“I should have died two times already,” said Nataliia Shuliakova with a somber smile. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has unimaginably changed her life.
When the war broke out in early 2022, Shuliakova and her family temporarily relocated to Moldova. Russian forces bombed their home in Ukraine in July of that year. When Shuliakova returned to Ukraine in the summer of 2023, she deliberated between two homes to rent, ultimately choosing the cheaper option in the city’s outskirts. A week later, a Russian attack blew out the windows and roof of Shuliakova’s second-choice apartment. Fortunately, she had not yet moved in.
Despite witnessing the destruction around her, Shuliakova said “losing hope” has not crossed her mind. Instead, she is preoccupied with worry about whether she is doing enough for her own country.
While the full-scale invasion began in 2022, Russia has been at war with Ukraine since 2014. Following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, the Russian Federation annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, and began a war in the eastern part of the country. Between February 2014 and 2022, the war remained in these two parts of Ukraine without notable international attention. The war escalated on the morning of February 24th, 2022, when Russia unleashed troops and missiles on sovereign Ukrainian territory. Today, after more than 700 days of continuous war, Russia has displaced millions, killed tens of thousands of people, and deported an immeasurable number of children from their homes. “It’s the end of the post-World War II order. It’s the decisive end of the end of history. It’s a 1945 situation,” said Marci Shore, Yale History Professor and expert in Eastern European History.
“More and more contacts in your phone become inactive,” Shuliakova said. “When your friends disappear on the frontlines and when your relatives stop answering phone calls, you realize it touches everybody.” For Shuliakova, life now revolves around air sirens and bomb shelters, which she calls adjustments to an unadjustable world.
The first day of the war is unforgettable for every Ukrainian citizen. Victoria Bardok, a 15-year-old student at Kyiv’s Novopechersk School, woke up on February 24, 2022, to news that her town had been occupied by Russian forces. “I saw a message in a school group chat on my phone, that a column of 200 tanks is coming towards the city. Get ready!” In denial about what was happening, she explained that, at first, she thought it was a joke. “We couldn’t go to the basement so we sat in the bathtub. At some moment we understood that the only thing that we can do is just lie in the bathroom.” Bardok and her family spent five hours sheltered in the bathroom.
Bardok’s experience is not uncommon. The Ukrainian government instructs those who shelter in place to follow a “rule of two walls,” which directs individuals to choose a location with two or more walls between themselves and the outside world. The first wall bears the brunt of the explosion, while the second wall absorbs debris. For those who do not have access to an underground shelter, bathrooms tend to be the closest location that meets these requirements.
Since the first strike in February 2022, there have been nearly 40,000 air raid alarms, each with an average duration of 57 minutes. The air strikes target infrastructure, destroying nearly 61% of Ukraine’s electricity generation capacity last winter.
As her town quickly fell to Russia’s invading force, Bardok endured two months of occupation before the Ukrainian army liberated her city in April 2022. Similar echoes of freedom reverberated across the country: Kyiv Oblast was liberated in April and Kharkiv Oblast followed in September. In 2022, Ukrainian forces also reclaimed substantial portions of Dnipro’s left bank in Southern Ukraine. Still, almost 18% of Ukraine’s territory remains under Russian occupation.
Masha Golovasenko, a 15-year-old student from the Novopechersk school, described the first day of the war as terrifying and filled with confusion. “When I woke up, my mom ran into our room and told me that the war had started. I was confused. We lived not far from Boryspil airport, and she told me there were some explosions there. I was very confused, I remember hurrying her on because I thought I was late for school,” she said. Two years later, the sirens and air ride alerts from Russian missile attacks no longer come as a surprise to Golovasenko.
“Explosions in the morning feel like some sort of alarm,” said Bardok. Shuliakova told a similar story, noting that she and her friends use the sirens as an incentive to get out of bed before an air raid causes public transport delays. Aspects of life once incomprehensible have become a reality.
In the first days of the war, thousands of Ukrainians volunteered to join the army and territorial defense forces to protect their country. Additionally, strict wartime laws limit men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, and mobilization laws ensure manpower needs are met throughout the country.
Golovasenko’s father went to war in February 2023 and was killed in Kharkiv in September of the same year. “On the 13th of September, they tell me your father has been gone for 10 days. He died. And when that happens, you don’t understand how to keep living.”
“When the Russians just go like this and take a part of your family, a part of your life, a part of you, you don’t understand. How should I keep planning my future? How am I supposed to learn to live with this loss?” said Golovasenko. While reflecting on her loss and the last two years of war, she echoed the feelings of many Ukrainians. “I remember thinking, why is my father dead, and Putin sits alive, committing crimes against humanity.”
In the face of uncertainty and danger, many Ukrainians are turning to civil society to organize support for the Ukrainian Army as well as those left vulnerable by the war. Shuliakova carries out weekly fundraisers on her social media for various brigades in need of support. Supplies do not always make it to those in need on time, Shuliakova noted. “We were raising money for a bulletproof vest, for some combat boots, and the day I was supposed to send the package, we received a message that the man who was supposed to receive it has received trauma that is incompatible with life.” The situation moves quickly at the front, each moment can be life-deciding, and help cannot always get to vulnerable people in time.
Over the past 24 months, tragedy and loss have become an unavoidable part of Ukrainian life. “It is hard even though I tell myself that it is normal, as normal as war can be,”said Shuliakova.
The war crimes, led by Vladimir Putin and perpetrated by the Russian Federation, shocked the world in their blatant disregard for human rights, undermining principles of international law and sparking widespread condemnation. “It’s brutal, it’s unequivocal, you know, it is genocidal,” said Maksimas Milta, a Yale graduate and country coordinator of The Reckoning Project, an organization that collects testimonies of Russian crimes in Ukraine. According to Milta, Russia’s deportation of children from Ukraine violates both the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. He noted that the International Criminal Court issued both Vladimir Putin and his “Children’s Rights Commissioner” Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova arrest warrants in 2023.
While the war has also severely damaged the Russian and Ukrainian economies, “Ukraine has been amazingly resilient,” noted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Lester Crown Professor at the Yale School of Management. “On the other hand, in Russia, it has been devastating.” Russia faces a decrease in energy production, increasingly high costs of war, and ever-accumulating Western sanctions.
In 2022, Sonnenfeld and his team of Yale students contributed to the exodus of over 1,000 Russian companies by creating a list that informed the public which companies continued to operate in the country after the full-scale invasion. The majority of Western companies that left Russia have not returned. Russia has also suffered increasingly heavy economic losses and continues to bear the expenses of a war with no clear end in sight. Shore echoed the senseless economic nature of Vladimir Putin’s war. “He’s taking millions and millions of dollars every day, in a country where millions of people don’t have indoor plumbing, and using it to slaughter Ukrainians and send missiles for no reason.”
Although Ukraine’s economy remains buoyant, the infrastructure and social damages are extensive. The World Bank Group, the European Commission, and the United Nations, currently estimate the cost of reconstruction and recovery in Ukraine at 486 billion U.S. dollars. However, the human costs of the war are immeasurable – even irrecoverable.
“You try to come up with an assessment of the damages suffered by families whose family members were murdered, slaughtered innocent civilians, people who suffered mutilation and dismemberment, and the thousands of children who were kidnapped. It defies imagination,” said Sonnenfeld.
The war has undeniably changed the social fabric of Ukraine and will shape the nation for generations to come. Additionally, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has profound implications on Europe’s geopolitical balance. In 2022, Finland and Sweden decided to join The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Both countries had previously abstained in an effort to avoid antagonizing Russia. Unprecedented Western sanctions have now made Russia a pariah state, economically and diplomatically isolated from the Western world. For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war has returned.
The war is not solely a Ukrainian problem – its social, economic, and political implications surpass Ukrainian and Russian borders. . The safety of Ukrainians, and with it the post-Cold War democratic world order, depends not only on the brave men and women of the Ukrainian army but also on sustained international attention and aid. “Don’t forget about what is going on in Ukraine, because if it doesn’t stop on our territory, it won’t end at the Carpathian mountains, it will go far beyond,” said Golovasenko.
International support is necessary for Ukraine to survive an enemy more than 200 times its size and with a population of nearly 100 million more people. The United States has sent more than $75 billion of aid to Ukraine since the beginning of 2022, prompting a high-stakes debate in Congress regarding future aid packages. On February 12, 2024, a new $61 billion aid package was passed by the Senate with support from the Democratic Party. However, the bill still faces an uphill battle in the House of Representatives, with a majority of the Republican party vocally opposed to the aid package. Ukraine has also received financial assistance from its European, Asian, and NATO allies who committed over $178 billion.
Aid is also symbolic, providing moral strength after two years of an exhausting war. “When you see support even from people, who live there, on the other side of the ocean, thousands of kilometers away, you understand that Ukraine isn’t alone. I am not alone,” said Golovasenko, “This feeling really gives strength to move forward. It gives strength to fight forward for a future because, if there would be no support, it would be much harder, morally and physically.”
Ukrainian students at Yale have also contributed to fundraising efforts. The Ukraine House at Yale, an undergraduate student organization, has raised over $15,000 since 2022. The funds benefit organizations like “Come Back Alive” and “Razom,” which support civilian air-strike alert and air-raid defense systems. Yale students are aware of the importance of aid for continued Ukrainian military success. “I’m no military expert, but I can predict it. If we don’t get military aid and financial aid, we’re going to be f–ed,” says Yurii Stasiuk, a Yale sophomore who leads fundraising for The Ukraine House.
As the two-year anniversary of the invasion approaches, the war has led to fatigue among many Ukrainians, but it has not diminished hope. “There is a sobering understanding that we will be victorious, but we have to keep moving and struggling through blood, sweat and tears towards it,” said Bardok. After years of brutal and tragic fighting, few predict the war will be over in the coming weeks or months.
Hope remains prevalent in Ukraine, and it is essential to the fight against the Russian Federation. A public opinion poll shows that 93% of Ukrainians remain confident that their nation will prevail over the invader. “Even if the global West will limit its help to Ukraine, we will not just give up,” Shuliakova said.
“We fight because we want to preserve our identity and our territories. And we know that if we stop doing this, we will just crumble.”