'Ukraine fatigue'? A Ukrainian mother-and-daughter story from London

Photo by Jasmine Yu on Unsplash

The mother of one of my Ukrainian friends leaves London next month. She’s going home, my friend says, her eyes lowered. For how long, it’s not clear.

“What? How?” I ask, staggered to think the middle-aged lady will return to a country that’s still being bombed, where the war haunts the local parks and neighbourhood streets and lurks in the skies over your home.

My friend explained the situation.

Her mother, a small business owner, also has a second part-time job in a school. In Ukraine, schools that have access to bomb shelters are opening as normal on September 1. Her mother’s school, says my friend, has a huge and sprawling bomb shelter from World War II days. That good fortune means she gets to dice with death. That bomb shelter means she has to return to her job in Ukraine, or quit. If she does the latter, she needs to sort out her pension. She hasn’t decided yet, said my friend, but she needs to go back to Ukraine. Even a Ukraine at war.

Of such monumen…