The holidays will be a little different

Kiev nights are long.

And particularly dark: streets and apartments are hardly lit.

When Ukrainians send evening photos of their neighborhood, they are strongly reminiscent of the famous “Black Square” by artist Kazimir Malevich (who, by the way, was born in Kyiv to a Polish family). 

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

  • Follow I follow

Jennifer Wiebking

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

  • Follow I follow

The night when the meeting with Nikita is supposed to take place is also quite dark because the Russian army has been bombing power plants and other infrastructure in their neighboring country since October.

But the meeting succeeds: Suddenly Nikita is there.

A young, slender man with a narrow face, alert eyes and a standing hairstyle. 

Nikita is 26 years old and has a degree in engineering.

He studied at the University of Aerospace in Kharkiv.

Today he lives in Kyiv.

He is proud that from the beginning of his professional life he has been working for a company that supports the Boeing group.

His job: "All sorts of airlines send us photos of defective aircraft parts and we advise them on how to repair them." Why this career path?

Nikita puts on a shy boyish smile and says, "Well, of course, when I was a kid I would have loved to be a pilot." Anyway, he's dealing with airplanes now, too.

In 2020, the company sent him to California for two months on business – then the pandemic came and kept him there for six months.

"Unfortunately, I haven't seen much of America," he says. 


He returned to Kyiv, then - on February 24, 2022 - Putin's war against Ukraine began. 


Nikita's mother and grandparents live in the south of the country.

Last New Year's his mother was in Kyiv, that's when he last saw her.

The areas in the south have been under Russian occupation almost since the beginning of the war.

"The Ukrainian part of the Internet is switched off there, I can only talk to my mother via some messenger services." Traveling from the south through the front line to Kyiv this December could be life-threatening.

"Our holidays will be a little different this time," says Nikita and sighs briefly.

“Because of the state of war, public holidays have been canceled anyway.

Luckily, New Year's falls on a Sunday.

I'll probably invite three or four friends to New Year's Eve." 

The Christmas festival of the Eastern Churches takes place the following weekend.

There will be no festive mood this year.

Nikita reports on the situation in his grandparents' occupied village.

"They say last week was a holiday because they got buckwheat.

But otherwise the shops are empty, looted by Russian soldiers.”


Nikita will probably work a lot from home around the holidays or, if there's a power outage due to rocket fire, he'll either go to the metro station, where there's internet, or to his company's emergency quarters, with a generator and Starlink internet access.

Maybe he goes to the gym too;

if there is a power failure, they continue to train in the light of flashlights.

Or he listens to the rock music he likes, Pink Floyd, The Scorpions - he calls the song "Wind of Change". 


Nikita lives in a Kyiv suburb in a block of flats, in a rented two-room apartment;

his roommate fled to the Czech Republic after the outbreak of war.

Luckily the apartment is on the first floor, which gives him a feeling of security during air raids.