The Flag That Stayed
The explosions started before midnight and did not stop for eleven hours.
Officials later called it one of the hardest attacks on Kyiv since the full-scale invasion began.
They did not need to tell me, I was awake for every hour of it.
At some point, I stopped counting the blasts and listened only for distance.
It moved from far to closer, then close enough for the body to stop pretending it knew where safety was.
The next blast started to come before the previous one had finished.
Russia was throwing the night at our capital.
I was frightened as hell.
Ukrainians far from the capital wrote that they had lived a night of horror too. More than 50,000 people went down to the metro, thousands of children among them.
By morning, more than twenty people were dead.
There was a moment that night when I stopped trying to write brave sentences and asked people to pray.
Then morning came, or what passes for morning after a night like that.
The photos arrived.
Burned buildings. Smoke over the skyline.
As usual.
You have seen these images so many times. You saw them last month, you saw them in 2022. Different streets, different people standing in front of the same loss.
This is another cruelty of war, it teaches the world to scroll past the unbearable.
But one photo held me there:
A shattered window in an ordinary Kyiv building. The glass is gone, and the room behind it is dark.
Inside the broken frame, a Ukrainian flag.
This is the photo I need the world to see.
I need the world to look at this window longer than it looks at another column of smoke.
A building can become rubble in one Russian night, but the meaning of a flag takes longer to destroy.
A window was shattered, and the flag stayed.
If you have ever placed a Ukrainian flag in your window, in your porch, in your garden, look at this one. If you have ever carried one at a rally, look at this one too.
This flag was already there before the missile, before the room became a wound.
Russia can break glass. Russia can break walls. It even burned a Red Cross warehouse where humanitarian aid was waiting for people Russia may wound tomorrow.
Still, the flag remained.
Nobody staged this photo, nobody arranged a symbol for the internet.
Somebody had simply put the colors there before the attack, and after the attack they were still there, inside the ruin, in the frame Russia tried to empty.
When you look at that flag, you are looking at us.
Exhausted and frightened, but still resisting.
Tonight the sirens will come again.
The glass can be replaced in one afternoon.
The room will take longer.
And the flag will still be there.
—Viktor
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This journal remains open to everyone. Paid subscriptions are what make that possible, and they let me keep giving this record the time it requires.
However you subscribe, thank you for looking at this flag with me. Slava Ukraini.
If you are new here, welcome. Start here.
What you are living through. You. Your countrymen. Your children. I am angry today. Angry that the man at the head of my country is doing nothing. I am ashamed and angry at all the world’s leaders who are basically doing nothing. Yet you persist. You find beauty and are brave. May you and those you love see the end of this and victory. You all are heroes.
Your people have taken the worst that Putin can throw at you, and yet you stand. The world's admiration for your people knows no bounds, as does mine.
Slava Ukrani. Heroyam Ukraini.