“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”
I am moving out of my apartment in Kharkiv today. While I drink coffee and wake up, I stare out my bedroom window for a long, last time. It overlooks a narrow street five stories below where I can see three tattoo parlors, a hipster barbershop, two coffee shops, a post office, a shawarma stand, a pharmacy, and a skate shop that specializes in custom skateboards and Carhart apparel. There is also a bridal boutique that sells beautiful designer gowns. The front of the boutique doubles as a café, where three young women are currently sitting. They will sit there for most of the day. The women change daily, but their routine is always the same. They will nurse americanos, smoke e-cigarettes, and scroll their phones. Eventually a young man in military uniform will arrive. One of the women will kiss him passionately and the whole group will enter the store. An hour later they will all leave, and there will be one less gown in the window. As I watch the shopkeepers and the people walking their dogs before they go to work, it is hard to remember that Kharkiv was being evacuated six months ago.
Russia’s second offensive on Kharkiv Oblast started on May 10th of this year. Russian President Vladmir Putin said the objective was to establish a “sanitary zone” in the northeast of Ukraine. One did not need to be a military strategist to understand why he said this. The first battle of Kharkiv had been a great embarrassment for the Russian military. They attempted to occupy the city of Kharkiv in February of 2022, but despite months of fighting, they never took control of it. They changed tactics a bunch of times. Nothing worked. In the small towns that they did capture, the resistance was fierce. In Izium, some old Ukrainian ladies fed poisoned cake to their Russian “liberators.” In Velykyi Burluk, resisters car-bombed the Russian-appointed administrator. The Ukrainian army took back the whole region in September of 2022. Now, in spring of 2024, the Russian military was not going to risk being embarrassed in Kharkiv again. There would be no occupation. They were going to rubble the whole place. Within a week of President Putin’s “sanitary zone” announcement, the government of Ukraine began evacuating the region.
When the news broke, my unit was at a training facility, getting ready for our next rotation at the front. We were sent to Kharkiv as soon as the evacuation was called. When I got to the city, my Belarusian roommate, Mischa, and I hired a realtor to help us find an apartment. It felt odd to be haggling with a realtor in a region that was being evacuated, but we knew it was the best way to find a good place when our unit moved to a new sector.
I remember watching as Mischa asked if we would be allowed to dog-sit his Ukrainian girlfriend’s dog in the apartment. The realtor told him the landlord said no. No pets. They discussed the matter in Russian for several minutes. Mischa had told me how important this issue was to his girlfriend. The realtor phoned the landlord, so Mischa could speak to him directly. Mischa’s girlfriend was with us at the time. I remember watching her watch him as he petitioned the landlord over the phone. When he hung up, the dog was allowed in the apartment. Mischa’s girlfriend smiled and wrapped her arms around his neck. That meant we were renting this place.
The apartment is on the top floor of a five-story “panel building,” one of those sad, concrete monstrosities that give the former Soviet countries their distinct and dystopian aesthetic. They are stark and oppressive looking, but behind their brutalist architecture is a pragmatic beauty. Pictures do not capture it; the buildings are objectively repulsive when photographed. But in person and in context they are endearing and hospitable, in a severe way. There is a kind of resilience that permeates the walls of a Soviet-era apartment block, a dignity. It penetrates the windows in the winter with the freezing cold that forces you to wear a toque while you sleep, and it leaks out of the faucet handles while you wash dishes. You can observe it in the patchwork of renovations and euro-inspired upgrades. Each apartment is an archaeology of domestic adaptations, a record of how regular people change the world they inherit in small but meaningful ways to make life more livable.
Like most apartments in Ukraine, in front of the entrance to this building there is an old, weathered, unpleasant-looking bench with an old, weathered, unpleasant-looking woman sat permanently upon it. She is always alone, even if there is more than one of her. I do not know why certain Ukrainian women decide their role late in life is to become an architectural grotesque, forever sitting outside their home, warding off evil. But I am very thankful that they do. Each of them is a kind of self-appointed neighborhood watch. They sit in judgment of all who pass by. They are intimidating and yet comforting. It is obvious they do not like you (or anyone), but if you lock yourself out of your building, they are there to help you. If someone parks their car in a way that blocks the sidewalk, that old lady transforms into a vigilante by-law enforcement officer. During missile strikes, she remains at her post, directing pedestrians to the nearest bunker.
The interior of the apartment is as self-contradictory as the old woman who sits out front of the building. The floors and furniture are made of cheap materials masquerading as expensive ones, but they somehow create an atmosphere of authenticity. The shower and curtain rods all hang permanently aslant and look like they will collapse at any moment. But no matter how many missile strikes shake the building, those rods do their job. The enclosed balcony where Mischa and I dry our laundry is minimalist and utilitarian, mostly used for storage. But it overlooks a beautiful bit of the Kharkiv skyline. I dry my laundry in a painting.
The apartment is perfect. But I was only here half the time. The other half I was in the woods with my platoon, hiding from drones and hunting for gunfights. When we started the rotation, we took two casualties in the first hour of the first mission. The Russians had figured out how to put thermal cameras on those small drones that drop grenades on you. So, suddenly we couldn’t do anything at night. We had to do everything in daylight, which meant there was no element of surprise anymore, no maneuver. Us and the Russian infantry were just running at each other like a battle scene from Braveheart. Back in the NATO armies, we always congratulated ourselves on our night-fighting capabilities, believing this is what made us superior to any potential adversary. We were quite arrogant about it, as if the bad guys would never learn how to operate in the dark. Goodbye to all that.
Halfway through the summer, the Ukrainians launched an offensive into Kursk Oblast, on the Russian side of the border, about 200 kilometers northwest of where we were fighting. One might assume this would have distracted the Russian chain of command from our tiny sliver of the front in Kharkiv, but it didn’t. We had their radios, taken from POWs we had captured, and we could hear the Russian officers freaking out on their soldiers. The more success the Ukrainians had in Kursk, the harder the Russians in our sector fought to take back positions we had captured. They fought hard, but not well, because they were conscripts.
At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home. I didn’t have my house keys because when the medics evacuated me from the zero-line I was separated from my gear. I messaged Mischa to see if he was home and could he come downstairs to let me in? While I waited for him to text me back, I went to get a coffee at the café on the ground floor of our building.
As I waited in line, I google mapped the trench where I had been blown up. It was 34 kilometers from my apartment, the same distance as my commute to work when I was an instructor at the Infantry School back in New Brunswick eight years earlier. I pondered this strange coincidence. Eventually, the barista’s voice broke through my pondering. Unsure how long she had been standing there waiting for my order, I blurted out Ukrainian words.
“One can have americano without milk?”
A missile exploded somewhere outside. Car alarms went off in the street.
“For here or to take away?” she said in English.
I looked out the doorway at the tables on the tiny gardened terrace of the café. It sat five stories below my bedroom window. The car alarms blared. My phone vibrated. It was a text from Mischa. He was walking the dog. He’d be home soon.
Dave Smith is a retired Major in the Canadian Armed Forces. He fought in Ukraine in the war there for the past year and a half. He previously authored an op-ed in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail earlier this year outlining why he decided to serve in Ukraine.
