It’s the same with war, probably. When you’re suffering, you like to think everybody else is too.

The first shells dropped inside the city limits in the final days of spring. Outside, the sun was shining, birds chirped, and an unfamiliar white flower below Dad’s window smelled sweet. He was writing on the wall under one of the squares: “The doomed man writes: I dream of the world’s end.”

The civil defence siren wailed deafeningly, its howl bouncing between houses, playgrounds and flowerbeds, making its way to the furthest corners of flats. It was a terrifying, screeching noise. In the centre, church bells rang in alarm. People fled terrified to their homes and basements.

I think the reason people didn’t prepare for the battle and siege, and didn’t stock up on water, food and medicine was not the suddenness of the war. It was not until the very end that anybody understood that the city was about to become a battlefield. I remember how we chatted about the first shootout, the people killed at the checkpoint. The battle for the Karachun Hill TV tower, the rumours about the people wounded in Andriivka as they tried to stop the convoy of vehicles. Until the very end, we tried to pretend this was happening to somebody else. We had food, water, gas and electricity. People were going to work, the cars and trolleybuses ran their routes, flowers were planted in Sholkovichny Park and on Freedom Street, and we ignored the danger.

I heard about the first two people killed from the girls at the post office. They said that a tank—we called all armoured vehicles with any kind of cannon on it a tank, not understanding the difference; we learned later that this one was called a NONA—had come out onto Artyom, right up to the famous windowless House of Communism—you know the one, it has that slogan “Communism Is Soviet Power Plus Electrification of the Whole Country.” It fired several rounds at Karachun Hill, with the TV tower on it. Ten minutes later, a retaliatory strike killed two passers-by. The tank, the NONA that is, had long since left the scene.

Within a few months, we’d lose count of the dead. In those days, it was news nobody could quite believe. Shells? Really? Are you sure? Maybe they were meant for somewhere else? Who on earth would fire on this city? There are civilians here. We whispered and gossiped, read the news, and had our doubts, and gave little thought to work. Letters and parcels lay unsorted, unsent. One day, they paid us our salary and told us it was the last time we’d be paid. Then the soldiers came and confiscated the mail van, promising to return it once everything was over. The first Russians arrived in Slovyansk in the same kinds of vans.

“When what ‘everything’ is over?” we quizzed them. They just shrugged and laughed. “Well, when we get to Kyiv. And then to Berlin.”

That same day, for the first time, a shell hit a block in our neighbourhood. Well, Dad’s neighbourhood. I remember walking up and down the street a long time looking for a hole in the wall, but all I saw was shattered windows. Then I found it: the shell had flown right through a balcony door on the sixth floor. Luckily, nobody was killed. The owners had left one month earlier. Sensible people; we should all have done the same thing. I unthinkingly took a picture with my phone. “It turns out a shell isn’t so terrible after all,” I thought. A week later, somebody in that same building was killed.