From Victor on Substack. Today 24th Feb, 2026
5:00 AM in Kyiv
Again
Feb 24READ IN APP
The sky was still black when the first explosions broke it open.
Four years later, at this same hour, I am awake again.
Everyone will say something.
Everyone will remember something and will count the losses.
I want to say something else:
This is not a country fighting to be great.
We are fighting to be normal.
We want to be ordinary.
To wake up and argue about small things.
To complain about the weather.
To smell flowers without scanning the sky.
To hear birds instead of drones.
To hear children instead of sirens.
To travel without calculating missile range.
To build lives that are not historical.
That is what this war is about.
Not glory, not destiny.
Normal life.
There are presidents in the world who speak about making nations great again.
Greatness as dominance, as fear, as spectacle.
But in Ukraine, greatness looks different.
It is keeping your shop open during a blackout.
Studying for exams in a shelter.
Falling in love when no one knows what tomorrow looks like.
Greatness is refusing to surrender your humanity.
Four years of war have not turned this country into something mythical.
It has revealed something painfully simple:
We are ordinary people who want ordinary lives.
That is the threat.
An empire can tolerate rebellion.
It cannot tolerate a small country insisting on being normal.
Four years later, at 5:00 AM, the rage is still here.
But so is hope.
More hope than rage.
More desire to live than to dominate.
More desire to build than to destroy.
That is what should be remembered.
Not just the tanks or the speeches.
Remember that there are hearts here.
That there are people who still plant gardens.
Who still make plans for summers that may or may not come.
Our greatness, if it exists at all, is simple.
It is refusing to let violence define what is possible, and surviving without surrendering our humanity.
Four years.
And what we are defending is not power.
It is the right to wake up and not think about war.
If that sounds modest or small, it is.
But no country should have to fight for something so simple.
And yet here we are.
Awake before dawn.
Carrying that first morning in February inside us.
And insisting there will be one that is only morning.
Just morning.
🇺🇦
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