Ukraine: After two years of war, the abnormal is the new normal

The two missiles flew overhead with a whoosh, startling the handful of Ukrainian pupils one morning this week, just as they were settling into their seats.

They shot fearful looks at their teacher, Olha Lytenko, who after two years of close proximity to war knows the difference between outgoing Ukrainian rockets, and incoming Russian ones.

“They looked at me and saw confidence,” the veteran teacher recalls a few hours later. “We paused, then got on with our work. Before, they would have been crawling under the tables.”

Lyman, a nondescript and sprawling railway hub in eastern Ukraine, was occupied for four months by invading Russian troops, and then liberated in October 2022 during a sweeping Ukrainian counterattack. But war never left Lyman’s doorstep, with the active front line often less than 10 miles away.

As Ukrainians grimly mark the two-year anniversary Saturday of the three-pronged Russian invasion of their country, Russian forces have overcome previous battlefield failures and now mount scores of attacks every day across the 600-mile-long front.

The attacks are forcing Ukrainian units starved of ammunition to dig deeper into defensive positions as they await stalled U.S. military aid and limited European help.

For the Ukrainian people, the cataclysmic abnormality wrought by the invasion has, after two years, become an uneasy new normal. And the town of Lyman, with its steady drumbeat of distant and not-so-distant explosions, is emblematic of a nation caught in limbo, with no end in sight.

Wartime school

Even Ms. Lytenko’s classroom is an example of a temporary measure that has, by necessity, become semipermanent. It’s a sanctuary for students and teacher alike.

Unique in the school, it is weather-proofed and made bright and functional, with two wood-burning stoves, a generator, computers, and Starlink satellite internet, enabling online teaching.

The school’s only obvious changes from when the Monitor first visited a year ago? A concrete above-ground air raid shelter that can fit 20 people now stands in front, and a frigid, unused classroom whose windows had to be replaced is stacked with wood to fuel the stove.

“The most stressful and unpleasant feeling is when the [fighting] is intensifying around the city, and you realize what scale of responsibility you are bearing, for the children and other lives,” says Ms. Lytenko, who has the patient eyes of a teacher clearly devoted to her students’ learning.

“Of course, it is stressful to cope with that,” she says. “But at the same time, having children here is a factor that helps us cope. ... They are by their nature hopeful; they want to come here; they want to see their friends and dream about what they will become in the future ... and that helps me personally get through it.”

Ms. Lytenko, who has taught at this same school for 34 years, helped pioneer the single-classroom concept at 10 locations across the district that serve just under 350 students today, a fraction of the prewar number.

For children who were in Lyman during the Russian occupation, the restoration of electricity and running water alone is a “huge achievement,” she says. She notes, however, that Russian missiles have recently targeted schools, including one last week in the nearby city of Sloviansk – an act that Ms. Lytenko says she “takes very personally.”

“Some families are thinking of moving again; others are ready to stay and think the city will resist this aggression,” she says. “Of course, parents aren’t like the children. They read the news and understand. That is another stress – it reminds us that this [disruption] will be here for a very long time.”

That tension is palpable across Lyman, where city officials say the level of destruction in the 40 villages and towns that make up the district can reach as high as 90% of existing buildings.

A tricky balance

When the Monitor first met Mayor Oleksandr Zhuravliov, soon after the city was liberated, he said initial plans to restore electricity and gas within three months had to be abandoned, because of the amount of shrapnel found in cables and pipes.

“We are step by step rebuilding the city,” says Mr. Zhuravliov now, noting that services are restored to much of the town of Lyman and to villages “not on the front line.”

Past calculations had assumed that, over time, the front would be pushed further away from Lyman, enabling a greater degree of normal life. But a much-promoted Ukrainian counteroffensive last summer failed to make significant gains.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all, the fact that the front line is still here, but it makes me more cautious,” the mayor says. “The enemy is indeed holding and is stubborn there. ... They took time to build more defenses.”

The result for citizens of Lyman is navigating a tricky balance of uncertainty, so close to Russian lines.

“It’s not normal; it’s all the time stress – all the time,” says Nataliia Dvorzhak as she watches repair workers climb a mobile phone mast next to a Soviet-era House of Culture. The building was destroyed by Russian missiles during the initial Russian advance, and is within sight of her decades-old apartment.

“People would have been dancing here until 4 a.m.,” she reminisces as she walks inside the wrecked main auditorium, where frozen winds blow through broken walls. The former factory worker sparkles at the memory of the food shops inside and even a hung picture of a flowery scene that once served as a backdrop for portraits – all details of daily life that once helped knit this community together.

“This place will never be rebuilt,” says Ms. Dvorzhak. “But Lyman will be rebuilt. People from this city really love it.”

Such an accomplishment would create rejoicing across town, where, among the few residents, eight people from three families remain living in a basement shelter since the first Russian shell on Lyman landed in their courtyard, in May 2022.

Iryna Dmytrenko, the resident organizer in the basement when the Monitor visited a year ago, spoke at the time of tired apathy, after so many months living underground. “We ask, ‘How long can you hide, and sit here and be afraid?’” she said then, noting that feeling was coming “more and more often.”

“Will there ever be an end to this?”

Today Ms. Dmytrenko and her family have moved back into a neighbor’s apartment in the building above, because her apartment was burned out. She now has a job with the city, and is grateful for utilities and even a train service.

“But the front line is very close, so we can’t expect changes,” she says. “People overall are mentally exhausted. ... It can’t go on without end.”

And for those still underground, there is even more uncertainty.

“Who knows? The war sounds even closer now,” says white-haired Marya Dmytrenko, as she lights a small stove in the musty, cramped basement. The roof over her fifth-floor apartment still leaks rainwater, which short-circuited electrical repairs. Now she and the others wait in the basement until the war is further away – whenever that will be.

Her husband, Volodymyr Dmytrenko, spends his days sitting in the same chair that he was in a year ago, playing with a new small dog. “I want to go home,” he says.

“It would be good to be able to walk out on the street, and go anywhere you want,” says Ms. Dmytrenko. “When you go out, it’s either sirens or something flying over your head – it’s just scary outside.”

She then addresses an American visitor, who has been to this Lyman basement before.

“You know better; you go everywhere,” she says. “Will there ever be an end to this?”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.