77 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists

By Scribd

From a team of leading Ukrainian reporters, 77 Days of February is the bracingly powerful and intimate story of the early days of the Russian invasion of their thriving, independent nation. It brings to the world, in a way not seen before, the experiences of everyday Ukrainians whose lives have been forever torn apart by this brutal and illegal war, and celebrates their monumental strength and resilience.

The twenty-four stories here, along with an introduction by Serhiy Zhadan, the internationally revered writer, musician, and activist, share the harrowing struggles of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and reveal compassion, sacrifice, and heroism at every turn. Written in real time, these reports bring the first days of Ukraine invasion viscerally to life. There is the man in Bucha who lost his entire family to the shelling and now gives interviews to journalists next to the graves of his wife and children, so that the world might better understand Russia’s crimes against humanity. There is the woman in Kharkiv, raped for a week by a Russian soldier who then shoots her ailing mother dead in front of her. The police patrol that collects bodies, victims of Russian rage. The fourteen-year-old boy who is taken by Russian soldiers to Belarus—one of thousands of such cases—and the remarkable campaign to bring about his return. The workers at the zoo in occupied Demydiv, near Kyiv, who endure near-constant threats of execution so that Archie the rhino, Lekha the camel, and 300 other animals have at least some chance of survival. The young Kharkiv family, moving from subway to basement to survive the bombing, until they have no choice but to make a daring escape from the city. The old man in the war-torn city of Irpin, alone and unable to walk—and the de-mining trainer who fights for days to reach the town, find him, starved and naked but alive, and rescue him….

These and so many other accounts of relentless courage amidst unspeakable violence make 77 Days of February an invaluable work of urgent, lived, history. The stories take place in the first 76 days of the war, between February 23 and May 9—two symbolic dates in Russian military ideology. On February 23, Russia celebrates Defender of the Fatherland Day; May 9 marks Victory Day over Nazi Germany. In contemporary Russia, under the influence of relentless propaganda, these dates are used to reinforce the Kremlin’s superiority toward its neighbors and the world, as well as its determination to restore the Russian empire through military force. For the title of this book, the journalists of Reporters decided to add one more day, as a reminder that the war did not end on May 9 and continues still.

To read 77 Days of February is to be plunged into the lives of astonishing people joined by a shared determination to cope, resist, and persevere. It is a fiercely inspired work of journalism that may change the way you view not only this terrible war but the world and the heroes who live among us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094459370

Book preview

Introduction

Witness and Remember

Serhiy Zhadan

War diminishes the value of language. Events, phenomena, and meaning all lose their weight as soon as we enter the force field of death — as soon as death changes from an abstraction into something concrete and present, something that can be felt in the morning air, recognized by heavy breathing and the smell of burning.

A change in one’s circumstances, a sudden situation of abnormality and dislocation, and a feeling of bloody fracture that one cannot fully grasp, leads to a certain numbness and silence. The words that only yesterday denoted certain objects lose their validity; they turn out to be insufficient for explaining things, and for speaking to the world.

War, without a doubt, requires restarting the language, reassembling its main mechanisms, and renaming the essential and important. This is a painful and traumatic process, but without it nothing is possible. Without it we risk leaving many episodes unexplained, episodes that later on will make up our story about this war, our vision of these months, our truths about pain and courage. We eyewitnesses must open this heavy door, a door of silence, behind which lies language itself, the language of a new reality, a language marked by rage and despair, fear and hope — a language that becomes, for each of us, redemptive and significant. Renaming what’s essential and memorizing the most important things — these are the bitter and difficult privileges of the one who dares to testify, dares to go beyond the bounds of silence.

The stories you will read here, a collection of reports, testimonies, and confessions, are about the necessity of documenting the most painful, the most difficult things, things that leave the deepest wounds and require the most precise words. These accounts were recorded by some of Ukraine’s finest journalists, who write of their own experience or that of others they met during those harrowing first days of the war. The reports from these eyewitnesses is one more reminder that language is vulnerable but by no means powerless. It builds in our lungs; it needs an outlet. It has enough strength to break out, even under the most agonizing and sad circumstances.

Why is it so important to talk about the war from the beginning, without waiting for it to end, without waiting for a certain distance? Memory isn’t always a reliable tool. It’s easily manipulated, and relying on it is risky, especially when it comes to highly emotional states, ones of borderline heartbreak, blindness, and stupor. Some things are forgotten against our will — memory simply displaces them, pushes them into dark corners and obscures them. Appealing to memory is not always rewarding. It’s more logical to turn to eyewitnesses who, while still living the war, find the strength to speak.

In my opinion, it is difficult to write about this war in terms of time, in terms of chronology. Can you remember exactly what kept you going in March? What gave you strength in April? What you were clinging to in May? The time of war is compressed and indivisible — it’s hard to distinguish anything from it. No calendar grid can be seen behind it. Instead, it resembles a dense flow saturated with voices, smells, and colors holding us all together. It doesn’t let go, doesn’t permit rest, doesn’t allow any opportunity for introspection.

Now, when reading about the first weeks of attack and defense, one catches oneself thinking that all these events, all these states — the eclipse of sadness, the flashes of hope — really needed to be fixed, needed someone to grab them from the flood of experiences and impressions. Voices needed the opportunity to appear on paper, to be heard and read in the future. One way or another, we will return again and again to those first days, the first weeks of the great war. We will try again and again to restore our feelings, our optics, to recall our heartbeat at that time. To what extent will we succeed? Memory is like a book; rereading it, you are surprised every time you notice something that had gone unnoticed, unemphasized, or undefined. Evidence is required. Pain and joy need documentation so that in the future we can consult these voices from the past, voices of memory, voices of history.

A question frequently heard these days is: How do you write about this war? What words can be used to explain everything that each of us is going through, that we are all going through? Are the reserves of language enough to explain a completely new experience, a traumatic experience that is physically close to the territory of death, directly connected with it? I’m not sure it’s possible to find complete answers to such questions. The nature of writing is that it emerges in even the most burned-out areas of consciousness, the most violent fractures and vastness — areas where, it would seem, language has become simply unnecessary, its possibilities exhausted, fatally limited, and insufficient. But language returns like water to a dry stream all the same, and writing along with it. It might be different now, but it’s obvious that without the written word, we’re deprived of important opportunities. In particular, the opportunity to testify.

That being the case, the idea that there should be a certain distance between reality and reflection, a place filled with air for breathing, is correct but inconclusive. Writing is a solitary activity, produced differently each time, unexpectedly and unpredictably. This collection is important and piercing, devoid of distance — a record of terrible, bloody reality. These are the voices that began to articulate war immediately. It’s the direct speech of eyewitnesses who dared to testify about the fire when the fire had not yet been extinguished. Behind the words can be felt an accelerated heartbeat, the jagged rhythm of a person who has left the territory of death and returned to the light. She ventured out, caught her breath, overcame her fears, and spoke.

Shards

Oleksandra Gorchynska

A man who had not heard from his brother since the beginning of March finally found his body. He had been killed in his own home in Worzel, shot in the back. Then they poured gasoline on the body and set it on fire.

A mother who with trembling hands wrote on her daughter’s back her first and last name, her date of birth, and the contact information of her relatives, using a ballpoint pen, in case one of them was killed or her child got lost.

A little girl from bombed-out Mariupol who was called the Ukrainian Anne Frank because she documented the war in her diary.

A grandmother from Bucha who could not say anything about herself other than her first name, so journalists searched for her relatives on Facebook. And they found them.

A resident of a village near Kyiv who tried to evacuate in his car but was shot dead on the Zhytomyr highway. His relatives learned of his death a month later, but they were not allowed to recover the body, because it was probably filled with explosives.

A young woman from Kharkiv who stayed behind to take care of her seriously ill mother. A Russian occupier raped her for a week and then shot her mother before her eyes.

A twelve-year-old boy and his mother from Irpin were buried near the residential complex where they had lived until it came under mortar fire.

A man whose phone was stolen by the occupiers, and who does not know where his wife managed to escape to, if she escaped at all, asks for help finding her on social media and through volunteers.

A four-year-old boy named Sashko who fled from shelling on a boat with his grandmother and then disappeared. The whole of Ukraine was looking for him. They found his body; probably the boat overturned because the Russians were shooting at it.

A pregnant woman from the Mariupol maternity hospital whose thigh was shattered by an explosion and who asked to be killed because she didn’t want to suffer, then died along with her child.

A Ukrainian football player from the village of Motyzhyn who was killed alongside his parents. The occupiers had kidnapped the family because the football player’s mother was mayor of the village.

A six-year-old boy whose hair turned gray after the occupiers raped his mother several times before his eyes. She died later from her injuries.

A woman who attached tags with contact info to her son’s clothes in case the boy got lost in the crowd on the way to the Polish border.

A resident of Bucha who lost his entire family to the shelling gave an interview to journalists at the cemetery, next to the graves of his wife and children, to testify to the world about Russian war crimes.

An eleven-year-old boy who went from Zaporizhzhia to Slovakia by himself and crossed the border at night, carrying only a package with a passport and a phone number written by his parents on his hand.

A photojournalist who’d taken pictures in Ilovaisk and had gotten out alive, only to be killed eight years later by two shots to the head in the Kyiv region.

A pensioner who was shot on the street when he went to a neighboring house to feed his elderly, bedridden mother.

A six-year-old boy from Bucha keeps bringing canned goods to his mother’s grave. She died of hunger during the occupation of the city, and is buried on the grounds of their high-rise building.

A woman from Irpin who’d bought an apartment and was renovating it when an enemy projectile flew into her building. Later she was in a famous picture — the one where civilians are hiding from shelling under a destroyed bridge.

A resident of Bucha who lived in his basement for more than a month. He buried three of his friends in the yard. He had to piece together the body parts of one of them — the occupiers gave him twenty minutes for the burial.

Today Is the Eighth Day Since Dad Has Been in Touch

Vira Kuryko

A week before the invasion, I read Astrid Lindgren’s war diary and decided to write my own to organize my thoughts. Even though I had been waiting for this from the outbreak of the war in 2014, and had prepared myself for the possibility that Chernihiv would be invaded, everything I had expected proved to be wrong.

2/28/22

Almost all warships of the Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation are stationed in the Black and Azov seas. The American media gave the new date: February 24–25.

That was one of the last paragraphs in my diary, written around midnight on February 23.

Today is the fifth day of the war.

I tried to understand everything as it happened. It was around 2 a.m. when my husband, Serhiy, and I were smoking in the kitchen. He had just returned from spending time with a friend. We talked about the prospect of the Russian invasion and I said I was not afraid. I don’t know if I really wasn’t afraid. But we always said we’d stay here until the end. Now I don’t know what to think. What’s more, I know that being certain of anything is a great burden.

As we got ready for bed, I told Serhiy the story of Viktor von Graf, a forester who’d planted trees in the steppe. It was an inspiring story about a man who conquered the odds. Now I struggle to remember his name. I’ve noticed this with other words, phrases, and names; they seem to have vanished from my memory.

At around 6:30 a.m., Serhiy’s phone rang. I woke up and tried to calm down the dog, who was alarmed by the noise. We were sleeping on the floor next to him because he has a broken leg. Serhiy didn’t speak, but only listened. There were loud noises from the apartment above. Serhiy hung up the phone and, without looking at me, began searching for news. I asked, What is it? Tell me. And he said, Russia has deployed troops in all directions. My heart broke in that moment and has yet to recover.

I rushed to the phone when it rang and saw that it was my father calling, just as everything was starting. He told me they were crossing the border from the Belarusian side. He didn’t know what to do. His army boots and military ID were at home, fifty or more kilometers away. I couldn’t remember where he was exactly. We hadn’t been in touch much recently. I asked him to fetch my mother and sisters and bring them to me. He said he would try but didn’t know if he’d have time. We said goodbye and he promised to do what he could. It’s been eight days since he’s been in touch.

Back then, when my father returned from the east (I can’t remember if it was 2016 or 2017 — it feels like such a long time ago), I was relieved. He was alive, and that was all that mattered. We were lucky. And now here we are again.

My dad belongs to OR-1, which stands for the operational reserve of the first line. It’s a group of servicemen who have combat experience or have served in the military since the 2014 invasion. After my dad returned from the war, for a long time I was worried that he would be called back to duty at any moment. But then I forgot about the reserve. On the twenty-third, we learned that the reservists would be called up that day or the following one. I couldn’t reach my father for several hours. I wondered if he was on a bus headed to his military unit in Ternopil. But no, he was traveling for work. He doesn’t have a TV or internet while on business trips, so he didn’t know anything.

Hello, Dad, are you at work?

Yes, what is it?

They just announced that the reservists are being called up.

Has the mobilization begun?

As he spoke, his voice grew heavy. Why hadn’t I realized that my father and I were very different, that he didn’t spend all day consuming the news or browsing social media?

No, no, only reservists for now. Everyone will be called up in the coming days. Those who have had a military physical within the past five years don’t need another one. They will just ask how you feel.

It was like that back then, too. Nobody checked anything. There was no time for that.

Yeah. Dad, let me know in advance when you’ll be leaving work.

Of course.

I couldn’t help but think how ridiculous the conversation was. Dad, I love you so much, and I’m very afraid for you. I understand almost nothing about you, same as you about me. But that’s no reason not to fear for your life. We got lucky once; I don’t want to joke about it. But the Russians are already here. They have been here for nine years.

I felt sick to my stomach and I was shaken to the core. I called my mom. She said the Russians were firing somewhere nearby. I said we could pick her up right away. My mom said there was no need. That phone call haunts me to this day.

Serhiy and I sat there in a state of panic, not able to fully grasp the gravity of the situation. We quickly began to shove things into a suitcase. Our home was still standing, and at the same time it was already gone. There were hundreds of books I had collected, dozens of plants I tended to. I was going through my things. I looked at my dresses and almost took one. God! We stuffed our pets into the car along with the suitcase and set off for Kyiv, for the west.

We stopped near Kozelets. We talked for a while before deciding to turn around. Our dog was a problem. We needed to leave him with someone. We rushed in the direction of Mena, in the direction of the

Reviews for 77 Days of February

[Edwin Lin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A heartwarming collection of stories that show the bravery and determination of the Ukrainian people despite all odds.