In the week in which Ukraine marks the third anniversary of the invasion of their country by Russia, a short and poignant extract from award-winning Night Train to Odesa by Scottish writer, Jen Stout.
I kept thinking back to Kyiv, sometime in spring 2023 – that strange spring, people emerging from the awful dark winter, proud that they’d withstood everything that had been thrown at them, the Shahed drones and the power cuts, the cold and the candles.
But there had been a sense of resignation, of facing a long struggle. No giddy hope here. The sea of little flags on Independence Square, a sea which grew with each death at the front, had been surrounded by silent figures, heads bowed, a permanent shifting funeral in the city’s heart.
‘I believe strongly that this is our last chance,’ the judge and army volunteer Oleh Ferdorov had said, as we sat opposite each other in a café in the centre of the city.
When we’d first met, in that bunker in Kharkiv, he’d been in uniform. ‘It’s our last chance to become really free,’ hecontinued. ‘To become really independent from them. If we don’t win now, Ukraine will never exist again. Itwill be destroyed. It will become part of Russia.
‘We understand this is the war for our lives,’ he said quietly. ‘Our crazy, crazy neighbours want us to be dead, and we want to live; we don’t have a choice.’
