The One Place in Lviv Where the War Is Never Far Away

 

 

 "This great movement of people, this exodus, had discombobulated Ukrainian society, but also galvanized parts of it. The evening after escorting Rudenko to the music school, I met up with Liasheva, the Lviv-based sociologist. She had moved to the city from Kyiv four years earlier, while finishing her Ph.D. Her dissertation was about housing issues in post-Soviet Kyiv. When the war began, and suddenly tens of thousands of people needed housing in her adopted city, she started trying to help. She found a room here, a bed there, helped convert an office space into a shelter. She also sorted and organized the many packages of aid that arrived from abroad. After several weeks of war, she was angry and exhausted. “There are all these romantic ideas that people have about war,” she said. “But it’s not like that. It’s the worst thing ever. You see so much pain every day. It’s not romantic at all.”

Liasheva’s volunteer group sent medicines to cities where heavy fighting had shuttered pharmacies. They distributed the medicines through the trade unions or mailed them directly to people in Kyiv or Kharkiv. “And I have learned so many things. But they’re not, like, philosophical things. We get all these medicines from abroad,” she said. “So I’m spending all my time just reading these labels and trying to understand them. It turns out there are so many kinds of diabetes. Now I know what they’re all called, in Polish, German, and Italian.”

 more in the newstory by KEITH GESSEN