MINUTE OF SILENCE

My city has been changing throughout the course of the war. As if Kyiv were living through an accelerated historical transformation. Every return astounds me anew. In recent months, it has surprised me above all with a feeling of new emptiness, new absences.

More friends and acquaintances have been mobilized; some left the country or made plans to. There are also those who were willing to risk their lives and crossed the border illegally to avoid taking part in the war. On the street, I will no longer come across those who died in the months of my absence. Some of my friends are among them.

The feeling of continual deprivation, of creeping destruction, it seems surreal. It hurts simply because the destruction doesn’t stop. And because the prospect of further destruction is discussed as if it were a constructive measure.

Already in the first months of war, when it became clear that the desired peace wouldn’t come, an opposing idea emerged: the concept of “endurance,” of being unbreakable. Along with it comes the contradictory notion that the war is both a free choice and an unavoidable necessity.

In May 2022, I returned to Kyiv after a month’s absence. The car radio was on quite loud. The almost ear-splitting voice of a woman shouted: “Good morning, heroic people of a heroic nation! We know who we are. We will not be broken!” News reports followed; already then, I couldn’t fully trust them.

The anchorwoman’s voice, expressing her fear through rage, as if she were really begging for help, is still stuck in my head. Her intonation, it seemed to me, refuted her assertions. Every inflection shouted at me: “Can’t you see, they’re forcing us to be heroes?”

A present echo of this voice is the answering machine of my mobile network in Ukraine. When you phone someone who’s on another call, the automatic response is: “This subscriber is not available. Perhaps this very conversation brings us closer to victory.” There’s a threatening ring to these sentences. But to me, they’re still poignant. Ukrainian society is still seeking words that can become symbols of solidarity, resistance, and survival.

This “us,” this “we” is meant to convey a feeling of togetherness, a sense of the totality of war. And this war continues to seize new realms of the everyday.

In August and September 2025, debates flared up in Ukraine over body language, specifically concerning the minute of silence. Since 2022, a minute of silence has been held every day around nine in the morning in Ukraine to commemorate the victims of Russian military aggression. During the long years of war, this minute was a personal matter for every individual—an occasion to reflect on what we are losing in this war.

But during the summer months, the status of the ritual fundamentally changed. Bloggers and activists shared images on social media of people who “didn’t observe the minute of silence.” Suddenly, it became apparent that during the Ukrainian minute of silence, in any public space—on public transportation, in kindergarten, at school, on the street—one had to pause and stand in place, unmoving, with a bowed head.

At first, pictures appeared of men on a train who had refused to stand up during the minute of silence. The train came from Kharkiv, a city under fire, where civilians and soldiers are constantly losing their homes and their lives. A well-known Ukrainian journalist described the men as “biomaterial” and demanded the security forces track them down. They were sought, eventually found, and identified. Then, several videos were shared of passengers and automobile drivers who didn’t pull over during the minute of silence.

The next step: social networks and even government websites filled with reports of “successfully conducted” minutes of silence. Kindergarten children stand in rows with their heads bowed, as do older schoolchildren and passersby. All in identical poses. With their bodies, they draw solidarity, unity, and synchronicity into the space. A designated, state-regulated emotion, a collective action, has become a forced daily ritual. It opens every day in every public space. Silence and mourning are no longer left to personal responsibility. Not taking part in the minute of silence has been dangerous for some time now.

In a situation of war, Russian aggression, and constant shelling, it is difficult, even painful, to be deemed suspicious by one’s own society. The same society that has been threatened by external aggression, and that one instinctively wants to protect. In this circumstance of external attack, can one afford to become the target of internal attack? Since one’s own environment, one’s own society, becomes the most important thing one can rely on in times of danger from the outside.

Every time I quote the statements, rituals, and rules of conduct from this time of war, I realize that even the slightest distancing from them is often interpreted as a dangerous affinity for the “enemy side.”

ON JOKES

Jokes in wartime appear to repeat themselves from generation to generation. Many of them seem, as if by design, to reinforce the image of a steadfast, unshakeable society.

These jokes allow for no political irony. They serve a different purpose: indicating acceptance of what’s happening. A Ukrainian activist asked me, “Write about the humor of our women in your article. So that people over there understand what we’re feeling.” Over there, that is, the imaginary West toward which people have been striving during the war, and whose pacifism they mock.

The best-known of these jokes are also picked up by the international media, mainly to illustrate the resilience of city dwellers who live through attacks.

A fellow passenger on the train to Kyiv told me such a joke: “Women try to put on their prettiest underwear before going to bed. So that they’ll look perfect when their corpses are dragged out from under the rubble.” A variation: “I called my girlfriend before the shelling and reminded her to make herself up nice before bed. When you step out of a burning house in front of the cameras, you’ve got to look great. So that everyone can see the kind of women we have!”

THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 27 TO 28, 2025

When I was in Kyiv this summer, I tried to chronicle the shelling of the city. In my apartment, I experienced one of the year’s longest and heaviest Russian attacks: the night of August 28th.

The evening before, some of my friends and acquaintances began to gather to spend the night together in one apartment, not alone. They knew that an attack was coming and that it would come down especially hard.

A little later, I saw pictures of platforms in the Kyiv Metro where people had settled down to sleep. On gray granite, under the fluorescent light, air mattresses lay next to folding chairs. Couples read their books side by side. Kids played in the cold white glow. Like hundreds of thousands of other Kyiv residents, I decided to stay at home.

The attack began. A bang sounded out, unexpectedly close. Ridiculous, that even then, somewhere inside me, I still believed the war would stay as far away from my home as possible.

The shelling was accompanied by a drone attack. Invisible from my window, the drones seemed omnipresent, as if they were rushing straight towards my windowpanes. They produced a sustained high tone reminiscent of the mating songs of giant insects. Like many sounds of war, there is something natural in it.

The buzzing of a mosquito, the flight of a fly, only amplified a hundred times. Each attack that night had its own climax, its “loudest” explosive chord. Indeed, it held some sort of musical composition.

Around four in the morning, the first reports of the destruction reached us. After another terrifying explosion, a sickening feeling of loss, grief, and helplessness came over me. I thought that people had been killed somewhere nearby.

One explosion, one of the last ones, carried with it a strange feeling. It was as if something had broken, collapsed to the ground, and swept away a part of the city along with it.

Figures were released later: eighteen injured initially, then one child buried under the rubble of a residential building. By nine in the morning, the death toll had risen to ten. Today, we know that twenty-five people died that night in Kyiv, among them four children. Dozens were injured. It was civilians who died; to be precise, they were executed without trial.

WAR OF ATTRITION AND DESTRUCTION

A small, five-story brick house on the left bank of the river in Kyiv has been completely destroyed. It resembles the house where my grandparents lived. From photos, the collapsed building looks uninhabitable. More than that, it looks like an old, dilapidated building that was condemned to be destroyed by legal means. Black, broken windowpanes, caved-in floors, bricks that crumbled into dust on impact. In the photos, it looks like a ruin refusing to testify to the night’s attack.

The war is hidden deep within these ruins. So too with the reality of war, which eludes the visual field of omnipresent news reports. The day after the raid, I learned that many European media outlets were highlighting the damage to an EU building in Kyiv. If I were to crudely summarize the statements of allied countries after another Russian act of terror, it would often sound like this: “We see that our common enemy is not ready for peace. This shelling confirms once again that peace with such an enemy is impossible.” But most of those who repeat these words live in peace themselves. For them, peace is possible.

The residents of Ukraine are denied peace. Their view is repeatedly portrayed as unanimous. Not infrequently throughout the war, I’ve been asked by international journalists what “the Ukrainians” think about the prospect of peace talks. But the Ukrainians—just like the French, the Poles, Hungarians, or Italians—cannot all think the same thing, even in a situation of pain, trauma, and war.

Nevertheless, this war—like many others—demonstrates how the notion of collective resistance often assumes an indiscriminate toll. It affects not only those who believe in it, but also those who don’t, killing apolitical people, as well as people with the most diverse views and convictions.

THE MORNING AFTER THE SHELLING

The next morning on my street is no different from any other. On the streets, there’s no war to be seen. Cafés are open. International reports of the shelling mention one in the vicinity of the EU building, whose wall partly collapsed and whose windows were blown out by explosions. It opened that day at its usual time, standing there as a visible sign of steadfastness.

In a small café near my apartment, the vendor told me her house began to teeter during the shelling and that her house pets warned her of the imminent strikes. During the shelling, her cats and dogs began, for the first time, to speak in human language. They asked her to go into the hallway and ran in circles to alert her of a new wave of attacks so that the whole family could be saved.

The vendor smiles at me and says: Everything will be fine. I smile back, we both laugh.

Reports of destruction in Ukraine are followed in the news by images of Russian oil refineries that have been hit by our drones. They try to reassure us viewers that we will respond to this strike with a counterstrike.

These seemingly minor details took on weight for me all at once. Every one of them disturbs, disrupts the usual course of thought, and shatters a coherence of reality that is so necessary in war—as necessary as a glass of water to quench thirst. Anyone unable to secure this uniformity faces scrutiny.

I work on this text, and I hear the warning of my German acquaintances: “Be careful when you write. Every word can be used by enemies of Ukraine, by political forces in Germany who always stand on the side of the adversary.” And I feel, even before my voice is heard, someone coopting it, evaluating it, and appraising it as a tool that is more or less useful for something.

FLEETING TESTIMONIES

After our conversation about the shelling, the vendor in the café suddenly starts to tell me how she recently witnessed a violent mobilization with her own eyes.

She was walking down the street and saw men being hauled onto two small buses. She adds, “They didn’t have time to make a peep. No one got it on video, no one could help them.”

The expression “they didn’t make a peep” reminds me of my childhood. Not making a peep is what kids and kittens do, not soon-to-be soldiers. The woman repeats that she saw the scene with her own eyes: “It would have been hard for you to watch.”

My friend calls me and explains that her brother in Odessa saw a stroller in the middle of the street, abandoned, because the child’s father had been mobilized while walking it.

Among the many videos of forced mobilization, footage from Lviv has stuck in my mind in particular: A little corgi barks frantically, leaping at the men shoving its owner into a mobilization bus. The man shouts: “But I’m with my dog! What are you doing?!”—as if this argument could convince the people handling him like an object awaiting transport to a new location.

Another video that caused a “scandal” in Ukrainian news this summer: the sudden mobilization of a man in the village of Merefa in the Kharkiv Oblast. On a crowded street, we see an elderly woman try to obstruct a bus departing for a mobilization center. She screams very loudly, but there is not a single word within her scream. Another woman films the scene with commentary.

The bus reverses, while the woman hangs on to the door. A soldier has to detach her from it and shove her off so that the bus can leave. The bus drives off, and the woman collapses unconscious in the middle of traffic. Other passersby run to her. The local news initially reports that she died at the scene. Then a retraction appears, saying she survived. Then another retraction: there is no way to confirm that the woman is still alive.

Forced mobilization is probably only possible because this war offers little prospect of peace. It is simply a matter of persevering until the other side is exhausted and can’t go on any further. The logical development of this approach I will not analyze here.

“Wartime humor” also manifests in documents of this kind. A young man does parkour in a park. Several soldiers approach him, throw him to the ground, and sit on him. Like in the corgi video, we see how the man is instantly stripped of his power over himself for the benefit of others, for the benefit of society. He is led away.

“What A Wonderful World” plays in the background. The video is titled “New friends in black wanted to prove to me that being dead is better than being alive.”

My mother sends me a photo. The jeweler near our house has closed his shop. A hand-written sign hangs over the bolted window: “Away for an indefinite period. With Ukraine’s armed forces.” Sometimes in Kyiv, one sees flyers about “busification”—slang for forced mobilization—alongside the recommendation: Hide at home!

Fragments from a recently published interview with Ai Weiwei sound like a response to this, once again referring to the concept of steadfastness: “Ukrainians would give their last drop of blood to fight.”

This and other public statements seem to serve the purpose of revealing only one part of war’s reality. This part exists. Among my friends, there are volunteers on the front lines. Some support the front lines as helpers. I hear of people who sacrifice themselves to save other soldiers and civilians on the front lines. But a reality in which “the last drop of blood” must be reckoned cannot be all-encompassing, cannot be the only truth.

FROM THE NEW DICTIONARY OF WAR

Grinding down the Front Line—the enemy’s advance into the interior of the country. Examples of usage: news reports, descriptions of the course of war by various experts.

Pencil/Pencils—Term for infantry soldiers on the zero line of the front, especially those participating in assault attacks. The word plays on the process of sharpening a pencil, which gradually loses length through the process of sharpening. (A year ago, an acquaintance of mine, a soldier who fought on the front in Zaporizhzhia, depicted his situation as follows: "We thought they would spare us. But our group is being used up. We’ve become pencils.” Shortly afterward, he was reported missing.)

To make a Defender out of a Person—A common euphemism for forced mobilization. Someone who is a civilian in life and creed is “made” into a soldier meant to defend other civilians.

I’ve heard these sayings used time and again by people I know.

MY FEAR, MY INCONSTANCY

At the beginning of October 2025, two acquaintances of mine were in a training unit in the Lviv Oblast; they were mobilized entirely unexpectedly, in the middle of their everyday lives. Both were conscientious objectors. Both have health problems.

I hope that mentioning this will make a difference for them, that they or others in a similar situation will get support. One of the two, a natural scientist and former university lecturer from the region of Lviv, is in very poor health; severe kidney disease is suspected. Nevertheless, he was denied admission to the military hospital on the grounds that many of those mobilized try to flee the hospitals. It’s been two weeks since I could reach him by telephone. I’ve removed his name from this text.

An artist and performer, whose name I can’t mention for security reasons, was mobilized on the way to work in Kyiv despite his poor condition. He needs medical attention, but still wants to serve the Ukrainian army within the scope of his professional capacities.

Perhaps this text, a sketch about “unbreakability” that shows different people in various situations, can partly complement the overall image of the war. I also hope that this publication will make clearer what we’re losing with every new day of it.

Like many other texts, this one is incomplete and raises no claim to a comprehensive truth about what is happening. A situation that fractures into pieces can probably only be reflected approximately through a fragmentary narrative.

The reality of years of war sinks into contradictory impressions. If I only follow the news reports, I perceive either people’s everyday experiences or the vast amount of data on losses and gains. To understand how the front line moves, I have to compare sources and assemble scattered information, which together amount to a kind of overall picture.

Perhaps one day, if the dynamics of the front line during all these years are analyzed, the many lives lost every day, perhaps then the ready-made formulas that have formed around the war, and explain its inevitability, will seem doubtful to some.

In public debates in recent years, the focus has shifted from war as an unacceptable practice that traumatizes communities and destroys cities and microcultures to an assessment of its results, whether they seem acceptable or not. Society’s willingness to endure war is measured through surveys whose results, in turn, will serve as arguments for its continuation. This reminds me of asking prison inmates to vote between life imprisonment and the death penalty in a survey. Perhaps it’s time to remind ourselves again what war really means.