The morning after a Russian missile barrage turned a Kyiv block of flats into a mound of shattered concrete and children’s toys, Tom from the volunteer kitchen told me something I won’t forget. He said the blast had blown the windows out of his van, but he’d glued them back with tape and kept driving. “This is what we do now,” he shrugged. “You don’t stop because bits are missing.”
This is the heart of the matter. Britain’s Foreign Office today condemned the latest attack, but the words feel hollow next to the grit of a middle-aged man who parks his patched-up van outside a ruined building and hands out soup. The cultural shift here is not one of surrender but of mundane adaptation. Ukrainians have folded war into their daily rhythm the way Londoners once learned to sleep in tube stations during the Blitz. It is exhausting. It is also, dare I say, quietly defiant.
What strikes a culture writer is the transformation of public space. Before the war, civilians moved through Kyiv with the distracted purpose of modern life. Now, every pavement step is deliberate. People help strangers lift prams over debris. Cafe owners open their doors as charging stations for generators. The social contract has been rewritten overnight: from polite distance to a raw, practical solidarity. Class dynamics have blurred. Doctors and bricklayers queue together for water rations. The oligarchs’ daughters are sewing tactical vests.
The hollowing out of resilience, however, is real. I spoke to a mother in Irpin who watched her children’s school become a crater. She said the bombing has made her neighbours less talkative. “We are all a bit gone inside,” she admitted, lighting a cigarette with steady hands. That is the human cost: not hysteria, but a quiet parting of the self. People become efficient, economical with grief. They do not cry in public; they wait until they are under the covers at night, if they are lucky enough to have covers.
Britain’s condemnation is correct. But sanctions and statements pulse in a different rhythm. They belong to the world of Whitehall and experts. On the ground, Ukrainian morale endures because endurance has become a kind of art form. They paint on the rubble. They play cello in metro stations. They refuse to let the story end with the missile. The story, as Tom with his tape-fixed van knows, continues with the soup.
This is not a victory narrative. It is a survival manual being written in real time, in a language of broken glass and shared phone chargers. And somewhere in London, a diplomat signs a memo. Both things are true. One of them is the future.
