"Everything Will Be OK"

With electricity only four to eight hours a day, we organized night shifts from four to eight in the morning to fill a foreign client’s order. “It’s strange at first, waking up at half past three in the morning to go to the factory. But you get used to it. And above all, it works.”

The licence was revoked, then March 2020 closed the skies. There was no last flight of Ernest, no farewell on the runway. When everything goes wrong, and then it goes even worse, all that’s left is to leap ahead. Bounce forward.

What did I lose along the way, between money, sleep, relationships, and health? All four, and perhaps something more. And yet I don’t remember that period as a black hole. You lift your head, you hold on, again and again.

He relocated from Kherson to Mykolaiv and got back on his feet — only to see his cargo of oil, ready to ship from the port of Odesa, destroyed by a missile. This is what lies behind the word “resilience” in reports: people who decide every day not to stop.

One spring evening in 2023, on the roof during a break from curfew, a message: a friend proposing a coffee on Saturday morning, the way we used to. A tiny thing. What we considered “normal” before the war was a privilege we took for granted.

Before the tractors can work the fields, they must inspect and demine them. Every now and then a tractor is blown up. “This is the price of the grain we ship all over the world.”

More than ten candidates for a single place at the conservatory, and I came in first. Then I pictured myself ten or twenty years on and wasn’t sure I’d be happy. I let the plan go — and found code, servers, and a different life.

He took in our girls fleeing the country, then quit his job at Amazon to go back and liberate his Mariupol. He fell at Bakhmut in March 2023. I never opened his last message. Don’t lose a single moment with the people close to you.

She fled war twice — from Donetsk in 2014, and again in 2022 — and turned each flight into a creative opportunity. Later she designed the cover of this book. “Creativity is the only thing they can’t take away from you.”

He offered to help with an oddball “phantom concert” experiment and became the partner of almost everything that came afterward. Years later he moved from Italy to Lviv. Happily and with no regrets, he swears.

One introduction to a client from his network brought the first real international B2B order — medical clothing flown to Canada, before the marketplace existed. If one bridge had worked once, it could work ten million times.

Birthdays during air-raid sirens: no external event can forbid someone from blowing out the candles — at worst you go down into the bunker, and life goes on. The war wanted to take away our humanity. We deliberately chose to keep it.

“Before the war I always had to explain where Ukraine was. Today what was almost a burden to explain has become my job. I am more fulfilled than ever, precisely because I can be one hundred percent myself.”

“Sorry for the delay on the weekly report. I evacuated my family and elderly neighbors who couldn’t move on their own. Now we’re all safe and I’m ready to get back to work.”