Then came the first gunshots, the first deaths. The police surrendered their weapons and joined the men in balaclavas, who would themselves become police officers a few months later. The army finally entered the city and some drunk threw himself under a tank. Somebody filled a beer bottle with kerosene and detergent, lit it, and threw it from the fifth floor onto a passing APC. A friend of a friend was shot by a sniper on his way home from the shop. They came for a neighbour and threw him into a basement, and he was never seen again.

Russian state television kept calling the new Ukrainian government a “Nazi junta.” Russian weapons started coming across the border. And then more weapons. After the street battles, the army retreated from parts of the city they’d managed to claw back. The liberation stalled. Maybe somebody was making money out of this. I couldn’t make it out. All I wanted to do was get out, but there was Dad to think about. Just lying there, like a concrete road barrier in the way.

They said on television that the antiterrorism manuals had never explained what you were supposed to do when a whole city had been taken hostage and come down with a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe you could call it Slovyansk Syndrome.

That’s what he called one of his last stories. It’s lying around somewhere. Although, wait, no, we burned that one yesterday.

At the edge of the city, checkpoints built from tires, barbed wire and old cars, and marked with crooked signs reading “Junta Begone,” were replaced with ramparts of cement and sand-filled sacks. The flags of Russia and the “republics” fluttered above them. The yellow-and-blue was trampled into the dirt or used to bandage legs. It was painful to see. To see a flag being trampled, that always hurts.

The men at the checkpoints studied my documents and flirted obscenely. It was upsetting, but sometimes thrilling. If they had stopped me like this last year in their regular civvies, even if they were dancing and singing cheerfully, I wouldn’t have dreamed of smiling—I would not have even turned to look. But now I smile. I don’t know if it’s the uniforms or maybe the loneliness of sliding into the maw of war. Kids. A silly game, like children with water pistols and foam bullets. To begin with, all they had was sticks. Then it was automatic rifles. Then came grenade launchers, mortars, machine guns, and some kind of rocket in tubes. It all seemed so distant, so foreign, nothing to do with us. And then it was too late.

I often wonder: What could one person alone have changed? What could I, a regular person, have done to stop it all? I still have no answer. It feels like it was all a dream. A horrible, unending, and all-too-real nightmare that I recall with crystal clarity. The warm, southerly wind that blows in the scent of soil and fields, obliterated by the stench of burning trees and houses set alight by shellfire. The asphalt wet with rain or blood, the craters, the charred holes in the walls of homes, the bodies in the streets, in the flats, in the stairwells. The besieged city is silent and hugs the ground, thirty people at a time sit in cramped cold basements, some talk in their sleep. The furniture shakes as tanks rumble down the street, as if an earthquake had struck. And again, the basement, the dawns, the quiet, Dad’s lengthy silences. And I look at the hole of our shell-blasted window draped with blankets and realise why I remember this so well. I had never woken up and the dream had never ended. And what if it never ends?