. They hide these men at home, afraid they will be drafted. The social roles change: before, the man was the breadwinner, and the woman ran the house. Now women must go to work. There are cases in which women are forced to have a third child, because men with three children are not drafted.

The war leaves a mark on the behavior and emotional state of people, and violence can appear in families where it had not existed before. Teenagers, especially girls, are more vulnerable, especially in low-income families that live near military bases.

v.

There used to be an online map that showed strikes and destruction in Luhansk. One night when I was away, I couldn’t sleep, and I kept a tablet under my pillow, on which I kept checking the situation. Suddenly I saw a strike right next door to my address. I kept trying to call my father and couldn’t reach him. For a few days I thought I would lose my mind. And then my father called, his voice was cheerful, and I said, “Papa, how are you there? What’s going on?” He said, “I’m in Petrovske.” That’s a village not far from Luhansk. He said that there was so much shelling that it was impossible to stay at home. The house that was hit, next door, was where a babushka lived. I said, “How is she?” He said, “She had made some soup and took it over to an ailing neighbor, and that saved her.” It was a miracle.

vi.

War changes people. People who should not have killed, and were not born to kill, have a completely different view now, after the war. I find it very hard to look them in the eye.

I want to go back to the life I had before, but it’s not like that and it will never be like that again, so I don’t know. Yesterday, my friend asked me what my plans are for the next couple of years, and I realized that I don’t know how to make plans. It’s enough for me that I have a plan at least for a week, for a month. This is the distance in time that I can control, I can keep, and I can manage, because everything beyond that is hard to predict. I have acquaintances who are still filled with hope, but I think my only hope is that we do not die of hatred.