Background:
Irka is sixteen and lives in western Ukraine, where the map is shaded ‘safer,’ though the sirens still teach the sky to hold its breath. She is the kind of teenager who talks about the future in clear verbs even as power lines hum with uncertainty. Her city sits far from the front, but the war still finds its way into hallways and classrooms, into sockets and schedules. “It’s calmer here,” she tells me, “but it still touches everything.”
When Russia began targeting Ukraine’s energy grid in October 2022, life shrank to hours. Eight hours of electricity on a good day. Sometimes, she remembers, just six hours across forty-four. Families learned to pour water into pots before the lights went out; gas cookers became small rebellions; homework bent itself around the thin beam of a phone. You get used to it, Irka says, with the matter-of-fact grace of someone who did.
School had to relearn its shape. Her building, built in 1965, has no large, reliable shelter, so the year is split in half: one week online, one week in person; mornings for one group, afternoons for another. “Online felt like not really learning,” she admits. Air-raid alarms, blackouts, dropped connections, lessons kept dissolving into the buffering, spinning loading circle of war. “You don’t feel responsible in the same way,” she says. “You miss a lot of material.” She prefers the weight of a desk, the scrape of chairs, the quiet chorus of pens. At home, when sirens wail, her family moves to the corridor, no windows, less glass, a hinge in the apartment where waiting feels sturdier.
It would be easy to mistake Irka’s calm for numbness, but listen longer and you’ll hear a compass. The war, she says, made her and many of her friends more ambitious, not less. “If you want a good future here, you have to work really hard,” she tells me. She sees two groups around her: those who look at the ruins and make plans to leave, and those who look at the same ruins and decide to build. Both make sense. Both carry grief. Irka chooses to stay. “There’s a good university in my city,” she says. She wants to study computer science, to write logic that holds when everything else flickers. It sounds almost defiant: a girl who has rationed megawatts choosing a life measured in megabytes.
Staying, for Irka, is not only about place; it is also about language. Of everything we discuss, this is where her voice sharpens. In the east, where communities lived closer to Russia, Russian has long been the default in public spaces. Displacement has carried that habit west. Irka bristles when people insist language “doesn’t matter.” For her, Ukrainian is a line the country holds together: a daily, spoken defense. “Language makes a difference,” she says. “Why is it so hard to speak your national language?” In a war where borders are violated, she insists that boundaries can also be drawn in the mouth, in the words you choose, in the sound of your belonging.
Her view of help is practical. Donations, she explains, matter. Soldiers who visited her school, part of a military-preparation curriculum where students learn to read maps and assemble an AK in under thirty seconds, talked about how quickly resources disappear. “Ten minutes of a small attack can cost twenty thousand dollars,” they told the class. In a life built around outages and alarms, numbers land with a certain bluntness. Sometimes solidarity looks like money; sometimes it looks like learning to be steady.
Steadiness is a theme with Irka. The fear that surged at the beginning has quieted into an almost disciplined hope. She does not romanticize the danger, “If a missile comes directly, no shelter will save you,” she says, but she refuses to let dread be the only story. One day it will stop, she repeats, not as a wish but as an orientation. The days until then are full: preparing for final exams, meeting a volunteer tutor when the power cooperates, helping at home, saving water, saving battery, saving plans.
There is an ordinary heroism in the way she narrates all of this. She does not reach for big metaphors; she inventories what she can control. It is the engineering mind at work: break the problem into parts, address each with the resources available, iterate. The war taught her that life would not hand her a path; she would have to design one.
When asked what she wants the world to understand about Ukraine, she hesitates, as any single answer feels too small. So she offers what she knows: speak the language that roots you; give if you can; remember that “safer” is not the same as “safe.” And then she returns to the future, back to the code she hopes to write, back to the university she wants to enter, back to the version of her country that can hold both memory and possibility.
The last thing she says stays with me for hours after we end the call. It isn’t dramatic. It’s the kind of sentence you could miss if you weren’t listening. “We all hope it happens soon,” she says, meaning the end, meaning the exhale. But hope, for Irka, isn’t a passive noun; it’s a daily verb. It looks like filling a pot before the blackout. It looks like showing up for afternoon classes after the sirens. It looks like insisting on Ukrainian in a grocery line. It looks like a teenager in a dim hallway, laptop cooling on the floor, writing the first lines of code for a life she refuses to postpone.
Irka does not ask to be a symbol. She asks to keep building. In a world that keeps interrupting, she keeps pressing run.