The Hate I Feel

In early June, I met Natalya with her husband and stepdaughter in downtown Kyiv. The family had arrived the day before from Dnipro but had been living in Mariupol, which by then had been destroyed and occupied by Russian forces, and were spending a few days in the capital before heading on to western Ukraine, where they had been promised jobs and a new life. She had gotten in touch after reading some of my stories about evacuees from Mariupol, and we planned a day together in Kyiv before they continued on their journey.

The prior few weeks had been a catalog of horrors for Natalya. Her hometown had been subject to unending bombing; her apartment had been destroyed by shelling; her 21-year-old son had, much like , been forcibly taken to Russia; her elderly mother