Living and Writing in Ukraine Today

It is the silence I notice most. Not the quiet of peace, which is open and full of breath, but the held silence between sirens, which is dense and watchful. The air itself seems to carry a physical weight, a pressure that settles on the shoulders and alters the quality of the light. In this quiet, you learn to listen not for what is there, but for what is missing.

Each morning, I bring this silence with me to the desk. The chair. The lamp. The waiting page. These simple objects become the architecture of a small and sovereign space. To open a notebook or a document is to make a claim: that here, in this bounded field of paper or pixels, another order can prevail. An order built on clarity and conscience, not on coercion and chaos. An invasion, after all, is not only a violation of territory; it is an assault on the very grammar of a people’s existence. It seeks to erase the story, to replace it with the deafening noise of force.

Writing, then, becomes an act of quiet self-determination.

It is a slow and deliberate defense of an inner border. Each sentence composed is a line drawn against the void. Each word chosen for its truth is a small reclamation of meaning. This is not about crafting beautiful phrases while the world burns. It is about the moral discipline of witness. The word conscience comes to us from the Latin conscientia — a “knowing with.” To write in this place and time is an act of knowing with a nation, of holding a shared truth against a tidal wave of falsehood. It is a refusal to forget, together.

There is a profound paradox in this. What power can a handful of words possibly hold against the brute mechanics of war? The question is honest, and it haunts the edges of the work. And yet, the things an empire can occupy — land, buildings, bodies — are not the things that last. Truth, memory, dignity, faith: these are weightless. They have no physical address. They cannot be shelled into submission. They can only be ceded, and the work of the writer is to ensure that cession never happens.

So the task is simple, if not easy. To sit in the weighted silence. To face the blank page and make a mark. To build, one word at a time, a space where the human spirit remains free and sovereign. It is a small act, but it is not nothing. It is how the story endures.