How the full-scale war has changed Ukrainians and what Ukraine's "new normal" is like

The electricity not being cut off during a rolling blackout can trigger a panic attack.

Getting into a lift is a game of Ukrainian roulette: will it get stuck today or tomorrow?

A notice in the communal stairwell reads: "Use a toilet before using the lift."

Generators roar in front of every little store and café like chained-up dogs. A man is charging his iPhone – the latest make – from a petrol-powered generator.

A colleague serving in the military invites me to join him for a break from my stressful existence in Kyiv: "I can guarantee 24/7 power supply and no military enlistment offices in sight."

Another friend’s invitation to visit Odesa this summer is similarly encouraging: "I know a beach that’s clear of mines."

A friend who just got back to Kyiv from the combat zone complains about the tricks his mind plays on him: "I used to spot pretty girls whenever I was out. Now I mostly notice these beefy young guys covered in tattoos. Where are they all coming from? A heroic people. Three hundred Spartans, for f**k’s sake."

A different friend who’s served in the army for the past two years says he decided to read something more intellectual than military manuals. He read in an Ukrainska Pravda column: "People inevitably try to find clarity amid uncertainty, to imbue meaningless things with meaning, to couch mundane occurrences in existential concerns, and to mistakenly come up with overly complicated solutions to simple issues." He had to read it three times before he realised he kept seeing "shower issues" instead of "simple issues".

Young kids are playing outside, tossing coins to decide who gets to be "our guys", who will be a "son of a bitch" [i.e. a Russian soldier], and who will be a "zhdun" [someone who waits – a word used in Ukraine to denote Ukrainians who eagerly await the arrival of Russian forces and want the territories where they live to be controlled by Russia or become part of Russia – ed.].

News about the 2030 Winter Olympics reads like science fiction.

I could go on listing these telltale features of our new reality ad infinitum. We all share those, but each of us also has our own. Just as each of us experiences the war differently.

What is our "new normal"? Do we really have to get used to it?

How do we regain our sense of self when habitual patterns and behaviours no longer apply?

Why is it important to create new routines and rituals in the wake of those that have been destroyed?

How does a new ethics emerge from the ruins of a pre-war world?

Will our world ever be the same again after the war ends?

Ukrainska Pravda discussed these and other questions with Tina Polek, a Ukrainian anthropologist of war and a member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.

What follows are Polek’s own words.

Broken patterns and the search for new ethics and routines

"I don’t even know what day it is today, what the date is. I don’t even want to look at the calendar, because it doesn’t matter. Every Ukrainian’s life came to a halt, froze, got stuck, on the morning of 24 February…

When I think about that morning today, a strange feeling washes over me all over again. It’s difficult to describe. It’s as if you’d been told about some Evil Dragon your entire life, a scary figure, but something you knew was made up, a fairy tale – but one day you wake up and see the Evil Dragon by your bedside, breathing fire on you, while you keep saying over and over again, ‘I don’t believe this, I don’t believe this, I don’t believe…’"

From How Are You, a book by Anna Gin

The feeling that today is the 906th of February is all about broken patterns and routines. Our sense of time is tied to patterns and cycles: weekdays and weekends, seasons and festivities, occasions big and small. Beach holidays and music festivals in the summer; skiing in the Carpathians in winter; a party every year for our best friend’s birthday.

Our daily lives, too, are made up of cycles and patterns: a morning coffee, lunch with colleagues during the workweek, seeing friends at weekends. All these things give us a sense of the orderly passage of time. When these patterns – some of which we might have observed for years – suddenly vanish, we feel uneasy, because as human beings we are averse to unpredictability.

The new circumstances brought about by the war are full of uncertainty and contingencies, which has a powerful effect on our emotions.

The better we are able to construct new patterns, the sooner February 2022 will be over for each of us. Some of us will take longer to do this than others. That doesn’t mean we forget about the war – just that new patterns give us the energy to keep going.

I can’t say that delayed life syndrome [where people defer the pursuit of their desires and the attainment of their goals to a later, more opportune time – ed.] is today’s new normal. Despite all the uncertainty and unpredictability, we keep making plans. Those plans aren’t as long-term as they used to be, but still.

We plan things we need or want to buy, and we plan to spend time with family or friends. We still have career ambitions. Many people are trying new things, despite the war: "I have to do something I didn’t dare to do before because tomorrow I might have to fight or I might get killed, and then I’d never have got to try it." I hear many people say that.

We’ve succeeded in integrating digital technology into our new patterns. Using digital tools – scrolling through Telegram channels and quickly consuming the news – is now part of our daily planning efforts. These are our new rituals. Checking the rolling blackout schedules, the air-raid alerts, and the social media accounts that monitor what weapons have been or are being used in the latest attack on Ukraine: Shahed drones, ballistic missiles or cruise missiles. Endless monitoring and trying to control the situation is the foundation of all our plans, whether for the next few minutes or the next couple of hours.

Early on in the war, we all went through a phase of denial, thinking that what was happening to us was impossible. This is the most common theme in every oral history, every testimony about the first few days of the full-scale invasion: "This can’t be happening. We’re living in the 21st century. How can there be a war?"

It wasn’t until we accepted the impossible that we were able to start formulating a new ethics: what is and isn’t acceptable in our new reality. Is it okay to celebrate birthdays when there’s a war on? Is it okay to meet friends for coffee? And if it is, then is it also okay to meet for beers? Is it okay to go on holiday? What about telling people about that holiday or posting photos from it? We’ve already worked through some of these ethical quandaries, but others still remain unresolved. It’s something we’re all still working on.

Our formulation of new ethical norms depends on how each of us has experienced the war. For example, people who have fought on the front line and people who have never been near it coexist in the same cities. The former may be suffering physical pain from injuries they sustained in battle and emotional pain from losing their brothers-in-arms; they might struggle to understand why others are drinking beer and listening to loud music with the war still ongoing. Others go out for beers with friends in noisy bars to recharge, to be able to keep going. Is it at all possible to find an ethical common ground?

Different experiences and survival strategies

"The war has taught us to keep our petrol tanks full, our phones charged, and our papers close at hand.

We used to be like: ‘Don’t eat the jam, it’s for the winter!’ We used to save our good shoes for special occasions, our favourite perfume for dates, and our traditional handcrafted shirts for photoshoots. Within six months of the full-scale invasion starting, the people of Kharkiv had rid themselves of those foolish habits.

We’re too close to our ‘brothers and liberators’ across the border. Tomorrow might never come. We might have no more photoshoots, or dates, or winters. Kharkiv’s new motto is: ‘Eat! Live! Drink! Right here, right now.’"

From How Are You by Anna Gin

Anthropologists love to talk about the "devil in the details". Despite the fact that people have been dying in wars since time immemorial and across many different cultures, context remains very important.

Until recently, we couldn’t imagine that war didn’t just entail combat clashes at the front, but also attacks on civilian infrastructure. Until recently, we had no idea what cyberwar even was.

And despite all the comparisons to World War I, the technological context of this war is entirely different. Technology affects people’s behaviour. Compare wars with and without drones. With and without Starlink satellites. These are totally different experiences that require fighters to behave in different ways.

When we studied World War II at school or university, we imagined that everyone who lived through it shared the same experience. It wasn’t at all obvious that everyone was involved in it to a different degree: it wasn’t just that some were in the army while others were on the home front; there was variation within each of those groups, too.

Also, war is not a static phenomenon. We imagined that the war started in 1939 and continued in the same way until 1945. But it wasn’t the same or consistent throughout. Textbooks can’t convey how dynamic war really is. It’s uneven both in terms of the intensity of events and in terms of how people experience and process those events.

There can be radically different experiences of war. We’ll be feeling the effects of this for years and years to come. There are families who have lost loved ones on the front line and families where no one is fighting. There are people whose homes have been destroyed and people whose homes are intact. Refugees abroad, internally displaced persons, and those who have not moved at all. Those who have experienced Russian occupation and those who were spared. Even frontline soldiers can have totally different experiences of the war depending on their position and what their commander is like.

Some go through one of the worst things imaginable: Russian captivity. Their families, and the families of those missing in action, experience the war as delayed life, because how can they go on living as before, not knowing where their loved one is?

The way we experience war affects not just our worldview, but also our very mundane behaviours. It affects our consumption patterns. At one end of the spectrum, there are people who decide to live like there’s no tomorrow. At the other are people who think that uncertainty about tomorrow means it’s better to set aside a security buffer of sorts. These are totally different strategies: living like there’s no tomorrow, and living like a stereotypical old miser squirrelling everything away for a rainy day.

Solidarity, guilt and taboos

"It’s totally wrong to measure your own life by the grief of others. But each time it seems: no, I’m doing all right, while that guy, a dad, is praying over the body of his dead child…"

From How Are You by Anna Gin

Zooming in, we can see how differently all of us experience the war. But zooming out, we will be able to see commonalities we share despite all those differences.

The first one is solidarity. So many bad things are happening that it’s not possible to have a strong response to each of them. Still, as soon as something like the Russian attack on the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital happens, we regain our ability to empathise. We realise we haven’t hardened or grown indifferent. It’s true that there are some terrible situations – I’ve seen this in our research – when injured soldiers are met with indifference from doctors or hospitals. But this isn’t the case at the level of Ukrainian society as a whole.

Solidarity is also about guilt. However much each of us is struggling, there’s always someone who has it much worse. And there are always people who are at the front experiencing things we can’t fathom, let alone compare to the difficulties experienced by civilians. The fact that we know and remember this is testament to our ability to perceive reality as it is.

Guilt is a healthy response to what’s going on. It’s okay to feel empathy towards those whose circumstances are much worse than our own. It’s not okay to feel paralysed by this feeling to the point where it interferes with your ability to live and work.

Something else we all share is the understanding of who our enemy is. As a society, we’ve reached a consensus on this, and we also have a set of related taboos. There is a taboo on communicating with Russians as business partners or in public domains. Even talking to liberal Russians at public events abroad is most often met with unequivocal disapproval.

But we aren’t always prepared to apply this taboo to personal contact with family or friends. Talking to people in or from Russia sometimes becomes acceptable in personal contexts. So there are significant differences across contexts.

Many people stopped talking to all Russians – and to Ukrainians living in Russia – in 2014, and even more did so in 2022: "She’s my sister, but she’s consumed all that propaganda and I don’t want to have anything to do with her." Many, however, keep in touch with family and friends there: "We’re sisters, so we don’t talk about politics, we don’t talk about the war." Or: "He’s a Russian, but I’ve known him for 20 years, and he’s different from the rest of them."

Context – including anthropological context – is important to our self-understanding, but also to understanding our enemy’s strategy and behaviours.

Take, for example, the work of American anthropologists during WWII, and the war with Japan in particular.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the United States Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942, tasking anthropologists with researching the Japanese national character and the effect of different military strategies on people in Japan. Many American politicians and people in the military believed at the time that the Japanese were "culturally incapable" of surrendering and would fight until the last drop of blood was shed.

Ruth Benedict, a well-known American anthropologist, was among those entrusted with this mission. She researched patterns of Japanese culture by studying history and art and talking to Japanese people who had emigrated to the US.

Benedict gathered all the information she could about how Japanese people think, why their style of fighting was so different from the American one, and how the US could use this to its advantage.

We know a lot more about the Russians today than we did in 2022, and we’re learning from our mistakes. But I’m not aware of any studies of Russian culture which Ukraine could use to bring victory closer.

We can hardly imagine what is really happening deep inside Russia, in the faraway Russia beyond Moscow and St Petersburg. To be honest, even our ideas about Moscow and St Petersburg are often superficial and based on stereotypes.

Before joining the army, each person is shaped by the circumstances in which they grew up, and it’s important to know about this context. Where do these people come from, what circumstances have they emerged from, how do they interpret "heroism" and "treason"? How were they trained? This isn’t about the technical features of their weapons, but about the culture they’re brought up in – the culture they will bring with them to the battlefield.

All this matters. Even when the war is over, we will have to know – not emotionally, but in terms of systematic knowledge – who and what we’re dealing with.

Will our world really never be the same again?

"God, I really don’t want to get used to this. I can’t – it’s wrong and painful to think that two-tonne missiles being dropped on residential neighbourhoods is normal. When it happens, the nurses just pause briefly, waiting before they inject their patients with intravenous drugs.

I think we should tell ourselves every time we hear an explosion: this is murder, this is a crime, this is a terrorist attack. We have to repeat this to stop ourselves from getting used to it."

From How Are You by Anna Gin

Lately, when people ask me "How are you?" I’ve been saying: "I’m all right apart from the war." When people in Ukraine say "I’m all right," their words are laden with the baggage of everything that’s happened. I think saying "I’m all right" today means first and foremost "I’m coping."

During a research project we did for the NGO Pryntsyp (Principle) about what happens to soldiers after they are wounded and how war veterans return to civilian life, we talked a lot, not just to the wounded veterans themselves, but also to their families and loved ones.

Researchers would ask open questions, like "How are you today?" One person, a woman, gave a reply that really struck me: "I wanted to say that everything’s okay, but I remembered I promised to tell you the truth." This was as scary as what she went on to tell us about the injury her loved one had suffered and everything they had been through together since then.

Still, I’m cautious when it comes to sweeping statements like "The world will never be the same again." That’s why I would personally avoid the term "the new normal". It’s only circumstantially "normal". When the war is over, a lot of things that define our lives at a very basic level today will be relegated to the past – and fade from our memory.

Some of the things we’ve learned from this experience will make us stronger, more flexible and adaptable. That’s what happened during Covid, too: we all learned to work and study remotely. When the full-scale war started, people in Ukraine already knew what to do when large gatherings of people were inadvisable and implemented a solution they already had at hand. School and university classes didn’t stop, businesses didn’t lose money because of staff absences, people were able to keep their jobs, and the government continued to collect taxes.

There will be a period of grief. All of us have scars of our own, but there are also scars we all share. Every person in Ukraine will remember what happened at the Mariupol maternity hospital. This memory will be passed down from generation to generation.

But the feeling that the worst is very near will quickly fade after the fighting stops. The point of no return will only come when the new circumstances have lasted so long that people have forgotten that things could be otherwise.

War is a tragic event, but I hope that it will not last long enough for us to forget what life without war is like.

Mykhailo Kryhel, Ukrainska Pravda

Translation: Olya Loza

Editing: Teresa Pearce