She is part of a generation of Ukrainian teenagers living in a conflict now in its third year with no end in sight. Kate grew up through the pandemic — and then through gunfire and bloodshed — unsure, like many of her peers, of what it meant for her future. She knows she is luckier than some of her friends who lost their homes or even their lives. However, it is difficult to understand all of this.
Kate feels frozen, her life grinding to a halt when Russia invaded her country in February 2022, then seized her city a month later — a brutal occupation that lasted half a year, she said in interviews during three-day visits home. Kate's mother did not want to split up her family. When they decided to evacuate, it was too late.
Kate was there as 80 percent of Isium was destroyed, with more than 1,000 of her neighbors killed. She was there when the city – an important transport hub in eastern Ukraine, with a pre-invasion population of about 45,000 – was liberated in September 2022.
Her classes are still online. Her friends were displaced. Crushed in a different country. Its beloved forests contain mines and at least one mass grave. However, I thought 16 would be different – more freedom, more maturity. But her birthday came and went on December 4th, and now it's the same.
“I thought, ‘Wow, cool. “I'm going to be so mature,” Kate said. “And I feel like a 10-year-old.”
She walks almost every day—remembering what her life was like, running away from what it has become—until her legs hurt and her mind goes blank.
While walking through downtown Isium, Kate walked through her memories.
The city has changed, but the streets remain the same, and she finds comfort in them. It was late December, and she was walking slowly and confidently—as if she couldn't be seen—wearing a donated women's jacket that she had not yet grown to wear. Red hair poked out from under her beanie, and her cheeks turned into a sandstorm of light freckles.
She stopped at each pedestrian crossing and looked back and forth, back and forth, as military vehicles drove by, belching black smoke.
She passed her old school, where the red and white bricks were crumbling, the roof open to the sky. Kate recalled that in the winter, students would pour an ice rink outside. One time, a girl slipped and broke her arm, which was big news at the time.
Kate said: “It seems that I will wake up in the morning and everything will be as it was before.”
After passing the school yard, she made her way through the city's main park, which was stripped of trees, and the fountain in its center was dark. This was where her parents met and fell in love when she was 19 years old. They were only three years older than her now, but Kate could not yet imagine such a love. Her parents divorced when she was seven years old, which is what she thought at the time It will be her toughest year.
Kate used to spend a lot of time in the garden. Picnic on the grass with Kira and Nastya in the summer – cold lemonade and mushroom sandwiches. Borrowing Olya's shoes to walk around the main square, she rolled so fast that she felt like she was flying.
And now there's only Kira left. “Always promise we'll be together,” she wrote in Kate's birthday card that month, stamping her hand in red paint on the front.
Through the card, Kate gifted a friendship bracelet studded with pastel shell beads.
Kate walked down a long street to the Donets River. Once upon a time, girls celebrated the end of summer here, diving into the cold water with their clothes dripping wet. At Nastya's house, they used the hairdryer found on Kate's clothes to hide the evidence. Her mother – who had forbidden Kate from swimming – never found out.
That was before Nastya moved with her family to Russia.
Kate walked to the next road, then stopped suddenly, her face like another collapsed building.
Olya – who was killed in a bombing when she was 14 – once lived there.
In the end, marches always end. Kate must face reality and return home.
The light was draining from the late December sky, and after more than five miles on foot, it was time to retrace her steps. Kate doesn't like to go out after dark.
She and her mother live temporarily with Kate's grandparents. Their real home – on the fourth floor of a bombed-out building – is a short walk away. No heat or running water. But it was a heritage. Her mother grew up in the same apartment. Their childhoods – separated by two decades – were intertwined. They played the same pitches, knew the same neighbors. They even seem like echoes of each other.
When they first returned to their apartment after freeing Isium, Kate screamed and climbed the stairs to her bunk bed, wrapping herself in a cocoon of purple blankets and stuffed animals. She didn't care that the windows were smashed and the front door was mangled.
“I'm home,” Kate sighed.
They stayed in their apartment in the warmer months, where the windows were open to the breeze, and water was carried upstairs in buckets. The atmosphere was cozy, the clock ticking in the kitchen, and the smell of coffee in the morning. Her mother was sleeping on a sofa on the other side of the curtain, which divided the only bedroom into two parts.
Under the bunk bed her godfather had built for her, school pictures were dotted on the wall. Kate could see all the girls she looked like – in a polka dot dress and open high heels, wearing red earmuffs and a wide smile that only now appeared In flashes.
“She has become more silent, more isolated,” said her mother, Anya Kubits, 39.
They are close. In the winter – at Kate's grandparents – there is one bed for them, and their black cat is tucked up at their feet. A refrigerator and microwave sit in one corner of the room, and a desk with a boxy computer for Kate's schoolwork sits in the other. Kate keeps her possessions — books, makeup, tarot cards, cartoons — in a small package. She had only made a few clothing changes, not wanting to make the situation here more permanent than it had to be.
“I'm not going anywhere now,” Kate said. “So I don't need a lot of things.”
Anything was better than the bunker beneath the kindergarten, where Anya worked as a program facilitator.
For nearly six months, they took shelter with 200 others, crammed into the only room in the bunker. It had a mirrored door, which Kate pasted over with Barbie stickers. Their lives became cold and airless—with only brief moments of respite in the open air—but they were safer than anywhere above ground.
If the Russian soldiers made their way up the steep stairs and past the three sets of locked doors, Kate knew where to hide. She looked older than her age, and she saw that her mother was afraid that she would fall prey to men.
They told everyone that Kate was much younger than her.
“It was terrifying,” Anya said. “We always hid it.”
Now, Kate still often feels stuck – she doesn't want anyone to see her.
She entered through the front door of her grandfather's house. Her mother was away visiting her stepfather's family. The apartment was – just as Kate preferred it – empty and quiet.
The next morning, Kate woke up to cheesecakes and violence.
It was two days before New Year's Eve, and hours before that, Russia fired the largest number of missiles across the border since the start of the war, hitting cities across Ukraine.
Kate was 16, and none of this was easier to accept now than it had been when she was 14. Growth has become more confusing.
She sat in her pink pajamas, drinking instant coffee mixed with sugar. Watching her mother getting ready for work. She wasn't sure what she was going to do that day. Maybe she's sending a message to Kira – who has a fever again – or reading manga, or practicing her guitar. She only played when no one was home to hear her.
Maybe she was walking, and every step led her to a very uncertain future. After the war, she longs to attend a nearby university Kharkiv, where she became a photographer or barista. She wants to earn enough to replace her mother's car – which was stolen by Russian soldiers – and take her on a trip to the Maldives, which she once saw on a TV show.
Kate rubbed her eyes and went back to bed.
