Diary of an Invasion:

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Ukraine has lost probably 50,000 people already - 30,000 in Mariupol alone - so in every village there are now widows and orphans. This hate will not disappear."

Something happened to me that I cannot convey to you,” she tells me. “I had a realisation, suddenly, that he was no longer among the living. But I tried to suppress those thoughts.” She pauses. “You know, I sometimes felt like I wanted to fall upon the road and hit my head against it, just hit it and hit it, and then I would raise my head and Volodya would be standing in front of me.” A lot of discussion about I.D.P., himself included, and their relocation within Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe (latter mostly being women, children and pensioners; men under 60 who don’t have proof of enrollment in a foreign university or medical statement saying unfit for war are not allowed to leave the country) When we became refugees, we left all our books in Kyiv. Now, since my first wartime trip into Europe, I have some books again – gifts from my English publisher. I’m wondering when I will be able to take those books home and add them to my library. On the night of February 23rd this year a few writers and journalists gathered in the Kyiv flat of renowned writer Andrey Kurkov, where their host fed them borshch, Ukraine’s national dish.

There are many fascinating characters who populate the story. There is Kurkov's friend Svetlana, who is not able to leave Kyiv. She sends a message to him – "I decided to say goodbye just in case. They have warned that there will be a terrible shelling of Kyiv. I'm going to stay in my flat. I'm tired of running through the basements. If anything happens, remember me with a smile." I cried when I read that. There is Tetyana Chubar, a 23-year old single mom. She is the commander of a self-propelled cannon (an armoured vehicle something like a tank) and she has four men under her command. She paints her nail yellow and blue, and she hopes to paint her combat vehicle pink one day. These are just two of the many fascinating, inspiring real-life characters who stride through the book. Vakulenko’s empty grave, among the pines and the birdsong, is marked by cross number 319. When it was exhumed with the rest, his corpse was misidentified as that of a woman, despite cemetery documentation that correctly gave his surname. Eventually, in November, journalists traced a photograph of his body taken at the time of its discovery in May: as soon as Ihnatenko saw it, all her lingering hopes were dashed. Not long after, the body was formally identified using a DNA sample given by his father. This journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. The war itself is a crime, an act of aggression under international law. But within this overarching crime there are tens of thousands of other crimes, whose evidence is being uncovered and documented. According to Oleksandra Matviichuk, the human rights defender who, with her Kyiv-based organisation Centre for Civil Liberties, won the 2022 Nobel peace prize, 41,000 war crimes have been reported so far.

In this difficult, dramatic time, when the independence of my country Ukraine is at risk, the works of the great Scottish writer Archibald Joseph Cronin, who brilliantly combined the talents of a doctor and a writer, help me a lot. I make use of all five volumes of his work, published in Moscow in 1994 by the Sytin Foundation publishing house. It does not matter what the stories are in these books. I do not read fiction now. I use the five volumes to rest my computer on, so that my Zooms and Skypes follow the rules of television, so that the laptop's camera is located at my eye level." We have a small garden and we hope that we can plant potatoes and carrots for ourselves. For us it is a hobby, but what kind of hobby can you have during a war? If the Ukrainian army manages to drive the Russian military away from our region, we will try to return to Lazarevka, to live a normal life again. Although the term "normal life" now seems but a myth, an illusion. In actuality, there can be no normal life for my generation now. Every war leaves a deep wound in the soul of a person. It remains a part of life even when the war itself has ended. I have the feeling that the war is now inside me. It is like knowing that you live with a tumour that cannot be removed. You cannot get away from the war. It has become a chronic, incurable disease. It can kill, or it can simply remain in the body and in the head, regularly reminding you of its presence, like a disease of the spine. I fear I will carry this war with me even if my wife and I some day go on holiday – to Montenegro or Turkey, as we once did." Can war be a time for self-improvement, for self-education? Of course it can. At any age and in any situation, even in wartime, you can discover new aspects of life, new knowledge and new opportunities. You can learn to bake paskas in a damaged stove. You can get a tattoo for the first time in your life at the age of eighty. You can start learning Hungarian or Polish. You can even start learning Ukrainian if you did not know it previously." It would be happening over time," insists Kurkov. "We had the accession of Crimea eight years ago and now this new escalation. But he doesn't have much time left, he could speed up the plans."A week goes by, and all the news is suddenly of the miles and miles of territory Ukraine has liberated in the east, and of the Russian army’s hurried departure. So I send him a message, and a couple of hours later – he was finishing off his column for a Norwegian newspaper – he calls me from somewhere in Germany. Even by his standards – Kurkov has a smile that could light Saint Sophia Cathedral – he sounds happy. “I’m very excited,” he says.

Kurkov is most famous for writing fiction. His novels have been translated into 42 languages. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, he felt unable to continue. Equally alarming, he recalls: "The Russians took Ukrainian children to summer camps and they were not returned. On Russian media, I read that a group of Ukrainian kids were taken to a Russian town and were making jokes about Putin, so the Russians started 're-educating' them." He pauses: "I wouldn't believe it if it wasn't happening." The army is now the most trusted institution in Ukraine," he says. "Something like 85 percent of Ukrainians believe in the army and only 60-something percent believe in Zelensky. The army is more important than the presidential office." Yes, he was a drug addict, but he was also a real collaborator,” says Ihnatenko of the local man. “But he is walking free, and no one does anything to him. That’s it – such is justice … It is very difficult to understand this. Perhaps these are matters that are too high for us.” Many families also travel with other people's children, trying to make sure that all the seats in their cars are occupied. Every empty seat in a car going to the west of Ukraine is a life that was not saved."one historic trauma that of forced deportations, gave rise to another historic trauma, the fear of hunger. “ A few hours later, at 4.30am local time, Russia unleashed a barrage of missiles, air strikes and artillery rounds, and sent airborne forces and armoured columns on a smash-and-grab raid on Kyiv. In Diary of an Invasion, his own newly published account of the war so far, Kurkov wryly observes that at least Putin did not spoil his dinner party. Instead, Kurkov and his wife were woken by explosions in the small hours of the morning. Russians were vertical in their thinking, always looking feudally upwards,” he concludes. “Ukrainians were horizontal – a collective or superorganism. This millions-strong, decentralised network was working tirelessly towards a shared and shimmering goal: victory.” As if by some divine joke, in the Ukrainian National character, unlike in the Russian one, there is no fatalism. Ukrainians almost never get depressed. They are programmed for victory, for happiness, for survival in difficult circumstances, as well as for love of life.”