Viktoriia Grivina

Love early morning walks through the city. Assumption Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Kharkiv on Gogol street. It is the main Catholic Church in Kharkiv.

Stars, Wars, and Shaheed Drones The sun comes out on a Saturday morning, drenching all in bright lemony light, as I walk with a group of locals to the Astronomy Museum of the Kharkiv University.

open.substack.com/pub/vika4goo...

I couldn’t help but analyze the russian gaze and the obsessive compulsion of russian intellectuals to write about Ukraine: open.substack.com/pub/vika4goo...

Woke up perfectly in time to hear a combined attack of russian missiles, shaheeds and m.gessens on Kharkiv.

Took advantage of a visa free regime

With our northern borders,

Rushed to us

Looking for political asylum

Our fatherland that winter

Was so cold,

That we had nothing left

But to freeze into it.

My awkward translation of a poem by Anatolii Kytchynskyi, a poet from Kherson, The Cold of That Winter (2005).

We called the cold of that winter “beastly”,

Because it was so freezing you could bark.

But language would save us.

There was a feeling

That all the colds in the universe👇

Starting this day in Kharkiv with a class of fly yoga was definitely a choice 😅. As we were swinging in hammocks after the threat of guided bombs subsided, the instructor asked if anyone watched the new adaptation of the Wuthering Heights already.

Happy pancake holiday. In Ukraine, it’s called either masliana (Масляна) or Kolodyi (Колодій). My kitchen is warm enough to cook again! Tried to make crepe suzette. Let’s burn the scarecrow of winter and approach spring.

This Kharkiv cat is a lightning, a Sunday messenger.

There is nothing like taking a relaxing hot bath in a cold ass winter apartment, and hearing a female voice from a street loudspeaker “attention, attention, missile threat, missile threat” 💀

It’s 0C outside, and I don’t see clouds of my breath in the apartment anymore🥳. Celebrated with some oven baked oatmeal with leftover barbecue meat. And my love - regional paper Slobidsky Kraj. “Sloboda” was a free settlement of Ukrainians in 17th century.

Update on my Kharkiv flowers. Banana is not doing well. It’s +7 inside, can see my breath. Today the new heater has to arrive 🙏.

It’s a cake that people in Lviv bought as a nostalgic move. Kharkiv biscuit factory needs to step up export. 😂

Breakfast in candlelight, watching Super Bowl halftime show using WiFi from a cafe on generator downstairs.

1,5 kilo of Kharkiv cake for breakfast.

“Don’t touch, sleeping till spring” - a plant in the hallway of Kharkiv School of Architecture says (now based in Lviv). I wish I could say that too.

An old orchid in my apartment is trying to bloom in -20 relying on a cold radiator it stands on. The way strength is born out of care, and violence out of great weakness of the criminal and indifference of the surrounding world.

Kharkiv groundhog Tymko IV predicted six more weeks of winter. Thanks for nothing, Tymko. We see you’re also embarrassed.

In -20 russian military purposefully destroyed the last energy facilities of Kharkiv. The attack lasted all through the night. Horrible cold, inhuman cruelty. Remember that when russian people will be crying in the court of justice how they were just following orders. They knew. They always knew.

Is it smoke in our yard? No, not us. A school was hit on another street. This time.

There is nothing more nerve-racking than reading in the news that your district was hit by a russian missile, that a school and a kindergarten nearby got hit, and knowing there is a school and a kindergarten nearby your parents’ house. Driving there with your heart shooting through your lungs 👇

Weekend my the Saltivka forest in Kharkiv. As russian drones hit residential homes, people play hockey on frozen water.

To sweeten the desperate cold of winter the famous Kharkiv cake is on discount in my supermarket. 😅

25 Shaheed drones hit my district overnight in Kharkiv. It’s strange but I always feel when they target civilians specifically. Everything sounds differently. I was born in the maternity hospital that was hit. I can’t sleep and can’t wake up. They do this on weekends so that people didn’t rest.

My friends who went to get water under russian bombs, then fled and found a job in a month in a foreign country had an office colleague who would tell her they are dating a russian soldier on tinder and laugh. Imagine laughing at the victims of violence. And we don’t need to imagine.

Modernist 1960s cafe Krystal in Kharkiv, was renovated in 2020. The problem with the renovation as you see are the pines that were enclosed in concrete and died. The cafe is famous for the Bilochka (squirrel) icecream - thick cream dessert with chocolate and lots of hazelnuts.

Fingers crossed, both gardens survive the changes.

Palm tree that survived ww1 and ww2 in Kharkiv botanical garden. The greenhouse suffered from russian attack in 2022, and the tree for the first time was threatened. Now the garden is fragile as ever, as most of the homes are barely heated after continuous attacks.

David Lynch kind of days.

Derzhprom, my modernist love on an evening walk in a winter Kharkiv.