The Second Year

War is a long story, with many chapters. Reporting from Ukraine, Wendell Steavenson sees dogged optimism, banished illusions, inspiring acts of generosity, and resilience in all its forms.

At the beginning of a crisis it’s the adrenaline that gets you through. When Ukrainians woke up on the morning of February 24, 2022, they were jolted into a world of urgency and alarm. Explosions, jets screaming overhead, tanks on their highways.

I remember reading headlines in the sleepy village on the coast of Brittany where I live, when an email from an editor popped into my inbox: Do you want to go to Ukraine for us? Once upon a time I had been a war correspondent in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt during the Arab Spring, but over the past few years I had started writing about food as a way to illustrate larger issues: ecology, economics, identity. I briefly weighed the article about onions I was working on against the Russian invasion. Forty-eight hours later I was in Ukraine. Call it muscle memory, my brain switched from peace to war as soon as I pulled on my Blundstone boots. All the everyday stuff—grocery shopping, admin, social events, diary entries known as “plans”—fell away.

Ukrainians were forced to make this transition at gunpoint. Very suddenly, actions were reduced to reflexes: fight or flight. In the western city of Lviv I saw volunteers for the Territorial Defense Force lined up in the street in borrowed, mismatched camouflage; at the train station there were thousands of people queuing in snow flurries, carrying children and pets and whole lives in raw, chafed hands, evacuating from cities under bombardment in the east.