When Leaders Leave and Fathers Stay Behind

We believed in the future in 2022,” he said. “Now we survive. That’s all.” His daughter grows up afar. He fights a war that’s no longer his.

In the fading light of a Kyiv evening, a city more accustomed these days to sirens than serenity, the atmosphere hummed with a curious calm. The air held the residue of conversations that could never be had aloud in the daylight and in a quiet corner of a worn cafe, I sat with a man who, for the sake of this account, I shall call "the friend."

We sipped tea as dusk began to pull its grey curtain across the city, and our conversation unfolded not like an interview, but as an unburdening. He spoke plainly, sometimes cautiously, but always with the clarity of someone who has lived too long with his thoughts and too little with hope.

His voice carried the weight of years spent observing Ukraine from within and afar, a man educated in English translation, currently studying journalism, and politically awakened during the Orange Revolution of 2004. A life spent tracking the pulse of his nation from Viktor Yushchenko’s halting reforms to Zelensky’s embattled presidency. And now, like so many U…