The Worst Morning Ever

On the second anniversary of the invasion, our vivid memories of the first 24 hours. In reporter’s notebook, Myroslava takes us to a demonstration in Kyiv marking the war entering a third year!

Editor’s note: The Counteroffensive was the victim of a hit and run on our beloved (but terribly unreliable) SUV! We are all okay – it happened in a parking lot – but the back of the car was damaged. Help us fix it by upgrading to a paid subscription on the button below! Or contribute a custom amount directly through this link.

It Started Off As A Quiet Night

Kyiv on the morning of February 24th, 2022 – foggy and spooky, the whole city deserted.

Tim: I landed in Kyiv on February 23rd, 2022 – what would turn out to be one of the last commercial flights into the city – and it was all incredibly peaceful. My taxi driver made sure to point out that no one was panicking. I went to grab a quick drink with a friend who was a seasoned war correspondent. “It’s not gonna happen, mate,” said the veteran journalist. Was this going to be all hype? 

Ross: I was living in London at the time, where I had moved from Ukraine years earlier. I was hugely skeptical that this war would start. It was a great example of terrible naïveté.

Myroslava: A few days before, we had gotten a little hamster, Kiwi, named after the green hairy fruit. That night I held this baby in my arms and thought that maybe the war would not start and it was all just intimidation. After all, who needs war in the 21st century when people want to conquer planets... not countries?

Myroslava and Kiwi at the last peaceful day, February 23, 2022

Alessandra: I was in Oxford at the time, finishing my last year of my undergraduate degree. I had spent my summers and vacations in Ukraine since I was 8, I had friends in Kyiv, I had planned to move there after I graduated. It was like a second home to me.

A Rude Awakening

Oksana: A downed rocket landed under my windows, smashing glass on all nine floors of my building in Kyiv. It brought me, oddly enough, relief. After months of living in a country surrounded by Russian troops, certainty was comforting—even if it only meant that my country was heading for catastrophe.

Tim: I got a call from an editor at around the same time. He said, “something’s going on outside – you better get to a bomb shelter.” I remember the first thing I did was stand in front of the mirror and brush my teeth. I was just in shock.

An ATM out of service on the morning of the invasion, due to being emptied by frantic civilians.

Myroslava: My husband next to me was not sleeping. He was awakened by explosions that I did not hear. The airfield next to us was being bombed. For a second, I thought maybe it was a dream... that was about to end.

Ross: I woke up around 3 a.m., and the first thing I saw was my ex-wife sitting in the chair and looking extremely disturbed and lost. I asked what happened and she replied: “war happened.”

Alessandra: I looked at my phone to check the time, and saw a notification from the BBC: “Explosions in Kyiv.”

An elderly woman waits for a bus on the morning of the full-scale invasion.

Processing the News

Myroslava: In the office of the news outlet I worked for at the time, we turned off the lights everywhere, according to the rules of light-masking. We wrote news items all night. There was too much of it, we did not have time to cover it all.

Oksana: I found myself infused into a stream of people, carrying in their hands children, pets, and human-sized suitcases – their entire lives. The most patient ones stopped at an endless line near the ATM, the rest rushed to the nearest metro station, damaged by one of the blasts.

People moving frantically in the Kyiv subway as explosions were heard that day.

Tim: The driver we had arranged to evacuate us in case an invasion started just disappeared as soon as it all began. We scrambled to find a car, began driving south to the city of Uman, to link up with some of my journalism colleagues, all the while filing reports even in the dark or without power.

Filing a report by phone in the dark, by headlamp.

Alessandra: I got dressed and cycled to my Russian translation class. I don’t remember much of the class, I was still reeling and trying to come to terms with the new world I had woken up to. 

Ross: I simply couldn’t accept the thought that a massacre of this magnitude could happen in the 21st century. I sincerely believed that we people were already too civilized and developed for this. Yet humans proved to be humans again. 

Oksana: It took me months to realize that normality had forever slipped away through that opened window, before my father called me to tell me that the war had just started. 

Alessandra: I realized that the whole morning I had felt sick. I hadn’t noticed because I had been so nauseous with anxiety. I tested positive for Covid in the library bathroom.

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A New Reality: 

Men arriving at a military recruitment center in central Ukraine.

Tim: It never occurred to me that our lives would all be irrevocably changed by that day. There was simply no time to reflect. It was survival mode. My colleague grabbed a can of tinned fish at the supermarket in a panic – even in those times, there was some dark humor there.

Alessandra: The largest country in the world thought it could take back the capital of its former colony in three days, and yet here I am, two years later, writing to you from a cafe in Kyiv. Although it might not be the Ukrainian victory people talk about, it is hard for me to hear it understood as a failure. 

Myroslava: My father-in-law came to pick me up, and I thought I would never come back. We stayed for 11 days in central Ukraine but decided to return to Kyiv even as Russian troops bombed the city. 

This postcard Myroslava’s best friend gifted her after she returned to Kyiv, it says: “Let's never say goodbye forever again.” March 7, 2022

Ross: The first couple of days just flew by in some kind of delirium. The amount of news that was coming from all over the Ukraine was just too much for the human brain to embrace. There are many days from then on that are carved into my memory more vividly, but this day clearly divides my life: before, and after.

Oksana: Today uncertainty, disappointment and fatigue have replaced the optimism and idealistic faith in the rule of law that fed our morale two years ago. That morning, we started fighting because we all had a lot to lose. Today we keep fighting before we all have lost too much to give up. 

Ultimately Ross moved from London to Ukraine, where he became Tim’s fixer and interpreter. Tim moved permanently to Kyiv in May 2023 to start The Counteroffensive. Myroslava joined the team in the fall of 2023, followed by Alessandra after she graduated from Oxford. Oksana joined us shortly after for her first journalism job.

After the paywall: Taiwan worries about what American hesitation on Ukraine aid means for whether they can rely on the U.S. in the future. And Myroslava files an intimate dispatch from a demonstration in Kyiv marking the second anniversary — along with, of course, our Dog of War!