My grandma was as hard as nails. She had just turned 17 when the Nazis entered her village in the Kyiv region, near what is now the city of Bucha. She hid in the attic to avoid being taken for forced labour. They didn’t find her that time, but a few weeks later she was caught working in the fields. They put her in a cattle wagon and took her to Germany. She escaped and walked a couple of hundred kilometres back to her village. Grandma said that life was hard for everybody during the war, but she was lucky.

In the past month, two of my friends here in Kyiv happened to tell me that their hands have started shaking during Russian airstrikes. Everybody who knows that my hands shake during airstrikes tells me their stories. One day, during an airstrike in the Donetsk region, I had a meltdown and have never recovered. Today you could say I am an ambassador for people whose hands shake during airstrikes.

Those two friends said the same exact thing: their hands never used to shake before and now they do. Each one wrote: “I don’t understand what’s just happened to me.”

For nearly five years, the Russians have been targeting these women and their children with drones, rockets, jet-powered drones and missiles. They have threatened us with nuclear weapons. They have used an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in combat; carried out a siege; again threatened a nuclear strike; tried to freeze us by destroying Ukraine’s heat and power systems in the middle of winter; blown up a dam, flooding two city districts; used more drones and fired yet other types of long-range missiles at Ukrainian........

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