Before the war, I never thought of space as something hostile.
The world around me was a service, an infrastructure, an environment of comfort. Shops, pubs, playgrounds—amid the countless markers on the map, you stop noticing physical reality. What remains is function.
And very little of yourself.
The asphalt is supposed to be smooth, free of potholes. The lights are supposed to come on automatically. Navigation is not supposed to depend on air raids. A voice is supposed to articulate words clearly, not lose itself in the description of a landscape.
Life inside one vast machine of distance. Everything that cannot be bought or used to repair your home is pushed aside, to the periphery.
For a country that has been at war since 2014, we have become master adapters.
Perhaps that is precisely why the full-scale invasion felt like a physical shock. Once again, we discovered that history never comes to an end. And once again, we had done a damn poor job of preparing for it.
At war, space regains its meaning.
Elevation matters again. A shattered building is either shelter or a reference point for enemy artillery. A field becomes the geometry of death. The sky above your head determines whether you will live or die.
I remember the moment I first saw someone instinctively duck at a sound I had not even heard.
It looked like an evolutionary reflex—as though the nervous system had begun, independently of consciousness, to learn a new physics of the world.
In many ways, war returns you to the good old days.
You begin thinking about the weather again, because someone’s life depends on it. About the night, because the changing of day into night no longer determines when you sleep. And about the fact that you no longer understand anything at all.
Except, perhaps, one simple thought.
A field is still a field. A road is still a road. A tree line is still part of the landscape. And yet every inch of that landscape is terrifyingly hostile. Suddenly, it turns out that world history still depends on concrete, soil, vegetation, distance, cold, elevation, and human endurance. Technology has not abolished territory. And death still occupies physical space.
And you are stuck inside it.
Perhaps progress works in much the same way. It does not eliminate violence. It merely redistributes it, delegating it to distance.
What you see in the morning, scrolling through the news, is slaughter adapted into statistics, analysis, geopolitics, and entertainment. An inner certainty that reality no longer has power over the body.
Until the slaughter becomes personal.
When I find myself back home on leave and walk along the long, beautiful embankment overlooking the Dnipro River, I no longer think about the ice that covers it in winter or the algae that bloom in summer, leaving a faint smell in the air. Instead, I find myself wondering: How many missiles would it take to bring down these bridges? For how long could the river hold back a mechanized offensive? One of those giants spanning the city was designed by my grandfather. I never asked him much about it. Now I regret that.
I wonder whether he ever thought about aerial bombs.
Perhaps it is not really about the bridges.
War has a peculiar way of dealing with the past. It does not take you back, nor does it make you cherish memories, as some books like to claim. Instead, it asks a different question: How many things are left that you will still have time to ask about?
When I was a child, it seemed to me that old people existed somewhere outside of time. My grandfather had always been my grandfather. A bridge had always been a bridge. A river had always remained a river. Everything seemed so permanent that it required no explanation.
I never asked how structures like these were built. I never wondered why the piers stood exactly where they did and not somewhere else. I never asked about the mistakes engineers fear most. It always seemed there would be time for that.
In truth, most of peaceful life rests on the certainty that none of us is going anywhere.
Then the war begins.
And suddenly you realize that almost everything around you was created by someone. Someone built the road. Someone constructed the dam. Someone spent decades keeping the power station running. And someone even designed the structures that you now find yourself looking at, involuntarily assessing them as potential targets.
War restores authorship to things. The world around you ceases to be a ready-made backdrop.
Behind every object, you begin to see human labour, because it has become much easier to imagine the moment when none of it may exist anymore.
Sometimes I think that is precisely why destruction hurts us so deeply. It is not only about square metres, money, or function. Destruction points us back to someone’s forgotten work, to plans for the future that were never fulfilled. And, more importantly, to the realization that the world around us was created by human hands.
My grandfather died long before the full-scale invasion began. I never asked him about that bridge. But for now, it is still there.
One of the most beautiful ideas is this: the writer will return from war and tell us something important. But a writer never returns from war.
That is precisely why it feels so strange to hear people speak about “returning to normal life,” as though normal life were a place you could simply arrive at one day. And stranger still is the idea that literature could explain war better than millions of seconds of recorded reality. You simply open YouTube and watch. Infantry at work. Strike footage. Everyday life. No text is capable of explaining the world better than the lived reality of hundreds of thousands of people who, deliberately or by chance, became part of this great, bloody European war.
Perhaps there is only one thought a writer can bring home from war: That serving one’s country sometimes takes astonishingly strange forms.
That is what truly feels important. Not armoured vehicles. Not ruins. Not a map showing the enemy’s advance. But the endless need for someone willing to come and assume responsibility—for the landscape, for the territory.
Literature does not know how to take responsibility. It usually arrives later.
And certainly not carrying some indispensable truth without which the reader could no longer continue living in fervent escapism.
Meanwhile, the territory keeps waiting. Kilometres of forests and hills that once seemed nothing more than background noise suddenly become the main subject again. Because beneath every interface, every service, every digital layer, there still remains the reality in which a human being grows cold, hides, bleeds, and fears the dark.
A reality that never disappeared. It was only we who spent so long pretending we lived somewhere beyond it.
And perhaps that is why, after great wars, those who survive try so desperately to restore normality to everyday life. To open a café. To repair a façade. To plant a tree. It is like making a promise, as though restoring the proper order of things could persuade the world to become safe again.
But in truth, there are no promises. Everything is already in its place. Already reserved.
What lies before you is simply the countdown to the day when you will once again believe that the landscape is no longer learning how to kill you.
And then it will all begin again.
Valentyn Pospielov, (born 15 July 1998, Dnipro, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian writer and serviceman. He studied political science at university and then devoted himself to literature. Since 2024, he has served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and has taken part in combat operations. Valentyn is the author of the novel ‘The Massacre,’ as well as ‘Stockholm and Oslo,’ the first two books in the Northern Cities Trilogy. His fiction combines elements of dystopia, political speculative fiction, mysticism, and psychological thriller, exploring themes of power, social responsibility, and collective trauma.
Viktoriya Matyusha (born in Kyiv, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian-English/French translator and conference interpreter to international organisations. Since 2019 literary agent and founder of the Literary Agency OVO. Co-author of the book “Lettres d’amour et de guerre”, L’Iconoclast, France, 2024.
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