The New Yorker:

Lena Samoilenko slept through Russia’s first attacks on Ukraine’s capital, and has been fortifying her home since.

By Masha Gessen 

On the day that Russia launched a new invasion of Ukraine, I reached Lena Samoilenko, a cultural activist and freelance journalist who works in Kyiv, in the early evening. “We are just barricading ourselves in,” she said. “I’m happy to take a break to talk.”

Samoilenko, who is thirty-six, grew up in Antratsyt, a small city in eastern Ukraine that has been occupied by Russia for the last eight years. In the years immediately following the first Russian invasion, Samoilenko helped organize relief efforts in the east, and, as a journalist, covered the occupation of Crimea. She now lives in a suburb just east of Kyiv, with her husband, the poet Anton Polunin, their two children, aged five and six, and Samoilenko’s parents. While we talked, Samoilenko’s father walked in, worried that Polunin had left the house—he thought that the newly announced curfew kicked in at 5 p.m. (In fact, it would begin at ten o’clock.) Samoilenko interrupted our conversation a couple of times to tell her five-year-old, Marta, to step away from the window. “I can’t get the kids used to that,” she said.

A month before our conversation, Samoilenko and I had met in Kyiv to talk about the ways in which people were preparing for war. She told me that she had refreshed her first-aid skills and made arrangements with friends who might come and stay at the house. But she also said that war, as she and her loved ones had experienced it in the east, was impossible to prepare for. We spoke in Russian; our conversation has been translated and condensed.

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