Growing up in a cold and dark Ukraine under constant Russian attack: ‘My 4-year-old can tell the bombs apart’
The tawdry routine of everyday misery of cold, darkness, and fear that grinds at the human soul: that is Vladimir Putin’s strategy of attacking civilians across Ukraine and could break the country’s will to fight on. But it’s unlikely.
Showers in darkness, a shave in cold water every morning, two small children who know the Russian president is trying to kill them, and dawn runs to a streetside stall for coffee and cocoa, the only morale booster for a new day. These are the routines of Kyiv residents like Oleksandr Merezhko. He knows he is lucky.
His four-year-old daughter Sophia is the same age as the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The elder, Lilian, is seven, so neither have known a world in which Russian troops are not fighting inside their country.
Sophia can tell an outgoing missile blast from an incoming Shahed drone attack. She attends kindergarten. Her older sister has learning difficulties, so Sophia grabs her hand when the sirens scream, and the air buzzes with what the family calls “bees” – incoming drones.
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She then leads her sister to safety in the Soviet-era bunkers outside their old but untargeted ground-floor apartment, where school carries on.
“For them it’s normal. They cannot imagine their life without it,” Oleksandr explains. “They know that when they go to the kindergarten we still don’t have power in the flat. When they come back there is no power. They have learned how to play using little lights and how to play in darkness.
“Better than adults I think, children are more adaptable. And they never complain.”
A couple of weeks ago what he thinks was a Shahed drone smashed into the top floors of the building next door, setting fire to two flats and injuring three people in the Kremlin’s ongoing campaign. Fragments, bits of plastic and yellow foam of the Iranian-designed autonomous plane loaded with 40kg of explosive, still pepper the snow outside the building – where this member of Ukraine’s parliament has lived with his family for four years.
“We almost bought a flat in the new highrise but we could not afford it so bought on the ground floor next door – luckily for us – just before the full-scale invasion of February 2022,” says Oleksandr, who is chair of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
A former human rights lawyer married to an academic, he can bring warm food to his small children from the parliamentary canteen. His cooker at home is electric and they’re unlikely to get power for more than a couple of hours in 24 – and usually after midnight.
Roughly half of Ukraine’s power-generating capacity has been destroyed by Russia. Most of these attacks have come since Donald Trump ended military aid to Ukraine last year – in the 36th month of the full scale invasion by Russia. Two-thirds of its nuclear capacity has fallen and GDP is expected to take a three per cent hit.
“I started to plunge into kind of depression and apathy because when it’s cold, when for the whole day you cannot even warm up food, and it’s dark, and it’s cold – it is difficult psychologically and for me, for many people.
“It looked endless, you know, just endless. And everything came at once, this cold weather which we haven’t had for years since the full scale invasion, this darkness,” says Oleksandr, warming his hands on a mug of green tea.
