I am a Ukrainian artist based in Kharkiv — a beautiful city with a population of over 1.5 million people, a big center of science, culture, art, education, and technology. A city which was unlucky to be located less than 40 km from the Russian border. And this is my work routine as a Ukrainian Kharkiv based artist today. I woke up in a basement. I barely slept for 3 hours since 5 am the previous day. After that my partner, our friend, and I packed our stuff and cats and came back to our apartment, as it was quiet outside and no shellings were predicted. We expected that we would be able to sleep. We prepared and ate dinner. I realized that the last time I ate something was when we came to the basement for the first time yesterday. And it was one protein bar. After having some rest we were going to unite with my mom and take her car to go to the blood-donation center. But we didn't manage, because we heard loud explosions, which seemed to come from a very nearby area. Then, we got the news about the air alert. We packed everything back up, and ran down to the basement again. While we were there Russian troops were firing at our city with “Grad”, “Uragan” and “Smerch” rocket systems, combat missiles were felt in the different districts of Kharkiv, all of them close to the center and all of them — at the civil districts. One hit my friend’s apartment, luckily no one was there at that moment. After everything got slightly quieter, we decided to go up again and have some sleep. We still heard explosions, but they were very distant...
Olia Fedorova, 25.02.2022, follow @olia_off on Instagram