The Indo Daily: ‘Life is going on, then everything stops for a funeral’: Four years into war
It was meant to be for a few days.In mid-February 2022, as Russian troops gathered on Ukraine’s borders, Ksenia Samotiy urged her family to leave. Three days before the invasion began, her parents decided her mother would take Ksenia and her two younger siblings out of the country “until things settled”.They left two days before war broke out. Her father stayed behind in Lviv.At the time, there was disbelief. Surely Russia wouldn’t actually invade. Surely they would return within a week.Four years later, the war continues.Today, Ksenia lives in Dublin. Her mother and siblings are in Warsaw. Her father remains in Ukraine. In a recent Sunday Independent article, she wrote that her “family exists now as a map rather than a household”. Birthday songs sung over video calls, Christmas dinners at separate tables, even funerals attended via FaceTime.Recently, she returned to Lviv for the first time since she fled. She found a city both familiar and changed. Coffee shops full, students gathered outside lecture halls, but also funeral processions that quietly stop traffic and a cemetery that has run out of space for the war .Today on The Indo Daily, Fionnán Sheahan speaks to Ksenia Samotiy about fleeing Ukraine, building a life in Ireland, and returning home to a country still at war.
