Vira Kuryko is a reporter. Here, she reflects on smoking her bombardment-flavored cigarettes, the advantages of regional journalism, and dates on the frontline.
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First days of the war - thoughts, experiences, actions
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“Today, my personality is split between the hypostases of a citizen of Chernihiv, a journalist, and the wife of a serviceman,” says Vira Kuryko.
On February 23, Vira was in Chernihiv, reading a book about the landscaping of the Donbas which Viktor von Graff had actively participated in, and discussing it with her husband. Yet the next day, she could not even remember the famous Ukrainian reforester’s name, and would be unable to do so for a long time thereafter.
Vira and her husband had planned their actions long before in case full-scale war would begin, yet their plan collapsed in the very first hours of the invasion. They grabbed their cat, their dog with a broken paw, a trunk with some books and summer clothes, and drove to Kyiv. Halfway there, however, they changed their minds and returned home. By that night, battles were already being fought no more than seven kilometers from the city; so the couple fled Chernihiv once again. Both feared finding themselves in a Russian-occupied city, and so this time, they went to Lviv.
"I felt completely overwhelmed,” says Vira. “I thought that it was essential for me as a reporter to stay in Chernihiv and work, and I reproached myself for going to Lviv. My husband was just as frustrated.”
After a time of doubts, they decided to return home for good, no matter what, and began inquiring about possible ways to drive to Chernihiv. Some people told them that the road was still there, while others claimed that it had already been completely ruined. Finally, Vira and her husband ventured into the journey.
All the way to Kyiv, they met mostly suspicious and paranoid military people at the checkpoints. The closer they moved to the frontline, though, the easier and more joking the atmosphere became. Vira and her husband felt that they were doing everything right. They saw many a torched car along the road, but still did not realize how large the numbers of people who had come under enemy fire while trying to leave the besieged city of Chernihiv there really were; they passed many a village without knowing that they had already been occupied.
“My husband enlisted in the army while I was going to stay and work in my city,” says Vira. “I never imagined I could have felt so good in such a situation. In the end, however, nothing went as planned.”
Vira undoubtedly loves Chernihiv. Once, she was advised to go to Kyiv and work there for big media, but this did not make her happy. Her only desire was to return home. Vira is by no means scared of being a regional journalist: she is convinced that her chances of finding a truly profound story rise in her home region, the area which she knows best. And it’s this deep knowledge that drives her to notice more and more of the nuances behind the façade of the well-known ruins.
She has been working on her material about the airstrike against Chornovil Street in Chernihiv for six months already (which is, by the way, an unbelievable luxury for journalists who write about national affairs). A Russian plane dropped six to eight unguided bombs or missiles on March 3 – the very day that Vira returned to Chernihiv. The records of the case are closed for the time being. No less than 47 people died then, yet Vira knows of 57 civilian casualties. She sees the people from those destroyed houses almost every day, and contemplates not only the craters but the human lives.
Three residential buildings were destroyed that day: a five-story apartment block where many elderly people, who couldn’t get to the bomb shelter on their own, died, a neighboring 17-story house, and a brick house in the backyard, purposely built in 1986 for families evacuated from Prypiat after the Chornobyl disaster. That smallest building was poorly visible from the road, and for that reason it has not often been mentioned in the media. Yet for Vira, this is the most remarkable location in terms of the lives ruined.
Among other stories from its surviving residents, Vira sees the most symbolic significance in that of Maryna Yeshchenko. Together with her family, Maryna was evacuated from Prypiat in 1986 at the age of 15. Then, they could take nothing with them but her grandmother’s sewing machine; and by chance, that was the only thing in Maryna’s apartment which remained intact after the bombardment in 2022. When she discovered that, she decided never to leave her home again or see herself as a victim of circumstance, and began to board up her windows as soon as possible, even though the danger of more bombardments was still very real.
Maryna’s fellow sufferer, a teacher of Ukrainian literature who lived in a neighboring block, had her apartment on the 13th floor completely ruined after the airstrike. She had been saving everything she could for years to finish repairing her accommodation, which she finally did right before the invasion. As a purple sofa remained intact in the destroyed apartment, she said that it symbolized herself, as she too was still holding on.
Vira also knows a lot of human stories related to the ruined Hotel Ukraine in downtown Chernihiv –for example, that of a namesake of hers who had been working as a barber in the hotel’s hair salon for fifty years. All the other Vira’s clients have been dropping by to pay her respects every now and then. Today, she has nowhere to work. An former maid from the hotel, Lypa, had survived the Second World War as a child: then, her family’s peasant house had remained intact by a miracle, and was moved to the outskirts of Chernihiv Eighty years afterwards, however, it still got hit by a Russian missile. Ten days later, an aerial bomb was dropped on the hotel that Lypa had worked at for most of her life. Her relatives have now decided to rebuild her house against all odds: they think it should remain the family’s backbone because its difficult destiny corresponds with its inhabitants’ resilience.
Vira has many personal recollections of Chernihiv's beautiful library, which was also hit by a Russian missile. She knows its history perfectly: having once lived nearby, Vira took daily photos of the library to track the way it changed when exposed to weather and the change of the seasons. The moment that the library was hit has been firmly entrenched in Vira’s memory. She and her friend were staying together to endure the siege of the city. Sometimes they went outside to smoke a cigarette, listen to the sounds of shelling and see if any of the neighbors’ houses were burning. That helped them to cope with their fear.
The fewer cigarettes the women had, the longer they stayed inside. Aerial bombardments occurred nightly, right on schedule – at 12, 4, and 6 am. Each time Vira pulled the blanket over her head, as if it could protect her. On the night that the library was hit, Vira and her friend ended up almost out of cigarettes, and they were spending another airstrike lying on the floor, when suddenly they both heard an explosion so powerful that the wooden walls in the house started to crack. In the morning Vira already knew that the library and a sports stadium had been hit, but she was way more worried about the man who was also killed. She went to the scene two days afterwards: the library’s roof seemed to be resting on a single piece of carving, while the crater at the stadium looked quite cinematically beautiful.
“My own thought, that something so horrible might cause a sense of beauty, scared me,” Vira admits. “But sometimes I looked at the events with the eyes of not just an ordinary citizen but a reporter, which are completely different points of view.”
As an ordinary citizen, Vira bought expensive shrimp and kits for making sushi to eat, because there was no other food left in besieged Chernihiv; she crawled through puddles, escaped another shelling, together with that friend of hers who didn’t dare to drop the last cigarette, but she could not reach another friend of hers who was living in a heavily bombarded district because the latter preferred to charge her vapes instead of her phone. Today, Vira laughs when recalling such episodes: this is some kind of mental defense for her.
Her favorite stories from the time of the siege of Chernihiv relate mostly to cigarettes.
"It was a disaster," Vira laughs, "We ran out of cigarettes in the city, and we had to find them by running between stores and listening to the rumors. When you got there, they were always gone. And then some guy opens up the back of his Renault as if it was a cloak, he gives you a white cigarette, you smoke it, but it burns up in a minute because there is some wood inside that is not shaved down. But it's okay, it's okay when you are being shot at every day.
In moments of despair, she went shopping, and asked the people to sell her cigarettes for 500 or 600 hryvnias - because what else was there to spend money on in besieged Chernihiv? Finally, she saw some caplin being handed out, 700 grams per person. A man was smoking next to her. Vira asked him to sell her cigarettes, and he offered to exchange them for the fish. She stood in line, gave him the caplin - but he gave her only one cigarette in return. Vira laughs, and says she still hates him for that.
“I smoked it and remembered all the movies I have ever seen about besieged cities where cigarettes served as the local currency,” Vira shares. “I could not but think how surreal it had seemed then. Later in Lviv I smoked the same cigarettes, but they were never so delicious as that first one. My husband said it was the flavor of bombardment that made it so tasty. I bought Pryluky again not long ago, but they still could not provide me with the joy of life I had been hoping for.”
When thinking as a reporter, Vira considers this an interesting storyline for a text. However, she managed to write just a single report from besieged Chernihiv: it related to her own experience, because Vira could contemplate nothing so thoroughly as herself. In March and April, she scolded herself severely for not being able to work like her professional idol Ryszard Kapuściński. Yet staying during war in your own country, when you must regularly put your journalism aside to help others and solve your own daily troubles at the same time, has turned out to be much more difficult than writing about foreign wars.
“The war has toned down my youthful wish to document everything, write and publish incredible books, quite a bit,” says Vira. “First and foremost, I just want to remain human. I may not become a journalist comparable to Hanna Krall, but I can still be Vira Kuryko, and that would be enough to live a decent life – which, by the way, I could lose at any moment.”
Currently, Vira lives in Chernihiv with her dog and two cats. She stays in that very house whose walls began to crack after the missile hit. Vira is engaged in documenting war crimes in her region; besides, she has started writing a fiction book she had long dreamt about. Its leading heroine tells ten different stories about her father to ten different men, yet none of these stories are true, as the girl’s dad has been a war veteran since 2014 and today he’s fighting at the frontline again, which his daughter cannot come to terms with. Vira has long wanted to write about misunderstandings and communication difficulties in Ukrainian families because her own father went off to war when Vira was 17, and now he’s also fighting. Therefore, Vira’s book will depict her own complicated family relationships too.
She never leaves Chernihiv any more, except if she has an opportunity to visit her husband somewhere near the eastern frontline. He’s also fighting in the war, though Vira never wanted it to happen. She says that she would have cried, fallen to her knees and begged him not to go.
Nevertheless, the world changed irrevocably on February 24. Hence, Vira goes on dates to him, and nothing can stop her from doing this. Being a serviceman’s wife partly scares her, partly amuses her.
Their best frontline date was during the battle for Lysychansk.
“We spent a whole day together,” Vira Kuryko recalls. “I was longing for a missile to kill us, and it would be all over. I came to see my husband in Kostiantynivka. His friends in combat gave us an old green Zaporozhets [car] with a machine gun in the trunk and some baggage under the seats to sleep. That night, amidst distant fusillades and explosions, I slept really well for the first time since the invasion began. In the morning, my husband brought me a plastic cup of coffee and a bread roll decorated with a bow. It was the best breakfast of my life.”
Vira remembers another of their dates at the border between the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Halfway from Bakhmut, she got out of the car and walked to meet her husband, , and he did the same. The distance between them was ten kilometers. The couple spent that day lying in a sun-soaked field and talking about what their life would be like after the war ends. In the meantime, other servicemen, covered with dirt from head to toe, spoiled all the romance by passing by and looking for the river.
“Quite intolerable conduct,” Vira laughs.
Vira does not know what the Ukrainian people will be like when they emerge from the war, but she has quite a clear idea of what she would like her fellow citizens to be.
“I would like us not to end up embittered,” she explains. “Involuntarily, we have taken a lot of anger into ourselves. It was not our fault, but still, I would like us to heal these wounds. I don’t mean any reconciliation with the Russians, but if I ever have children, I’m going to tell them stories about my search for cigarettes in besieged Chernihiv, not about our traumas.”
Yet at the same time, Vira would like to preserve the memory. Today, at the entrance of Chernihiv, the backbone of a bullet-battered car can be seen: this was the car of the deceased Volodymyr Andriichenko, who was killed on that very spot while evacuating the wounded people from the city. There were dozens of such cars – the municipal services later removed them, but leaving Volodymyr’s as the memorial to his deed and to his sacrifice. Every day, people lay flowers at it, stop by and read Volodymyr’s story on a plaque.
“I would like us to preserve the memory of this war in that kind of way,” says Vira in conclusion, “but without ever becoming embittered against ourselves.”