The Soldier Who Brought My Ghosts Back

A Ukrainian soldier’s sketches met my war-torn childhood. Across borders and decades, our wounds spoke. His art screamed. My memories answered. Together, we refused to forget.

It is May 2025, and I am resting briefly in Poland, at the threshold of another season of reporting from Ukraine. In a few days, I will cross into a land that no longer needs introduction to the world’s sorrow, a country whose struggle has defined this generation’s understanding of resistance, identity, and survival. But today, I write not only as a reporter on the cusp of conflict, but as a Kosovar who has, through the strange geometry of war, become bound by thread and thunder to Ukraine’s fate.

This story begins not with the crack of gunfire, but in the quiet, haunted dusk of my own past. I was a teenager when the war found us in Kosovo. I know what it means to be displaced, silenced, forgotten. That war etched itself into my bones, its screams, its absences, its bitter wind sweeping across refugee camps and burial sites. The faces I met then were etched with the same strain I would come to see again in Ukraine. And so, when the bombs began to fall on Kharkiv, when Russia’s machiner…