My mother told me.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t there. I couldn\u2019t be. He drew his last breath in Donetsk \u2014 my hometown, now occupied by Russia. The front line, blazing and thundering, has divided us. A line that cut through Ukraine like a wound, dividing not just land but lives. <\/p>\n
My father considered himself Russian. I consider myself Ukrainian. It didn\u2019t stop me from being his son or him from being my dad. But it did prevent me \u2014 a writer who has been critical of Russia \u2014 from safely traveling home. We would hug if we met, yet we didn\u2019t even say goodbye.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t a unique story. It\u2019s just mine. Across Ukraine, hundreds of thousands \u2014 perhaps millions \u2014 of people have lived some version of it. Families divided. Children cut off from their parents. Lives torn in half. The front line respects neither geography nor intimacy. It slices through us all mercilessly.<\/p>\n
In 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and Donbas, over a million Ukrainians became refugees.<\/p>\n
My family was among them, leaving behind friends, relatives, and parents. Then it seemed temporary, but it dragged on for years. We had to begin again \u2014 with just two suitcases and a stack of documents, though we only grabbed half of the important documents when we left. Looking back, those were our last cloudless times.<\/p>\n
Then came 2022. President Vladimir Putin of Russia escalated the conflict that began in 2014 into a full-scale invasion. Shelling. Explosions. Tank columns. Civilians shot in the street. About 7 million Ukrainians fled abroad<\/a>; nearly 4 million more became internally displaced.<\/p>\n Behind those dry statistics are real people: children growing up in foreign languages, families scattered across borders, wives seeing husbands only through video calls.<\/p>\n And those who stayed \u2014 too poor to flee, too ill to travel, or too determined to leave \u2014 are rarely seen in news reports. But they exist.<\/p>\n Today, my wife and I are used to being \u201ctemporarily displaced,\u201d though it feels permanent. We managed to leave Donetsk on the very last train that connected it with the rest of Ukraine in July 2014. <\/p>\n We\u2019re often told: There\u2019s a war on. Be grateful you lost only your home. Be grateful to the Ukrainian government. Be grateful to the American president who now seeks to end the war \u2014 perhaps at the cost of our homes, our land, and our future. <\/p>\n But war is not just a thief. It is also a looter. A pillager. Governments track military costs in spreadsheets. But what of the human cost that doesn\u2019t show up in ledgers?<\/p>\n I saw dozens of refugees when my family wandered across Poland in the early months of the war. The United Nations offered $600 for a family of four, but only for three months.<\/p>\n