My very close friend from Kharkov has not responded to my letters for 4 days, and I began to worry a lot.
Today I received this letter from him:

In Kharkov, everything is the same, only even more complicated and difficult.
Our life is like walking on a tightrope - high above the ground you go forward, swing, stagger, every step can be your last, but you go. Not knowing whether you will get there and where you are going at all.
There are more schools with bomb shelters, some children went to school on September 1. But not all, many children have never sat at a desk, since first there was covid, and then almost immediately the War.
It is still unclear with winter heating. On the one hand, TPP-5, which gave us hot water, is destroyed and there is no point in restoring it, since one missile will nullify all efforts. On the other hand, the mayor's office claims that everything is fine, they have mini-boiler houses, like in this photo. No one has seen such boiler houses yet, but since everyone is behaving calmly, I hope that the issue can be resolved.
It seems that the electricity situation has become easier, even the street lighting has been turned on. But over the years of the war, we have become accustomed to the situation developing according to a sine wave. There is water now. I hope that they have thought to disconnect the pumps from the centralized power supply, if possible.
Seeing (less and less often) friends and acquaintances, we discover that on the one hand Time is running slower and slower, infinitely slow, constant bombing and agonizing hours in shelters, and on the other hand Time is clearly running faster and faster, because we look older and older, as if we have aged 13 years in these 3 years of the War. People are aging en masse and rapidly...
If Europe and Europeans could feel what Putin has turned our lives into, and if they heard our sirens for at least an hour and rushed in despair to their children and grandchildren to hide them in shelters, I am sure they would take our tragedy closer to heart.
What is happening to our people and our country is a monstrous tragedy. It will, like a red-hot iron, leave a trace of pain and sadness, grief and sorrow on the bodies and souls of entire generations of Ukrainians - for a long time, almost forever.
If Europe does not know what Misfortune is and what Trouble is, then this is Ukraine. Incurable псяеищ and unbearable disaster.

10/07/2024