Second Year of Full-Scale Invasion: Eyewitness Accounts

February 24, 2024June 7, 2026

Today marks the beginning of the second year of the full-scale invasion — and the tenth year of the war against this concentration of evil. Recently, Yulia Navalnaya said that everyone should separate Putin from Russians, and her words are correct. She just doesn’t know their full meaning yet. The thing is, Putin — whatever version of him currently exists — is alive. The 400,000+ Russian occupiers who have been permanently neutralized over these two years are not. We stopped understanding or accepting any other kind of separation a long time ago. If anything changes on that front, it will take several generations.

Two years ago today, the thought that this full-scale war would still be going with no end in sight — that thought simply did not exist. What existed was something more immediate: whether our army could hold through the first strikes, whether it could keep its command structure intact, because everyone understood this phase of the war would be completely different. Kyiv and the surrounding region made that clear fast. For the first time, we watched smoke rise over the capital, heard cruise missiles overhead, saw enemy aircraft in our own sky.

February 24, 2022: Personal Recollections

Today we are publishing recollections from several Ukrainians about what that day was like for them. We have not smoothed anything out or edited these texts, because adjusting to sterile Google rules for the sake of views and ratings is wrong. All quotes appear exactly as written — because changing even a couple of words in a personal recollection can alter its meaning entirely.

From December 2021, we started searching for and buying dry-cell batteries, power banks — I discovered that USB lights existed for them. At the pharmacy I found the last (!) proper medical kit available; even iodine and antiseptic came only after long persuasion — everything was going to the army.

In the final days before the invasion, we began stockpiling long-shelf-life food for at least a few months and thinking through what we would do if the enemy reached our city. Now all of that seems like some kind of panic response, but in the first months of the war it helped us feel grounded and focus on what actually needed doing. What nobody expected, though, was the missile strikes. The first ones were received with something close to curiosity — I am sorry, but that is how it was. People went out onto balconies, filmed videos, ran into the streets and courtyards to see what had hit and what was burning, exchanged calls and messages. Here are some of my photos and video stills that no longer have any operational value:

At first it seemed impossible that missiles would be fired across such distances just to hit a residential building — especially since the first targets were infrastructure. Eventually we understood: this is a war without rules, and we are dealing with genuine terrorists.

My older daughter panicked on the morning of February 13. “There’s going to be a war tomorrow, and I have a child,” she said, and bought tickets for the evening train to Frankivsk. She packed her things and started persuading her younger sister to go with her.

By lunchtime she had convinced her, and late that evening my husband and I saw them off at the station. A few days later the children and grandchildren had settled into small hotels in Yaremche — good thing our girls work online. The two of us stayed home, in Kyiv. On the twenty-fourth, we woke at five in the morning to explosions. My older daughter called. War.

What I remember from the start of the invasion is not the missiles flying over the building — it is the ordinary things. The garbage stopped being collected. Four hundred apartments kept producing garbage anyway, war or no war. Our building manager chased garbage trucks around the neighborhood and paid 100 hryvnias per container just to get it taken away.

Later we found out that the base of our waste collection company was in Hostomel and had been destroyed. A friend near Borodyanka ended up under occupation. He was lucky enough to survive it without losses — the Orcs¹ didn’t stay in his village, just drove through on APCs, knocking down electricity poles, and shot a woman who was simply walking down the street talking on her phone.

As for myself and my wife — aside from severe psychological pressure, we suffered no other losses. We already had a camping gas stove and canisters — the kids had bought them for hiking trips once. The school nearby was distributing humanitarian aid. When the electricity went out, so did the internet, and those periods of being cut off from the world were very hard.

How did I experience February 24, 2022? Somehow without hysteria — as a given. Everything had been building toward it, and the emotions had spilled out earlier. I had no plans to leave, because… I don’t know… a colleague had managed to transport her bedridden mother, but for me it was enough to go down to the basement with the animals during air raid alerts. The children I did manage to get out of Kyiv about three weeks later, when the Orcs came very close. No more than five families remained in our building — we did a count, to know who to dig out in case of a direct hit. There wasn’t much garbage, because there weren’t many people left; we dug a pit for it.

From the window you could clearly see strikes coming in — warehouses burning, shops closing, empty shelves, no transport, the metro running only a few stations and then on foot from there. A burned-out enemy armored vehicle that had broken through. Shattered storefronts. Checkpoints. Trenches in the city. A line for the last delivery of offal. A missile crossing the sky. A line at whatever pharmacy was still open. You bastards, I will never forgive you, you fucking katsaps. But there was no panic. Our guys were walking into shops for bread with automatic weapons, and maybe it was our defenders who gave us the confidence to keep going.

Two Years Later

That is how some Ukrainians remember that day — the second year of the full-scale invasion now behind us, the end still not in sight on the horizon. We may return to this topic when the occupier has been dealt with, at least on our own land. If the word “dealt with” sounds too confident, just go back in your mind to the morning of February 24, 2022, and remember what you personally felt then.

Today, confidence in our Victory is on an incomparably different level than it was two years ago. We casually debate which tactical event matters more — a downed AWACS aircraft or a strike on the Novolipetsk steel plant. At the same time, the enemy propaganda, still very cautiously, pretending to quote Western media, is reporting previously unheard-of casualty figures for the Russian army.

¹Orcs – a common term for Russians who support or participate in the armed aggression against Ukraine. Dehumanizing? Yes. Accurate? Also yes.