Everyone in Ukraine knows someone on the front line. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion into the neighbouring territory in 2022, Vlada Somka and her partner Anton were at university, in their early twenties. They, like many of Ukrainians, thought it would be all over soon.

But four years later, Anton is on the frontlines in the city of Sumy in the country’s north-east. He volunteered to go instead of being conscripted, but it’s like having to jump instead of being pushed. When a man turns 25 in Ukraine, he is obligated to fight in the war, unless he can show exceptional reasons not to. Because Anton volunteered, at least he was able to choose where he was posted. Sumy is a strategically important spot — the Russians have to go through it to get to Kyiv.

The couple have put their life on hold. But not everyone has.

“Last year was the worst year of my life,” says Vlada. “Half of my friends joined the army, and the other half fled the country.”

They could have gone too —both of them are university educated, fluent in multiple languages, and had lived and worked across Europe before. But Ukraine is their home. They have to defend it, says Vlada. They’re not Russian.

So this is their life now: Vlada in Kyiv, still going to university and keeping in touch with Anton through voice memos. Anton, a hipster on the frontlines, who brought a drip coffee machine to the trenches because “you have to maintain standards”.

The pair had once shunned marriage, seeing it as an old-fashioned construct. But they wed in March — at least then Vlada would have full legal rights and the paperwork to access Anton in hospital. They’ve also banked sperm at a local IVF clinic, as another form of future proofing.

“I never wanted children,” Vlada tells me, “But when the war happened, it changed everything.”

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One of the first people I met in Kyiv was Yelis. She is a refugee, one of an estimated eight million Ukrainians who have fled from the country’s eastern border regions. Yelis works in a handbag shop in a renovated silo on Reitarska Street, a trendy part of Kyiv. It’s on the lower floor of a beautifully-renovated building, next to a ceramics shop, wine bar and matcha café. Her hometown Zaporizhzhia is one of cities currently partially occupied by Russians.

Yelis is warm and earnest. She has striking pearly-pink nails, and generously hands out recommendations for coffee shops, a salon down the road. We sit on Danish wishbone chairs in a corner and she fixes me coffee over copies of Vogue.

One of Yelis’s friends lost her brother, and then her husband, in the last year of fighting. Her friend is completely on her own now, raising her two daughters. Yelis found out on Instagram.

“I wrote to her: ‘Please tell me it’s not true’,” she says. “Because for this family, this is the second family member who died for their values.” She describes her friend’s nine-year-old daughter, Sofia, “getting down on her knees at the cemetery”, and 11-year-old Polina, “who probably doesn’t even remember what it was like to go to school and live in a city not near the frontline.”

On my last evening in Ukraine, I visited the war memorial in the centre of town, next to a metro station. I had been already, but I wanted to return before I left the country. People climb out of the metro to the sight of thousands of blue and yellow flags bearing the names of Ukrainian soldiers; there are rows and rows of photos of the dead.

Just a few metres down the road, people strolled up the central avenue, towards their Friday night plans. Couples shared cocktails outside bars. A band played to the crowds on the square’s steps. Circles of teenagers and kids ran around, shrieking and kicking at the air. Girls rehearsed TikTok dances. Mourners stepped out of the passing crowds to pause at the memorial. One man in faded fatigues went around from curb to curb, stooping to take out candle lights from a shopping bag and placing them down every few metres or so. I watched one couple, in their mid-30s, with a young child. They stood a few metres to the side, the woman was crying as she held the hands of her husband and her daughter. After a while she straightened and let both their hands go. She then went on her own down a path between the flags, past dozens of framed photos until she found her brother.

Her husband held her daughter back at first. Then he let her run to her.

Some time later, a young woman approached the site. Kneeling, she smoothed out some ground to pierce the stake of her hand-drawn flag. She said a few words and leaned back and took some photos. She stayed for a while.

He had been her best friend, she later told me. He was killed in the Donbas region about a year ago. Today was his birthday; he should have been 23.

Vlada earlier that day had told me she no longer talks to old friends of hers who left Ukraine before the conscription deadline. Of course, Vlada says, she can understand why people want to leave, why they don’t want to put their lives on hold. But it’s difficult to see the change, to see their lives diverge.

“In the first year of the war, everyone was so patriotic, everyone believed it would end soon and they could come back to their normal life.” But then as the war wore on, their conviction faded. “People start to lose this belief. They don’t want to lose their youth.”

“I can understand this,” she says. “But at the same time I cannot., Because there are some who are willing to sacrifice their age, their years, the time,” she says.

“It’s here you verify the values of your life.”