When Pavlo told me he had news with a cryptic smile, I thought he was talking about a new shipment of humanitarian aid and the challenges of delivering it. But what he told me made me deaf.
I can’t sit on a woman’s skirt when there’s a war,” he told me, trying to muster as much tenderness as he could.
My fiancé went to the front lines and all I could do was tearfully ask why.
When Russian bombs fell on Ukraine a few weeks ago, we fled Kyiv and moved to the western city of Lviv with a few suitcases and our two cats.
Pavlo, who worked as a consultant at the Department of Energy before the war, immediately tried to join the war effort.
But when he went to a recruiting office, he was told there were enough soldiers.
So he was busy coordinating humanitarian aid from abroad and overseeing shipments to the hardest-hit regions. I was sure he would avoid direct hostilities. When he told me he had decided to go to the front, I was shocked, devastated.
“I know you’ll understand,” Pavlo said with a shy grin.
I did and didn’t. I didn’t want to discourage him, but I couldn’t accept his decision for days.
It was like everything inside me was frozen. It’s the kind of decision that’s impossible to undo.
We went to Kyiv to see his relatives and get his military equipment. The first thing I noticed was how loud it was in the capital. The neighborhoods rumbled – it was as if the sound of shells and bombings were all around us, near and far at the same time.
We saw cars being blown up by rockets on main roads and drove past a shopping center which was attacked killing eight people.
One evening we met friends at a house and since a curfew had been announced in Kyiv we all stayed there overnight. Explosions sounded in the distance.
“It’s the air defense that works,” explained our good friend Vitaly, a veteran of the war in the Donbass region.
We calmed down and went to bed only to be woken up a few hours later. The house shook. Russian Grad missiles fell about 500 feet from us.
Everything around us was burning: the forest and the buildings; There was no phone signal.
We went down and spent the night in a bomb shelter, and in the morning we blew out a tire after hitting shrapnel.
A local member of the Territorial Defense Units, who happened to be driving by, helped us attach the spare part to the car.
The scenes in Kyiv were confusing.
The streets were empty, but a few small shops and cafes were open.
The capital seemed determined to stay alive, but something in me did the opposite – it was like a light went out, faded.
I had turned to stone, heavy, impenetrable. I’m in Ukraine and I have to stay strong
I said to myself. I’m in the back. I can create life – life for which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines are now risking their lives.
We spent the night in another city. In the morning, Pavlo encountered a truck with humanitarian aid going to the front. Then we said goodbye.
Pavlo writes to me almost every day, but he doesn’t say much.
It’s what he’s not telling me that worries me.
“I was at the shooting range. All is well.”
But he ends every conversation with “I love you”.
And suddenly I feel alive again. If we win this war, our love will rebuild our country.
Iuliia Mendel is a journalist and former press secretary for President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/my-fiance-is-joining-the-front-line-to-defend-ukraine-41508900.html My fiancé goes to the front to defend Ukraine