Given the blank white background, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Ivona Kostyna - the founder and chairperson of Ukraine's Veteran Hub, a non-profit providing holistic support to Ukrainian veterans and their families, as well as an ambassador for One Young World, a vast organisation comprising of young social entrepreneurs, activists and leaders all over the world tackling almost any issue - was joining our Zoom call from any normal environment, just like I was; nothing looked out of the ordinary. Except that our time began with Ivona warning me that if an air siren went off during our conversation, she would have to terminate the interview and run to her nearest bomb shelter. For the rest of the hour I felt on edge, wary that any minute the warning sound could go off, even though I was far away in London. It was a small, yet stark reminder - though expressed with such normality (as Ivona herself tells me, sirens have become just another part of everyday life) - that one year on from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, people like Ivona - who works in the capital of Kyiv - are still living under extreme and terrifying circumstances.
As it turned out, Ivona's unremarkable background was actually her office, a “kind of” public space for veterans and their families, which include a walk-in space where they can come in and receive services and support. “And so I'm here,” she gestures. “Literally in the electoral space right now.”
And though she describes her work for Veteran Hub - which she launched in November 2018 - with an upbeat passion that leaves me all but speechless, there is no denying that the war has taken its toll. “I have been severely affected by a traumatic mental experience,” she tells me. “And I have been experiencing flashbacks and nightmares and a lot of things that are not good for your mental health, though they're completely normal when experiencing dramatic events.”
But Russia's invasion isn't the first time that she has lived through violence. In 2013, Ivona was one of about 400 people whom Berkut riot police brutally dispersed in the first days of the EuroMaidan Revolution. The violent dispersal brought more people to the streets and they eventually drove then-President Viktor Yanukovych from power in 2014.
To help supply friends who went straight from Independence Square to defend Ukraine from Russia’s war in the Donbas in 2014, she organised a fundraising art festival in Kyiv, bringing supplies to soldiers at war in September 2014 until March 2015, when she went on to join Pobratymy, a non-profit that provides social and psychological support. She also helped assemble Ukraine’s first team for Invictus Games, a sports competition for injured war veterans. During the spring of 2018, Kostyna ran a media campaign “Thanks to You” that encouraged people to express gratitude to veteran, before launching Veteran Hub, which brings together eight nonprofits that provide legal, psychological and employment assistance to veterans.
And though her story has been far from an easy one, for Ivona, leaving Ukraine has never really been an option. Though she did initially consider it when the war first broke out, as soon as her husband went to join the frontline she knew she wanted to remain as close as possible in case anything should happen. But she also considers herself, in some ways, one of the lucky ones, because unlike many other people whose partners have gone to fight, she is able to stay in close contact with her husband. “I actually had time to spend with him for a few days, he came back for a sort of vacation, which is not completely a vacation because we are at war, but we managed to see each other from the beginning,” she says. “I would say we've seen each other for less than a month in total in the past year. We usually chat on messenger, we don't have that many calls, unfortunately, because of the poor quality of connection and because of how intense both our schedules are. But we keep in touch every day, there wasn't a single day that we missed connection.”
Despite their physical distance, she is proud of her husband and “grateful” that he is able to do his bit for their country, though the true scale of its impact is evident. “The main issue in our life is uncertainty,” she says. "We cannot plan for the future. Even for a day or two.
"We must be very mobile and must be ready to take off any moment. And that's the way we have lived for the past year. I make sure my gas tank is always full, that I have my major belongings packed.
“I know that I might only have an hour to flee if something dramatically changes.”
And Ivona recognises that some of her experience is predominantly, and uniquely, female. “The majority of soldier's spouses [left behind while they go to fight] are female, though we do have spousal male spouses of soldiers who haven't enlisted in service while their partners have or women serving while their male partner isn't,” she explains. "Because of that huge responsibility for the management of the family, you remain in the back, and you remain there all by yourself in very unstable environments, because we must be ready to flee at any moment, we don't know where we will be living, whether we will have accommodation or not, whether we will have to go abroad or not.
“I must take all those responsibilities for all those choices for the whole family all by myself. While my husband doesn't have that flexibility of decision-making for the civilian endeavours we have in the family.”
And such personal responsibility - on top of her responsibility to the veterans and their families who rely on Veteran Hub for support - has drastically impacted her mental health. "It's a huge load on top of the workload, on top of the security, making all the security decisions, because every time you hear an air raid alert - and you can hear them three or four times a day - you must decide whether you're going to the shoulder or not, what will be consequences if you don't know, whether I can drive at this time or if I can spend a little more time in the city before I have to go back home outside of it.
"So it's a lot of small decisions all the time. And I think that what is particularly important for women and myself is that you don't have the chance to share that emotional burden. Because when you are in a stable partnership and your partner is with you at home, or at least not in a danger zone, you have the flexibility to kind of call and cry, and say, ‘I feel so bad, I had such a heavy day, I have been uncomfortable. Can you please just comfort me,’. But with a husband in the military, you cannot expect that at any given time because his circumstances are much more dangerous. And so you are left to that emotional burden all by yourself. And so what I see for example, from my personal experience, is that when he comes back home, for the first day my emotions go, I cannot control them.
“I feel safe once in a while. And I'm an emotional mess, and I'm very sorry for myself. And I'm ashamed of this reaction, but thankfully, my husband is very understanding. And he understands that this is the first time in months that I can feel relaxed. And that's why I feel the way. But yeah, it's complicated [being a woman here].”
Thankfully, though it seems a strange word to use when discussing such a situation, Ivona's work gives her a purpose, a reason to keep going and a way to support the country she loves so much and its people. "Working at Veteran Hub is a very fulfilling job because you work with human stories and human trauma, and you see them in their most vulnerable states, which is definitely a privilege and I'm very proud that we were capable of building an environment in which people with a traumatic history feel safe, and they feel understood and heard.
"It's an everyday struggle, because it's not something that you can build once and never change. You have to be very dynamic and change with the situation. The projects we're working on right now, for example, with the support from Wandering World and Brand Tech, involve studying the unique experiences of spouses of veterans, which is a story I can relate to because I know that before the full scale invasion, I myself not having that experience, underestimated the struggle that those mostly women undergo while they are while their loved ones are serving and this risk of losing them everyday.
“You cannot run away from you, you live with that risk for days and days and days in a row. And it's a very real real risk that becomes reality for some people in your surrounding. And it is a very important project for me, because we didn't find enough information, international literature, we didn't find any information that would relate Ukrainian experience to the experiences of people whose loved ones are fighting in the same area. And I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of that research and then reading those interviews.”
However, for Ivona, the real mission starts when the Ukraine war ends. “What we most need is contingency and funding and support and the understanding from people that war doesn't end with the Victory Day,” she says. "Unfortunately, war is the thing that brings a lot of distress and you will be living with the consequences for years afterwards. In the past nine years, we've seen that people took five, seven, nine years to feel comfortable, again, in a civilian environment. And it's not something that happens without any support, you would need to provide the support to the survivors of war for a very long time, for a decade, or more, or maybe even for the whole lifespan of this generation. And so that's why our mission is challenging.
“We see a lot of support at the moment for the country, we don't need all of that support because our target audience is currently in service. And they will come back once it's safe enough for the country to bring them back from the frontlines. So when the day comes, my work starts and the work of my team. And we need to make sure that at that point, people are still ready to support and still ready to provide all the care and funding and volunteer efforts to help bring those people back to civilian wellbeing to a good about well being.”
For those wanting to help now though, there are still ways. "At the moment, I would donate to the army. We need weapons, we need to protect ourselves. The only way to survive this war is to fight back and to protect ourselves with military equipment with anti-air alert inventory. And I don't even know the names of all these things, but I know that once they come, it becomes safer. Because I know that once we have more protection in the sky, there will be less shellings, we have less time we spend at night awake, listening to shooting somewhere in the area where we live. So that is the most important thing for now.
“We're fighting for our survival, once it's over, we will do our best to recover and to flourish in the future. In the meantime, we are very grateful for all the support and grateful for the healing of our wounded, which is a huge burden.”
Many of you reading will have reached out to support those in Ukraine last year, whether it was through booking an AirBnb in the country so that funds might go directly to those in need there or via organisations such as UN Crisis Relief, The British Red Cross and United Help Ukraine, and your support been felt.
“You feel the support and we have been feeling it for a long time," Ivona says. "And it's all levels. It's on the political level, it's on the media level, but it's also on the human level. We have a lot of foreigners coming into Ukraine supporting us in whatever way possible. We have a lot of people volunteering, we have people writing all the time, like my personal friends from abroad, they continue supporting, and providing moral support just from knowing that they are there.
“But at the same time we see some Russian propaganda, we see people who are victim to those Russian propaganda and we see people who circulate narrative that is very unethical discussing the right of Ukraine to exist, discussing the right of Ukraine to fight back and discussing the matters that don't actually include our concern their opinion within a country that is an inactive war and decided to fight for itself. And that narrative is unpleasant. But what I'm happy about, is that it's the minority. And the majority of the narrative that we see is huge support from all around the world basically, and acknowledgement of our right to fight for our own freedom.”
Before our conversation concluded, Ivona spoke of hope. Though they only plan ahead in short periods of time and so don't always think, or see, a future often, there is confidence that it exists. "I don't know what it will be like, but I have the definite feeling we will withstand whatever is coming. And I know that we will have enough strength to overcome the consequences.
"I do think that we will survive and Ukraine will withstand and we will have a good flourishing community in the future that we'll recover from its tragic experiences and build a country that we all want to live in"."
To see a full list of charities and organisations that can help; head to the Ukrainian Institute London.
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