Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 36 No 5
- There is always a last day before
Catastrophe always arrives suddenly. In February 2022, there were six of us in a Mitsubishi, packed with things grabbed in haste, four adults and two little girls, aged three and nine, who took turns sitting on my lap in the back seat.
Every single car was going in one direction. Not one was coming back the other way. That was when I realised what was happening. It wasn't the explosions outside my window in Kyiv, but a continuous stream of cars flowing west.
We hadn't prepared. One more day would have made a difference. But yesterday was gone, and today had already arrived. You look up and suddenly there is a missile above you. It could be a village house outside Kharkiv, a residential neighbourhood in Israel, a luxury hotel in Dubai, or Kuwait International Airport. The missile does not care.
On the first day of Donald Trump’s Epic Fury, our Ukrainian friend appeared at our door in tears. Her husband was stranded on an oil rig near Saudi Arabia. As captain, he could not abandon his post without abandoning his duty. His replacement, an Australian, had not arrived. Flights were disrupted, and the man had wisely turned back. The captain was trapped.
Four years earlier, he had fled Ukraine and found work at sea, far from the war, or so he thought. Now drones flew overhead, and he could not escape the destiny he had tried to outrun.
He was not alone. Hundreds of thousands of travellers were stranded across the region, in hotels, at closed airports, on cruise ships. Most had come for vacation and found themselves in the middle of a war. They were unprepared. No one can ever really be prepared for disaster.
The strange thing about what increasingly resembles the Third World War is that most of the world still believes it is living in peacetime. This war does not resemble the wars of the twentieth century. There are still armies fighting on battlefields, but the conflict increasingly appears in fragments, with missiles here, drones there, proxy battles somewhere else, frozen bank accounts, burning pipelines, refugees standing on railway platforms.
But the psychological effect is the same. A growing number of people wake up each morning to a day that might be their last. Awareness is growing, but more slowly than the danger is. Tomorrow may be too late.
"While Russia was amassing troops at our borders... we refused to see it, because we wanted to go on with our normal, peaceful lives. But war destroys illusions. One of ours was the belief that the line between wartime and peacetime was fixed and far away, but it was not. While we make plans, schedules, diets, retirement funds, we all assume a future that may never arrive."
Ten northern European countries (Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark) have agreed to develop joint plans for the evacuation of civilians in the event of a crisis or military conflict, drawing on the experience of the war in Ukraine. And political leaders are doing, today, what should have been done yesterday. We all do this.
Twelve years ago, when the war first flared up in Donbas, my intuition told me it was time to pack my things and run. But I stayed put. There is always tomorrow, right? At least, that is what we like to believe.
Early one morning in Donetsk, I was walking past the school where my children had once studied when I noticed a military truck standing in the schoolyard. Its metal frame was raised at an angle. Even from a distance, I recognised it: a Grad rocket launcher, a machine designed to spray rockets in the general direction of the enemy. Around it stood several men in camouflage with machine guns.
One of them waved me over.
“Are you spying?” he asked.
I said I was simply walking by.
“Why here?” he demanded.
“Why not?” I replied.
The men exchanged glances.
“Why don’t you just shoot him?” one of them said to the other. “I don’t like him.”
“Me neither,” the man in the striped undershirt answered.
At that moment, I understood something very clearly: I could die right there, in the schoolyard where my children had once played, about three hundred steps from my home.
Then one of them said, “Wait. I know this fella. He lives nearby.”
The man in the striped undershirt turned to me.
“Then why the hell are you standing here like a fool? Get out of my sight.”
I began to walk away slowly. One step. Two steps. I kept expecting to feel a bullet in my back.
The next day, my wife and I left. It was the very last train from Donetsk to Kyiv. The border closed behind us like a trap slamming shut. We have all been given one more day. We simply pretend we haven’t been told.
When we arrived in Kyiv, we saw carefree people in cafés and on the streets. They acted as if nothing special was happening in the east. Whatever was happening, it did not concern them.
The same thing happened to all of us Ukrainians for months while Russia was amassing troops at our borders. We refused to see it, because we wanted to go on with our normal, peaceful lives.
But war destroys illusions. One of ours was the belief that the line between wartime and peacetime was fixed and far away. But it was not. That line is moving even now. And while we make plans, schedules, diets, retirement funds, we all assume a future that may never arrive.
On the evening of February 23, 2022, millions of Ukrainians went to bed believing that tomorrow would look much like yesterday. Some expected trouble, and tensions were high, but life continued. Children were put to sleep. Alarm clocks were set for the morning.
The missiles came before dawn.
History almost never announces itself in advance. Which means that the day we are living right now may also be that kind of day, the last ordinary day before something changes everything.
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