The phrase “the forgotten war” might be somewhat misleading, as almost no one in Europe has forgotten Ukraine. We know the approved nouns. We say sovereignty, invasion, resistance, aid. We support Ukraine in principle, which means we support it straightforwardly and frictionlessly as we do with anything that has not yet truly affected us. What we do not fully grasp, or at least not genuinely, is what a war feels like once it has become built into the infrastructure, once it has infiltrated electricity, sleep, family life, traffic, grief, weather, and the layout of the streets. One arrives in Kyiv to see generators lining the roads because the power grid is down again, and suddenly “energy insecurity,” a phrase that once appeared only in thinktank papers, is there on the pavement, growling and coughing diesel into the air.
And everyone, truly everyone, is affected by it. Not affected in the abstract moral sense, but affected as in changed, marked, and pulled out of shape entirely. Our fixer’s brother is missing. Missing, not dead, which in Ukraine is sometimes the more terrible category because the no-man’s-land between positions is so exposed, mined, and pulverised that bodies are often impossible to recover or even confirm. In some places, there are more missing than dead, which initially seems like a bureaucratic discrepancy until you realise it means families living within a state of permanent suspension. Not closure, not mourning, not exactly hope either — just the long administrative and spiritual torment of not knowing.
The south of the country resembles what outsiders expect war to be: dragon’s teeth scattered across the landscape, military convoys, and the harsh angles of military defence. Kyiv and Lviv are different, but not because they are less at war. In those cities, the war manifests in memorials and air raid sirens. Faces printed on boards. Flags. Photographs. Fresh flowers. The strange and increasingly familiar civic choreography of interruption, where a siren sounds, and conversations simply shift around it. During the 48 hours we were there, approximately 800 missiles and drones were launched at Ukraine. Eight hundred. A number so vast that the mind, in self-defence, tries to turn it into data, but on the ground, the data transforms into sound, tension, waiting, messages checked at 3 am, a child hurried indoors, a mother who does not fully sleep.
What is remarkable is the strength of the endurance. “Stoicism” is the word that comes to mind, though it feels too refined, too classical—a marble word for something much messier and more exhausting. It is closer to what older generations called the Blitz spirit, except that phrase has taken on a sepia tone that can make catastrophe seem almost comforting, and there is nothing comforting about this. Still, the family resemblance is clear. People carry on under existential threat. They queue for coffee, go to work, joke darkly, check on relatives, charge phones when possible, step around the generators, glance at the sky in a way that is no longer dramatic but simply habitual. Courage here does not often appear as cinematic heroism. It manifests as continuity.
My generation has a habit of wondering what it must have been like for our grandparents, as if history at full pressure were something available only in documentaries, black-and-white footage, and inherited stories about ration books and bomb shelters. But there is no need to speculate so much. One only has to look at Ukraine. There it is: the thing itself, or close enough to strip away our romantic distance. A society living with the possibility of erasure and refusing, daily and without much rhetoric, to be erased. People endure. They endure sirens, blackouts, absence, uncertainty, bureaucracy, fear. They endure because the alternative is annihilation, and because endurance, once stripped of all the heroic varnish we like to apply to it from afar, turns out to be a series of small practical acts repeated under intolerable conditions. That, more than any slogan, is what Ukraine teaches us.
