I first encountered Julia Kalashnyk through her writing on Substack. What immediately stood out was her ability to capture something often missing from international coverage: the texture of daily life in Ukraine during war. Headlines speak in explosions, advances, and diplomacy. Julia writes about routines, classrooms, grocery stores, and the emotional contradictions that define survival.
Julia’s path into journalism began long before the full-scale invasion. She spent over a decade living in Italy, collaborating with Italian media before returning to Ukraine in 2016. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, her work shifted dramatically. Collaborations expanded across international outlets, and her focus deepened into documentary storytelling — not simply reporting events, but preserving memory.
“We are testimonies,” she explained. “This is a historic experience, painful and overwhelming, but it must be documented for the future.”
One story she has followed for three years captures this philosophy perfectly. It is not about generals or battles, but a teacher from Kharkiv. When the invasion began, the teacher fled with her family to a village, only to find herself trapped under occupation. After 42 days, they escaped to Kharkiv, but by then her classroom had dissolved — students scattered across continents, education disrupted, normal life fractured.
Yet the teacher continued teaching online, becoming what Julia described as “glue” holding students together across geography and trauma. Julia met her in 2023 and began filming, drawn not to spectacle but to persistence.
“It is a simple story,” Julia said, “but sometimes simplicity reveals extraordinary strength.”
That observation reflects a broader truth about wartime Ukraine. Individual lives often embody the resilience of the nation itself. A teacher maintaining classes through blackouts. A shopkeeper cooking through drone attacks. Families preserving routines even as sirens interrupt them.
Daily life, Julia emphasized, continues with a strange duality. Supermarkets remain open. Cafés serve coffee. Online lessons proceed. Cultural events take place. Yet beneath that continuity lies constant awareness of danger.
Electricity outages, missile strikes, and winter shortages become background conditions rather than exceptional crises. People adapt by necessity. Power banks are permanently charged. Water is stored in jars. Flashlights are kept in specific pockets. Cash is withdrawn whenever possible in anticipation of banking disruptions.
This adaptation produces a psychological shift Julia described as “adjusting to the unadjustable.”
War reshapes the boundaries of normality. Behaviors that would once feel extraordinary become automatic routines. Conversations casually reference air raids alongside grocery lists. A friend abroad may react with shock to stories that Ukrainians recount almost mechanically.
“I sometimes describe something that feels normal,” Julia reflected, “and see the reaction of someone outside Ukraine. It is like a cold shower. You realize how extreme it sounds.”
Cities experience this transformation differently. Kharkiv, positioned near the Russian border, carries a unique psychological atmosphere. Residents maintain constant awareness of incoming threats. Reaction time to air-delivered bombs can be measured in seconds rather than minutes. Monitoring Telegram alert channels becomes habitual behavior.
Julia recalled one moment that encapsulated this reality: shopping for clothes when alerts signaled an incoming strike. She found herself running toward a metro shelter with one shoe on, the other still in her hand — an absurd yet entirely real image of wartime life.
These contradictions extend beyond physical survival into emotional coping. Dark humor plays a significant role in maintaining psychological balance. Ukrainians create memes, jokes, and ironic commentary even during intense attacks. Julia described humor as a shared mechanism across war zones globally — a way to reclaim agency over uncontrollable circumstances.
Memes about damaged buildings, jokes about missile barrages, and ironic social media posts become small islands of emotional relief amid ongoing stress.
At the same time, war produces a haunting temporal distortion. Many Ukrainians experience pre-2022 life as distant, almost unreal. Emotional continuity is interrupted. Memory reorganizes itself around invasion as a dividing line between two identities: before and after.
“I sometimes feel,” Julia said, “as if my life only began in 2022.”
This sense of rupture carries long-term psychological implications. Anxiety becomes anticipatory rather than reactive. Quiet nights feel unfamiliar. Calm periods create unease rather than comfort because experience suggests danger will eventually return.
Preparing for emergencies becomes instinctive behavior — charging devices, monitoring alerts, storing supplies — even during peaceful moments.
Yet despite these pressures, Julia’s work emphasizes something fundamentally hopeful: continuity. Ukrainians continue teaching, filming, writing, working, laughing, and documenting. Small gestures — maintaining routines, helping neighbors, sharing humor — become acts of resistance against chaos.
Every city, Julia noted, develops its own wartime identity shaped by geography, threat patterns, and community dynamics. Kharkiv’s experience differs from Kyiv’s. Border towns differ from rear cities. Each produces distinct cultural adaptations while sharing a collective resilience.
Ultimately, Julia’s documentary approach reflects a broader philosophy about storytelling in wartime. Grand narratives matter, but human stories endure. Individual experiences reveal emotional truths that statistics cannot capture.
Her teacher from Kharkiv, empty classrooms marked only by footprints in snow, and students connected across continents represent a deeper story about Ukraine — one defined not solely by destruction but by persistence.
These stories remind audiences that war is not only fought on battlefields but lived in kitchens, classrooms, grocery stores, and city streets. It is experienced through routines interrupted yet maintained, fear acknowledged yet managed, and hope preserved despite uncertainty.
And that, perhaps, is the essence of Ukrainian voices today: not just survival, but continuity of identity, memory, and humanity in the face of relentless disruption.