By Mariya Katsman (MIA ’23)

As I walk by the trees on the Columbia campus, still lit up from Christmas, they remind me of my hometown of Kharkiv in Ukraine, where the lights have a very different sentiment today. During a comforting phone conversation with my mom, amid the global panic in the media, she pointed at the tree lights in Shevchenko Park, which had suddenly changed to red and blue over the past night. My mom giggled, “Are we already preparing to meet the occupiers?”

Kharkiv is only 24 miles (or 40 kilometers) from the Russian border, twice the distance that it takes me to get to Columbia from my home in Brooklyn every day. The majority of the population speaks in Russian, which puts Ukrainians from the city in the category to be “protected” by Russia.

Many people ask me about the situation in Ukraine these days and how Ukrainians are handling it. When I get asked, it rarely feels that the questions come from a position of empathy, but rather out of curiosity or an opportunity to share their new analysis of the situation. I am not sure what people expect to hear. 

Ukraine is a big country, with an area of more than 233,000 square miles (including Crimea and occupied territories), with a diverse population of around 43 million people. In comparison, Ukraine is almost as large as Texas, which is approximately 268,000 square miles with 29.5 million people. Ukrainians are employed across various sectors of the economy, including information technology (IT), consulting, and entertainment. Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city in IT employment, which generated over US$1.5 billion for the city in 2021 and created many IT products for exports to the United States, Europe, and Israel. 

As of February 15, 2022, life is continuing as normal in my hometown and around Ukrainian territories outside of the occupied region. People go to work, spend time in coffee shops, attend concerts and theaters, plan vacations, and generally don’t talk about the war or fears of an escalation from our northeastern neighbor Russia. 

War has been the Ukrainian new normal for the past eight years, since Russian-backed armed groups began the war in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in 2014, allegedly fighting for the autonomy of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR). 

Sometimes, when fear is permanent, it becomes a silent shadow that follows you everywhere, and you get used to it. Ukrainians, especially in the eastern cities, are used to the reality of our country being at war, but it’s the little things that have changed in the past few months since Western media announced a new Russian military build-up around Ukraine’s borders. And even more so in the past week. 

The little clues that the situation is more unsettling than before appear unintentionally at a dinner table, over a phone call, or while enjoying a stroll around the city. When I visited Ukraine in January 2022, my parents showed me around a new park with light installations. At the end of the park, we passed by a field of light spheres. After looking around, my dad suddenly said, “What do you think Russians would do with all of this if they come? They would probably bash every single sphere one-by-one…” We didn’t talk about it further and went to a different beautiful park. 

It's the little things that matter and are so easy to overlook.

I keep looking for patterns as I compare the situation now to the past eight years and in 2014. Today, my father, who is in his 60s, is ready to physically defend Ukraine from the Russian invasion, just as he was in 2014. Similar to him, many people in their 60s and older are trying to join the new local volunteer territorial defense units, which aim to organize the resistance to Russian forces in case of an invasion. According to one of the commanders of the defense units in Kyiv, Captain Yuriy Kostenko, there has been an increase in volunteers joining the units as of December 2021. Most of the volunteers have university degrees, and many are women or elderly. However, the defense recruitment age limit is 60, so people are being redirected to other ways to support the country. The territorial defense units are expected to include up to 90,000 people, in addition to the 250,000 members of the regular Ukrainian armed forces.

When I was 17, following an opportunity of instability in Ukraine and after Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia already occupied Crimea and invaded Donetsk and Luhansk. There was an intrusion in Kharkiv as well. Buses of Russian citizens crossed the border and arrived in downtown Kharkiv claiming that they were protecting Russian people from “Ukrainian fascists.” They told us this when they asked me and my mom, on our Saturday walk, to show them to the main square in our city, which they referred to by a wrong name. That day, the same “protesters” called for the mayor of Kharkiv to come out to them at the Shevchenko Theater, which they had mistaken for the mayor’s house. 

Since 2014, fortunately, there has been no war in Kharkiv. Still, the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions has taken a toll on the Ukrainian population: about 15,000 people have died, including soldiers and civilians. Over 1.5 million people are internally displaced, with no ability to return home.

With the new build-up of troops on Ukraine’s border, estimated at around 130,000 and equipped with “everything from tanks and artillery to ammunition and airpower,” some experts believe that this is enough to conduct a full-scale war in Ukraine. With the large-scale movement of troops across Russia and ever-increasing numbers of equipment appearing on  satellite imagery, it’s easy to overlook the “little” things.

On February 11, 2022, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which was deployed to monitor ceasefire violations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, reported a massive increase of 749 ceasefire violations, compared to 251 violations the day before. As many governments requested their citizens to leave Ukraine due to security concerns over possible Russian escalation, many OSCE members are leaving the country too, but the mission continues to carry out its mandate.

It is especially critical to continue to monitor the situation, as one of the commanders of the self-proclaimed DNR is asking Russia for the deployment of 30,000 troops to help defend itself from the Ukrainian army, and the Russian parliament Duma just voted in support of recognizing the self-proclaimed DNR and LNR, where 700,000 people were already issued Russian passports. The vote was held on February 15, 2022 and is now being sent to President Vladimir Putin for immediate consideration. Recognition of the “republics” would allow Russia to extend security guarantees to the regions and “lawfully” protect their inhabitants with the Russian army.  

Meanwhile, Russian media continues to spread disinformation by reporting that even American “analysts” believe that the war with Russia is falsified by the CIA and that Ukrainian politicians themselves reveal that the Ukrainian President is “trying to create units to conduct mass killings of Russian people in Ukraine.” While the United States is watching out for a “false-flag” operation conducted by Russia to justify an invasion, even U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan agrees that “little” red flags have been floating around the media. 

Who knows if there is a need for a large red flag when there is an aggregation of little ones.

Mariya Katsman (MIA ’23) is a first-year student in the International Security Policy program at SIPA. She grew up in Ukraine and came to the United States in 2015, shortly after the war began in Eastern Ukraine.