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There’s the usual silence when you ask people in Ukraine where they are and what they’re doing when Russia drops its pretense and launches an all-out invasion.
It’s like they don’t have time to think.
Or maybe they don’t want to remember those times – as if looking back will stop them from moving forward.
As they answered the question, some Ukrainians in their 20s and 30s compared it to the day the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
CBC News has been on the ground about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since its inception. Do you want to know about his experience there? Send an email to ask@cbc.ca. Our reporter will answer your questions as we approach our one-year anniversary.
He referred to February 24, 2022 as the “moment of 9/11” – a temporal fork in the road that made everyone realize that the world had changed irrevocably.
But there is a difference between how the West remembers 9/11 and how Ukrainians remember the beginning of the Russian war.
Ukrainians will tell you the invasion began not last year today but in 2014, with Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. The Canadian, American, British and European legions who rushed to help Ukraine, often compared the Russian attack on February 24, 2022 to the indestructible time when the US and its allies were engaged in “a two-decade war on terror.”
However, for senior lieutenant Khrystyna “Kudriava” (nom-de-guerre, meaning “curly hair”), only 28 years old and second in command of the mortar unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, the events of the past year have come to life. – change the quality.
At that time, he was at the front in the eastern Donbas region, where the intermittent shelling of the previous week had been much louder and more intense.
Khrystyna was on combat duty that morning when intelligence revealed Russian tanks and infantry on the move. The position was peppered with Russian BM-21 GRAD rocket artillery, effectively destroying it.
“For the first time in 10 years, I allowed myself to swear and curse,” Khrystyna told CBC News. “Before the moment, I thought that my vocabulary was rich enough to express myself in every possible situation.”
As the rocket rained down, and in anticipation of an overrun, he began to delete data from the phone.
After it was over, he said, he wanted to know about his family. “Should I write to my mother? Should I write to her? And perhaps, in a situation like this, should I write to her?”
Khrystyna says she believes the world changed in 2014. People in the West are only catching up, she says.
Many Ukrainians would agree. But just last year, millions of people have been driven from their homes and entire cities have been destroyed by Europe’s biggest armed conflict in eighty years.
For MacKenzie Hughes, the world-changing events of a year ago came nine electronic time zones away from the desperate fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Hughes, 20, currently volunteering in Ukraine with the Canadian charity HUGS, was working on construction in Calgary at the time. He was building the deck when he heard about the invasion through text messages – one of which was from his father, Paul, who was also in Ukraine with the same charity.
“I’m alive,” he told CBC News in a recent interview in Kherson, where the group is delivering food to devastated villages outside the recently liberated city.
“I work, I live a normal life. After work, I’ll see my friends, play pool, swim or whatever, you know, hang out by the river.”
Within days of the invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a plea for foreigners to come and help defeat Russia. Hughes joked with his teammates about signing up.
“So it doesn’t seem like a joke,” he said.
Within weeks, she was on the ground in Ukraine with her father, subject to some of the same frontline risks as Khrystyna.
In a sense, he has caught up with him. And while he chose not to serve in a military capacity, Hughes could still see the kind of brutality Russian soldiers were subjected to.
He said he visited the interrogation and torture cells he had left behind in areas he had previously occupied. The moment that stayed with him was watching two grandmothers beat each other over bread.
In Ukraine, fears that Russia might go to war are mounting as Ukrainians reflect on and remember those lost on the anniversary of the invasion.
They are far from the peaceful streets of Calgary.
But if there is one thing Hughes and Khrystyna share now, other than the location, it is the sense of purpose the last year has given people.
“I found my calling in Ukraine,” Hughes said. “I really want to live in Ukraine after the war and see how it flourishes, and the way it will be rebuilt. Because I really think that this is a beautiful country and it will become even more beautiful after the war is over.”
There is still a long way to go between now and then.
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