In the midst of the resurgence of Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, a video recorded a couple of days ago in the Ukrainian capital in which young people are seen doing something as routine as ordering a hamburger has resonated on social networks. “If they can go to McDonald’s, it’s not a war”, has been one of the most repeated comments, as well as this one: “At least our money is well spent”.
The brutal abnormality of war is perhaps best understood by watching another video recorded in the Ukrainian capital on Monday afternoon, in which children can be seen running in terror to a shelter (or the nearest subway) after the alarms went off, or another in which you can see, happily, a military couple who spent the first minutes of their marriage in a basement in Kyiv.
It may also help to read the report from before-last-night, the seventeenth mass drone attack this month in the Ukrainian capital. Ukrainian air defenses shot down 29 drones out of 31 detected, however, canceled or not, and more if they are missiles, the remains of the devices are equally capable of causing damage. The night, like so many recent nights in Kyiv, ended with serious damage to 12 blocks of flats, 11 injured and one dead, a 33-year-old woman who had gone out on the balcony to watch the drones being shot down.
In a war in Europe in 2023, if one is not on the front line, one can go from dinner at McDonald’s to running to a shelter when sirens are heard in the street or when an alert is received on the cell phone with the voice of Mark Hamill, the actor who gave life to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. “Attention: air raid alert. Go to the nearest shelter. Don’t neglect yourself. Your overconfidence is your weakness,” warns an app that reports on attacks in real time and that Ukrainians use as easily as Google Maps.
But there are many months of war and sometimes, as Tamara and Mila explained to me, they prefer to curl up in bed and cross their fingers, because they have to work the next day. Or resign yourself to sleeping in your car if the alert traps you in the underground parking lot on your block, as happened to Stanislav recently, especially if no one is waiting for you at home because you have family sheltered in the foreigner in a safe country.
Right now, even away from the fighting, living or visiting Ukraine means going from absolute normality to being punished by the brutal outbursts of war violence. It means dining in Chernihiv in a scandalous Georgian restaurant and ecstatic with the poetry of tastes of its dishes as if we were in a fashionable place in New York and not 60 kilometers from Belarus or Russia, just two hours later run down to the hotel shelter because the alarms have gone off for a massive drone attack and you don’t think they’re just passing through Kyiv.
At first glance it looks a lot like any other European city, but it’s a matter of looking up to see a giant advertisement for the new iPhone to stopping in front of a tribute to the heroes of the Euromaidan or to those who fell in has been fighting since 2022, and it’s the same fight to avoid being run over by a scooter as it is to avoid the metal barriers that continue to be spread over many streets, ready for use.
Right now, living or visiting Ukraine, even away from the fighting, means crossing paths with military personnel at every turn (going shopping, eating ice cream), as well as countless people with war wounds. It means restaurants close at ten, and bars and cocktail bars at eleven, with an hour to get home before curfew. It means seeing Ukrainians taking photos, smiling, in front of destroyed Russian military equipment, such as the one displayed in Saint Michael’s Square. One of these families wanted to take a picture with the foreign reporter. His daughter has known nothing but war: she was born in a hospital in Lugansk in 2014 in the midst of a Russian siege. Now they live in Kharkiv and continue to live there because they can’t bear the thought of being separated. “We trust in the future, in a peaceful future”, they told me.
The author of the McDonald’s video, with ten million views, was Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics, who when he published it aimed to refute Russian propaganda that the country is at a standstill or does not exist has young people, in the same way that it publishes photos that show the adaptability of Ukrainians, that as soon as the alert ends they return to their tasks. Yesterday his students ordered food from McDonald’s. “In war, people eat, even if missiles fall outside where they do and food is distributed at home during the attacks,” he tweeted. “It’s called resilience and the will to live”.
