Alone in Ukraine: the experience of a 21-year-old discovering a war zone for the first time in his life
This article retraces my experience, based on my travel journal: a 21-year-old French student, I went alone to Ukraine to discover a war zone for the first time in my life.
This story is my story, the story of Quentin, a 21-year-old student with a passion for geopolitics and for the way the world is changing, who decides to travel alone to Ukraine to gain a first journalistic experience. My dream: to become a foreign correspondent.
There are journeys you prepare well in advance to make sure a project runs smoothly, and there are those born of a sudden burst of determination. From the day I learned that Europeans could enter Ukraine freely, the decision was made: for the first time in my life, I would experience a conflict zone and the atmosphere of war. The project takes shape little by little: the route, the journalistic angle and the first hopes of meeting people. On a personal level, I focus on gathering the tools you need for an expedition to a country at war: the Telegram warning channels, the air-raid detection apps, and even a life insurance policy – which makes a point of reminding you that within 50 km of the front, it will not cover you. The main idea: to cross Ukraine, from Lviv to Kyiv, Bucha, Irpin and Odesa, by way of Kharkiv and Dnipro, to discover Ukraine and meet its people, and to understand their different feelings and perceptions depending on age, experience and geographical position.
01 The departure
Early on 16 May, the big departure. I set off without stress, with “a certain adrenaline and excitement”, and the strange feeling of leaving for an experience imagined “20,000 times in my head”. At 17:28, I cross the Ukrainian border towards Lviv. No panic, at least not yet. But already the cemeteries multiply, the flags appear, and the realisation sinks in: here, war is not a concept. It has names, faces, graves. As my journey goes on, I will quickly understand that the experience of war is not limited to the front. It is also in the cities, the streets, the stations, in the daily lives of the people.
02 Lviv, a first night with a soldier
Arriving in Lviv, the first night says everything about the country I have just entered. In a hostel room shared with two soldiers and a student, I meet Stefan, a Ukrainian soldier who has come to spend the night before going back to the front, an opened bottle of vodka at the foot of the bed. After brief introductions and a few jokes, the conversation begins. At first the scene is rather comical, but it quickly turns tragic. After I suggest a more personal exchange, I find myself alone with Stefan. With the help of a translation app, a conversation about the horror of war begins.
“War, nobody forces you to go there, you have no business here, you’re a young man, don’t waste your life on things like this,” he tells me.
The soldier then opens up, his face closed, about the recent loss of his nephew in combat and about the harshness of the front: “He went missing in the Bakhmut district and they can’t recover his body, the Muscovites have taken the territory and the body is lying there.”
In a few hours, Ukraine stops being a destination and becomes a human experience in its own right.
03 Kyiv, sirens and café terraces
17 May, heading for Kyiv. On the train, the excitement and the concentration only grow. As we approach the capital, the pressure rises. A large cemetery slides past, then a first alert goes off on the phone. Outside the station, people carry on with their lives without paying it any attention. As if the war had become familiar. This surreal scene will come back throughout the journey: the siren wails, but the terraces stay full; the notifications announce danger, but the conversations go on; death prowls, but life persists.
In Kyiv, I discover Independence Square, the memorials and places of remembrance that honour the soldiers who fell for the country’s freedom.
Discovering Kyiv and the memorial on Maidan Square. A soldier pauses in remembrance before the portrait of a brother-in-arms.
One of the paths of the memorial on Independence Square.
After a short tour of the city, a first meeting with a drone soldier takes place in a café in the Podil district – a very lively neighbourhood where Ukraine’s young people gather. He tells me about his story, his life, the war and how it has changed, his battles, but above all his past experience of imprisonment on the Russian side. After this conversation, a tour of the city gets under way: the Podil Square area and its very lively surroundings, the banks of the Dnipro, St Michael’s Church and the tank exhibition. You could almost forget that a conflict has been raging for more than four years now, so peaceful and joyful is the atmosphere. The cafés play international music everyone knows, people laugh and have fun, the terraces are full, and the sun is shining. However, on the way back to my lodging, the war returns. At 23:18, a first alert goes off. The shrill sound tears through the calm of the night. I gather my things and hurry down to the building’s cellar. “It feels strange the first time.” For the first time, war is no longer something imagined, but a very real experience.
04 Kharkiv, a night of bombing
The next day, I leave for Kharkiv to drop off supplies with the NGO “Voices of Children”, accompanied by one of its members. After 5 hours on the road, and conversations about Ukraine, the war and life in general, it is time to go to bed before the next day’s distribution. At 00:40, an alarm goes off. The first bombardments echo through the city. The shrill sound of the explosions seems to draw closer, little by little. I sleep very little, but to my own surprise I discover in myself a calm and a serenity in the face of the situation. Is it recklessness, carelessness or genuine self-control? Either way, I live through the moment serenely, lying in my sleeping bag, “protected by my little wall”. When morning comes, the food and clothes are delivered in the small village of Budy. After about an hour, we head back to the capital. In my mind, and in my understanding of a war zone, this experience was a founding one, because of the discovery of solidarity among the population and above all because of this very concrete experience of war: a night of bombing. Since that day, I feel that I’ve reached a new mental milestone. My greatest fear has gone. The fear of believing yourself incapable, of not knowing how to react. Of being paralysed by the very particular sound of war and the strange atmosphere it creates in your head, where zero risk does not exist and where the lottery of the bombings decides your future.
On the way to Kharkiv with Benjamin. A sign towards Kharkiv, covered over to hold up the Russian army’s advance by hiding the directions.
Storage building for the goods brought from Europe by members of the NGO “Voices of Children”. Budy, a small village near Kharkiv.
05 Two students, then a women’s march
For my second-to-last day in Kyiv, I meet two students aged 18 and 19 to understand their daily lives and how they feel about this war. Over more than an hour and a half of conversation, they tell me about their lives, their fears, their anger and their ambitions for the future. This deeply human exchange tells the story of two students who want to become film actresses. Two smiling young women, full of ambition and of future, whom nothing at first sight sets apart from young people in Europe. Only a daily life they did not choose. Two students whom nothing had destined to know such horrors, and who decide all the same to go on living, studying, and striving to make this youth spent under the Russian threat a normal one. These two students reflect a Ukrainian youth that refuses to leave the country despite the constant threat, that keeps growing, that has grown used to the sounds of war in its daily life, and that builds its future to the rhythm of the conflict.
On 22 May, at breakfast time, and before leaving for Irpin and Bucha, I come across a gathering of women carrying Ukrainian flags printed with the faces of their dead husbands, fathers and brothers. Something important is happening. As I reach the heart of the march, I recognise fear, distress, sadness and, above all, a great deal of anger on the faces of these women wounded by this endless conflict. “Why this war?” The question has no answer that matches these women’s pain, but it is enough to show that behind every piece of propaganda, every communiqué and every military strategy, there is the weight of the absent on the shoulders of these families.
On the morning I leave for Irpin and Bucha, I come across this woman at a women’s protest against the war, at the heart of the march, furious at a speech by a city councillor.
06 Irpin and Bucha, a landscape that heals
After covering this protest, it is time to leave for the original destinations. In Irpin and Bucha, the traces of disaster are less obvious than you might imagine. The past fighting is clearly visible in the bullet holes and the buildings scarred by the clashes, but the towns have also already been partly rebuilt, with renovated roads, paths lined with flowers and a lively town centre. It is precisely this contrast that is so unsettling: the landscape heals faster than the memories, which remain deeply scarred.
“In Bucha, you cannot guess the atrocities if you only look at the setting.”
Knowing about past events therefore becomes essential for this visit to take on its full meaning; you have to look for what has disappeared from view.
Traces of the violence of the fighting.
Bucha.
07 The night train to Odesa
Before taking the train to Odesa in the afternoon, two more meetings are on the programme, with a Frenchman who has been living in Kyiv for a year, and with a reporter, who has covered the conflict since its very beginnings in 2014. After these two new encounters, I head for the station, for the second part of the journey: the south of Ukraine.
The night of the 23rd is a particularly eventful one. Putin’s army has prepared a very large-scale attack on the capital, with heavy means. On the train to Odesa, I follow the intense bombing of Kyiv on my phone. Having spent the week with people who are now under the bombs, I am struck at that moment by a strange feeling of guilt at not being there. The train also moves to the rhythm of the attack: it stops, sets off again, slows down, advances little by little. The journey becomes an experience of war at a distance: being out of relative danger, while staying connected to those who remain under the strikes.
A game of hide-and-seek around the Russian tanks on display on St Michael’s Square.
A last moment in Kyiv before leaving for Odesa. The destroyed Samsung headquarters building.
08 Odesa, a missile one kilometre away
Odesa welcomes me with the sea and fatigue, but also with an atmosphere that seems calmer, less dangerous. Until the evening of 25 May when, after a new alert, a ballistic missile hits the port, one kilometre from where I am. A sound of a power I have never known before rings in my ears at that moment. Caught by surprise, I feel a strong surge of adrenaline and great confusion run through my body. “It surprises you when you’re not expecting it…” Focused and in a hurry, I gather my things and leave the terrace, now empty, to look at the damage. I then meet a woman, very calm, packing away her music equipment under the black sky, with the sound of the alarm still ringing out. An exchange begins in the middle of this apocalyptic scene. “Did you see the missile? Yes, just now, it’s just come down on the port,” she replies, unhurried. “But what are you doing in Ukraine, there’s a war here,” she says, astonished. So a conversation starts, and I explain to her what drove me, at 21, to come alone to Ukraine, and what still keeps me there, beside her, while a missile has only just struck and the threat still hangs, suspended above our heads.
After about ten minutes of conversation, I help her put her things in her car and go back to where I am staying. Back in the flat, I sit down on my bed and start to take in what has just happened. “That one really didn’t fall far away.”
Arrival in Odesa. Arcadia Beach.
After my meeting with O. Pakunov, I come across this building devastated by a Russian strike.
Still in Odesa, the day after this event that will mark me for life, I meet the director of the French association to understand how education works in a country at war: how classes run, the organisation, and the development of French culture in the city. Another meeting, a day later, with a member of a political youth association will enrich my project and my experience in Odesa.
09 Dnipro, the last dance
Then comes Dnipro, the last stage, the most nerve-racking of my experience in Ukraine. “Enjoy your last dance in Ukraine,” a friend writes to me in a message. Despite the stress and the tension building ahead of the next destination, the message is reassuring. How can you enjoy yourself in a city that suffers intense bombing and a permanent threat? Yet it is in this frame of mind that I arrive on the outskirts of the city. There, the setting is more Soviet and colder, and the atmosphere more warlike. Indeed, the city is a grey zone for soldiers heading to and coming back from the front. The military presence is therefore greater than in the other cities visited before. Concrete blocks to shelter in during an attack are installed every 500 m. In Dnipro, the alerts multiply and are taken more seriously. Fear is present, but concentration even more so. One evening, after a day spent with a Ukrainian student from Assas University in Paris, and while the Telegram messages were forecasting an eventful night, I put my things by the door for a quick departure, and position myself at the window of my little lodging to watch the sunset and the night to come, “ready to film a Star Wars battle”. The phrase raises a smile, but behind the humour there is the tension of a man alone, under threat, eyes fixed on the sky, ready to bear witness to this endless war. In the end, it will not happen, because despite the many alerts and a few light attacks during the night, the accumulated fatigue managed to keep me asleep.
One of the city’s many concrete shelters, which says a lot about how close the war is here. Dnipro, 50 km from the front line.
A soldier back from the front.
On 30 May, at Dnipro station, as I board the train, a new alarm sounds across the city. The train is stopped and an evacuation procedure is put in place. In the underpass of the station, I come across families, soldiers and teenagers in transit. So I sit down on the ground and wait for the signal to return, so I can collect my things, left in a hurry in carriage 12, seat 5. With only my phone, I try to photograph this new experience of war. Here again, the scene is strikingly brutal. Taking your train can mean going underground to hide, in the hope of not being hit by a drone or a missile.
10 The way home
On the last day, a visit to the city of Lviv is planned, before one last sleepless night to catch the bus very early the next morning. I leave Ukraine at dawn on the bus from Lviv to Kraków, before boarding for Paris at 22:00. This is the end of the adventure.
11 A country that refuses to submit
This story is not only the journey of a young student who came to discover a country at war. It is the portrait of a country that refuses to submit. A country that never stops fighting for its freedom and for a form of normality in a daily life torn apart by war. A country where young people keep playing football next to the memorials, where the terraces stay full despite the noise of the incessant alarms, where the trains keep crossing the country, sometimes late or after an evacuation. This country full of courage and bravery is Ukraine.
Back in Paris, the excitement fades and gives way to a great tiredness. I had come looking for an adventure, and I am leaving with a certainty: the will to come back and meet this people of rare resilience, where, even under the bombs, life never stops.