August 23, 2022—Kamianets-Podilskyi

I am sitting on the windowsill in my living room. It's five in the morning of the 181st day of the war. The night was sleepless, sirens after sirens, when the valley with the river canyon amplifying the sounds give it such volume that the city landscape alone never does, as it swallows the city steers, activating dogs and most certainly birds much earlier than their time. After a short while of peaceful rest, after the sirens stopped, my town, covered with a thick layer of fog, is slowly awakening: the curfew is over. Everything here is now immersed in a complete silence that you can only encounter in a small town like mine and in that rare moment when the choir of morning birds is quiet already but the people are still not out on the streets. This silence is so surreal and overwhelming amid the war. The rocket attacks are most typical at this hour. When they are detected by our national radar system, the entire river canyon is filled with the wailing sound of air raid alerts. It's rare we get a morning like today. I come out to the balcony—quietly, as even I am afraid to attract sirens—to immerse myself in this silence, so strange and challenging for the horizon of my human hearing. Today is August 23, and many of us in Ukraine are bracing ourselves for tomorrow, our Independence Day, that our enemy threatens to make hellish for us.

Reuters alerts us too: “The US has intelligence that Russia is planning to launch fresh attacks against Ukraine's civilian infrastructure and government facilities soon.” Right. When you are somewhere there, such a report probably makes sense. But if you are here, you'd know—the attacks against Ukraine's civilian infrastructure are daily. This morning, for instance, the Russians attacked Dnipro, Enerhodar, and Kharkiv, among many smaller cities, towns, and villages that do not make the news and whose names are unreadable to non-native speakers. Yesterday morning was like that too. An