Men staying in line overnight outside a military conscription office in Ukraine, February 25, 2022. Screenshot from YouTube. Translated from Ukrainian by Svitlana Bregman This story is part of a series of essays and articles written by Ukrainian artists who decided to stay inside Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This series is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Association/Rozstaje.art, thanks to co-funding by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through a grant from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. It's not that I didn't believe in the possibility of a full-scale Russian invasion. I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to disrupt the regular course of my life. For me, there is nothing better than my daily rituals: morning workouts, daytime work on texts, an evening book with a glass of dry wine, conversations with my wife about creativity and raising our son, dear friends who come to visit and bring prosecco … But then it happened: the invasion. I did not want to experience cold, hunger, fear, or anger. An introverted homebody like me wasn't suited for such trials. I couldn't imagine anything worse than being forced to stay with a group of strangers, fighting as a soldier. I have experienced this before. Forced socialization in adulthood is depressing when you are surrounded by people who are mostly not kindred spirits. And you certainly understand perfectly well that it is their natural right to be different. In war, you have to adapt to circumstances and find a common language with those who you would never associate with in civilian life, obey those who disgust you, and command those you distrust. Yes, I had already experienced this before. In 2015, when I first joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine, when the war in the East started, I ⁠met the following people: a miner from the Dnipropetrovsk region who became like a brother to me; a criminal investigator from the Cherkasy region with whom I learned to find a common language; a flock of classical gopniks from the south who I initially avoided, although their fearlessness eventually earned my respect; guys from Podillya who taught me simple farmers’ philosophy and showed me how to love and notice subtle beauty such as birds singing, ice patterns on the car window, and the silence of the Donbas steppes. But all this came later, after weeks and even months of us clashing like metal rubbing against metal. This time, during the full-scale war, other people came along. They turned out to be my kind of people. In theory, I could drink red Californian wine in my kitchen with them, even back before February 2022. My battalion is mostly made up of residents of the capital city, and despite our different social statuses, political views, and cultural backgrounds, we have more in common than not. After all, most of us are the vintage of the same year, and we were maturing in similar conditions. Kyiv's Syrets district of the 1990s did not differ much from my home district “D” in Cherkasy. Our general secondary education gave us fairly equal opportunities, although each of us chose our own path. Well, as an author, I suppose I could distinguish myself from the general public, claiming that my choice is about the achievement of life goals in a way that is quite unusual for my current circle. But the essential point, such as the mental rooting of my generation in our country's historical context, is the same. There is much affinity between us. I — a writer — am not different from my brothers in arms: a trucker with the code name “Geographer,” a “Virus” IT guy, or an odd-jobber “Jet.” We are all different, but we share the same enemy and goal — not to pass this war down to our children. Because we were once children ourselves not too long ago. We are children of the unstable post-Soviet reality who have experienced a number of metamorphoses and have grown into a new and unexpectedly strong generation. We survived the Chernobyl disaster, the poverty of the 1990s, perestroika, the dangerous temptations of the first years of independence, the revolution, and the emergence of ourselves as individuals in an era of continuous change. Now we are at war. This is no longer an era of change. This is a radical transition of another level, and my generation is bearing the brunt of this transition. In December 2021, I interviewed many of my Kyiv acquaintances trying to understand how they were experiencing the emerging threat at the border. Under the guise of peace, there was anxiety and fear.