Ukrainians on the war: "A landlady stopped talking to us when she heard that we were Ukrainians"

We were totally shocked

Something happened to us this week that totally shocked my son and I.

We were at the main train station in Düsseldorf and talked.

Like almost everyone in our hometown of Kharkiv, we speak Russian, not Ukrainian, but we pronounce some letters differently than Russians do.

That means: You can tell from our Russian that we are Ukrainians.

Eva sleeper

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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A woman in her 50s approached us and spoke to me.

I apologized that I didn't speak German, whereupon the woman said, now in Russian, that's what she thought.

Then she started swearing at us very badly.

We Ukrainians should all die, and stuff like that.

I was totally perplexed at first and couldn't get any sound out.

Isn't it enough that my homeland is being bombed, do I have to let the Russians insult me ​​now?

But then I started to fight back.

It was also reported in Germany that at the very beginning of the war there were Russian marines who radioed the Ukrainian soldiers on land to lay down their arms.

One answered them: "Russian warship, fuck off!" This has become a dictum among Ukrainians,

and I said something along these lines to the woman.

Then she withdrew.

I was so upset that I had to call all sorts of people, including my husband in Ukraine.

Next Thursday we have to leave the hotel where we have been staying for weeks.

We still don't know where we're going, but I'm being pragmatic: Everything has been so well organized so far, it'll be fine.

A lot of things seem normal

I dropped my cell phone and broke it.

That's why I haven't been able to get in touch for the past two weeks.

The technology in the office has failed, but almost everyone has been given laptops.

So I work from home.

I have the feeling that many residents have returned to Kyiv;

most facilities are working, even the cinemas are open again.

Kyiv looks almost like before the war, you might think everything is normal.

But there are always rocket attacks.

My office is in the north of Kiev, where missiles could potentially hit.

Luckily I work from home.

A lot of things seem normal, but not everything is the same as it was before.

Public transport is infrequent, canceled during air raids, and there is nowhere to go after 7pm.

My mother in Melitopol says that the war is continuing unchanged and that basically nothing has changed there either.

Occasional kidnappings are reported and the squatters continue to take over businesses.

They replace the signs on our shops with the names of Russian shops.

A big problem is medication.

They only come into town with volunteers if they are allowed in.

And some medicines are taken away at the checkpoints.

My grandfather and grandmother, who live in a village near Melitopol, report that their lights and internet connection keep going out.

There are active combat operations.

The Russians stole the cars from the people in the village.

But also wheat, tractors: they stole everything from them.