City of Lions

In Western Ukraine, a country roughly the size of Texas, the signs of war are subtle but unmistakable. The Ukrainian frontier guards are mostly female, in contrast to the mixed Hungarian contingent at the border town of Záhony. At a hotel in Lviv, the largest city in the region, the concierge informs you that the hotel restaurant doubles as a bomb shelter with the air of someone who has long grown used to such pronouncements. In a lobby festooned with Christmas decorations, there are signs advising you not to take the elevators. At breakfast the next morning, several men in combat fatigues join the queue for lamp-warmed eggs, crepes, and shredded cabbage, including two who speak English in loud American accents. A toy store on the city’s outskirts sells Lego knock-offs depicting military scenes instead of castles or pirate ships. 

Lviv’s population has lately been swelled by internally-displaced refugees from Eastern Ukraine, but even before the war it was one of the country’s major urban centers. It is, however, something of an outlier among Ukrainian cities. Lviv’s history defies easy summary, but a clue to its origins can be found in its many names: Lemberg to the Germans, Lwów to the Poles, Lvov to the Russians, and Lemberik to the Jews. More fancifully, it has also been called Leopoldstadt or Leopolis, the City of Lions. 

Trieste, Budapest, St. Petersburg—many places have been described as the furthest reaches of the Western world, but Lviv has a better claim to the title than most. Galicia, the historic province that surrounds Lviv, is the easternmost frontier of Latin Christianity, and the city’s downtown is still dotted with Catholic and Greek Catholic churches and cathedrals. Lviv was part of the medieval Kingdom of Poland, the Habsburg Empire, and interwar Poland before finally being absorbed by the Soviets at the close of the Second World War. 

Lviv’s history is inscribed in the city’s lovely baroque architecture, which bears a striking resemblance to better-known Central European destinations like Budapest, Prague, and Krakow. All four were major cities under the Habsburgs—Lviv and Krakow were effectively co-capitals of Galicia—but only Lviv was left out of NATO and the European Union. When you stroll down Lviv’s cobblestoned streets, or walk past Market Square, or admire one of the city’s beautiful churches—Roman Catholic, Armenian, Greek Catholic, or Orthodox—it’s easy to forget you’re visiting Ukraine, and not one of the trendy Eastern European cities that play host to river cruises and digital nomads.

Yet even the least observant visitor is quickly reminded of the war. Lviv has been mercifully spared the worst of the bombing, but cathedral windows are boarded up and most of the city’s downtown monuments are covered in protective netting. Because Lviv is a safe haven compared to Ukraine’s eastern cities, its picturesque downtown is filled with soldiers in combat fatigues on leave from the frontlines. Many are on crutches or missing limbs. A patriotic sign at a downtown bus stop depicts a jacked, top-knotted Cossack shouldering a Javelin anti-tank missile. 

Despite its favorable location, Lviv has not emerged from the current conflict unscathed. The city and its environs have been subjected to air strikes since the beginning of the war, including an attack last September that killed seven and damaged a local high school. 

Learning in Wartime 

Ukraine’s education system also shows the strain of war. At Ukrainian Catholic University, many of the students have friends or family members in the military. The makeup of the student body also reflects certain wartime exigencies. “Seventy percent of first-year students are girls,” says Yelyzaveta Shakhova, an 18-year-old psychology student from the southwestern Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. “Every year, there are less male students.”

Like Lviv itself, Ukrainian Catholic University is a bit of an outlier. Most Ukrainian universities are large state institutions, but UCU is a small, private school funded mostly by overseas donations from America and Canada.  Although the campus is not far from Lviv’s historic downtown, UCU’s buildings are much newer, with comfortable dorm rooms, spacious lounges, and fast WiFi, at least as long as the power stays on. When discussing the war, students struggle to reconcile the relative safety of their cloistered academic environment with dire news from the East, where many still have friends and family. C.S. Lewis’s  1939 essay “Learning in Wartime” was a late addition to the fall English curriculum for several first- and second-year students. 

Over-caffeination and fatigue are familiar feelings on campus, but a deeper sense of weariness pervades UCU’s collegial atmosphere. “People were eager at the beginning [of the war], people volunteered,” says Shakhova. “Now people have gotten used to it.” 

Iryna Kuliieva, a 19-year-old political science student from Vinnytsia in Central Ukraine, is worried about her family. “With each day, I’m getting more and more pessimistic,” she says. “My dad is in the army; he got injured.” Kuliieva says her father volunteered in March 2022, shortly after the outbreak of the fighting, and will be going back as soon as he recovers. 

The group of first- and second-year students I spoke to, all confident English-speakers, were well versed in American culture and Gen Z idioms. Kuliieva, who is particularly talkative, spent six months as an exchange student in Nebraska. Despite their social media–inflected jargon, the students’ concerns are deadly serious. War or the threat of war has been an inescapable fact of life for as long as they’ve been following the news. 

“Most Ukrainians are mentally exhausted,” says Marharyta Savchuk, a 19-year-old political science major from Lutsk in Northwestern Ukraine. Even the hardcore patriots, she says, are getting tired. 

“It’s been part of our lives for so long,” says Shakhova, who was 8 for the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and Donetsk. “Our teacher was ‘woke’ enough to educate us on the news,” she adds.

Kuliieva, the former exchange student, also deploys Gen Z terminology to describe Ukraine’s troubled history. “We have a lot of generational trauma. From [the] Holodomor, for example,” she says, referring to the brutal famine and political persecutions Ukraine endured at the hands of the Soviets in the 1930s.  

Despite worrying news from the frontlines and the almost palpable weight of Ukrainian history, the girls have no plans to leave. Kuliieva remembers returning home from Nebraska on the eve of the war. At the Denver Airport, security asked her, “Are you sure you want to go home?” 

“I love Ukraine,” she says. “I want to stay here. I want to rebuild it.”

Her fellow students fervently agree. Maria Chichak, an 18-year-old political science major from Kiev, has friends and family in Montenegro. “They still feel like strangers,” she says. “I’d like to study abroad, but not live abroad.” 

Savchuk, the political science major, spent four months in Poland at the outset of the war. “I was lucky to have classmates and teachers who were very supportive,” she says. 

Nevertheless, she still felt out of place, even in a country as welcoming as Poland. “You are just not meant to be here,” she remembers thinking to herself. “You will always be a stranger.”

“I had the choice to stay but I still decided that I wanted to go home,” says Savchuk. “I missed my father.”

Despite her fluency with American slang, Shakhova sounds very old-fashioned when discussing her decision to remain in Ukraine. “As weird as it may sound, the full scale invasion made me want to stay,” she says. “[Ukraine] is still my motherland.”  

Christmas is approaching, and the students plan on celebrating according to the Western calendar on December 25. Older relatives, they say, generally stick to the traditional Orthodox calendar and observe the holiday in January. On campus, festive decorations hang next to signs directing students to the nearest bomb shelter.   

The Field of Mars

The conflict has left an indelible mark on Lviv’s geography. East of the city center, the Lychakiv Cemetery is a somber reminder of Western Ukraine’s past. Founded in 1786, it is home to many German and Polish tombs and sepulchers. Russian graves from the Soviet period are also present, although the city recently removed a monument to the Red Army’s liberation—many locals would call it a sack—of the city in 1944. Next to the cemetery, a new field has been cleared to memorialize Lviv’s war dead. 

At first glance, the Field of Mars is a triumphant monument to Ukraine’s fallen heroes. In contrast to the sober grey hues of the neighboring cemetery, the field is saturated with color. Blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags are ubiquitous, but so are banners from various military units, including a few from the infamous Azov Battalion, a hard-right outfit that has been involved in some of the conflict’s toughest fighting. Red-and-black flags, a callback to Ukrainian nationalism in the Second World War, are also common.     

The mood dampens as you walk among the individual graves, raised wooden boxes covered in plain white stones and usually marked by a photograph of the fallen soldier in place of a tombstone. Below the flags and banners, the boxes are littered with smaller photographs, candles, and keepsakes left by friends and family members. Many have corner QR codes that can be scanned to donate to the family or the deceased’s military unit or to simply read about the dead soldier’s life. Some of the keepsakes—a favorite energy drink, a photo of a teenager on a BMX bike—are heartbreakingly personal.  

The December 6 Feast of St. Nicholas is still a popular celebration across Central and Eastern Europe. Friends and family exchange small gifts and children find chocolate coins and oranges under their pillows and in their stockings. In the wet gloom of early December, the wooden boxes of the Field of Mars are covered with pine boughs and bright orange clementines. 

The Field of Mars is part of Lviv’s new geography, a landscape shaped by war and patriotic feeling. One of the best views of the old city can be found on a newly-installed monument to “the hundred martyrs” of the 2014 Maidan protests, a precursor to the current conflict that resulted in the eviction of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. The memorial is a simple and rather brutal concrete observation terrace on a hill just outside Lviv’s historic downtown. 

On a cobblestoned square in front of the Church of the Holy Eucharist, one of Lviv’s lovely baroque Catholic churches, a new display pays tribute to the wartime exploits of Ukraine’s military. It’s a strange mix of the old and the new: Photos of unit emblems and soldiers in digital camouflage sit next to pictures of Catholic, Greek Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim chaplains. The diversity of religious beliefs in Ukraine’s armed forces is a reminder of the country’s cosmopolitan past. The military regalia is a reminder of its present troubles. 

In early December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly acknowledged Ukraine’s casualties for the first time, saying that the military had suffered 43,000 deaths and another 370,000 soldiers injured since the beginning of the war. Most believe this to be a significant undercount. Meanwhile, the Field of Mars continues to expand. Next to the rows of flags and banners, tractors clear space for more wooden boxes.  

Lviv’s Foreign Volunteers

Lviv is less cosmopolitan than it was during the Habsburg era, but it continues to attract foreign visitors. Before the war, the city was gaining a reputation as a budget-friendly alternative for backpackers seeking a glimpse of the old Mitteleuropa without the crowds of Budapest or Prague. Now wartime Lviv attracts a different class of visitor. 

According to the International Volunteer Center, people have traveled from as far away as New Zealand and South America to contribute to the Ukrainian cause. The center is located on the refurbished third floor of one of Lviv’s crumbling but still stately apartment buildings. Like the students at UCU, the center’s staffers are war weary but determined.  

Arthur von Manstein, a bearded Frenchman from Versailles, co-founded the International Volunteer Center to connect foreigners with Ukrainian NGOs that contribute to the war effort, from candlemaking to chopping vegetables for military ration kits to helping with drone production. He first came to Ukraine ten years ago with a British company. Now he has a Ukrainian wife. 

“In France, people think the war is over,” says von Manstein, who has noticed a sharp decline in Western enthusiasm for the Ukrainian cause since the beginning of the war. At the outset of the fighting, hundreds of volunteers made their way through the IVC office. That flow has since slowed to a trickle. Von Manstein estimates that there has been a 20-fold decrease in donations since the sudden resumption of the Israel–Palestine conflict. 

“I came back in August, so I’m quite fresh,” says Tiana Onufriichuk, another IVC staffer from Vinnytsia. Before she felt compelled to return home, Onufriichuk was working as a stewardess for Emirates Airlines, where she observed a global split in public opinion.

According to Onufriichuk, non-Western passengers would tell her, “‘The U.S. is using you!’” From Westerners, the response was usually different: “‘How’s your family? How can I donate?’ It’s like two different worlds,” she says.

Onufriichuk still celebrates a traditional Orthodox Christmas in early January. Like many Ukrainians, she is fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. Growing up, her father was a Russian-speaker.  

Rebuilding in Wartime

As the conflict enters its third year, the question of how to rebuild after the war ends looms large. Volodymyr Hnylko is a 23-year-old Ph.D. student at Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, one of the large, state-supported institutions that typify higher education in Ukraine. Despite Ukraine’s battlefield exploits, grim casualty reports and territorial losses have lately dominated the news.  

“Will my country survive another year or five years?” asks Hnylko. While hopeful for a peace deal, he’s worried that giving up territory in the East will only encourage further Russian aggression. 

“We are afraid of giving up territories because of Donetsk and Luhansk,” he continues, referring to the 2014 Russian annexation of Ukraine’s eastern provinces. Many Ukrainians, including Onufriichuk, the IVC staffer and former airline stewardess, have similar fears.   

Hnylko also worries about what Ukraine will look like after the war ends. “On paper, we are the poorest country in Europe, but we have potential,” he says. “We don’t trust the government, which is why we can’t build institutions.” He fears that Ukraine’s chronic struggles with corruption will hamper the rebuilding process. 

Timur Yakimenko has worked with reconstruction teams close to the frontlines, but he is also worried about Ukraine’s future. Yakimenko is from Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine and the hometown of President Zelensky. Often called the “iron heart of Ukraine” by locals because of its heavy industry, Kryvyi Rih is a far cry from the cafes and cobblestoned streets of Lviv.

Due to its location and industrial output, Kryvyi Rih has been hit much harder by Russian airstrikes. “My windows cracked in a missile attack,” says Yakimenko. “It’s like Russian roulette; you don’t know where it’s going to fall or hit.”

Now that he attends law school in Lviv, the atmosphere feels very different. “There are blackouts of course. You can see the diesel generators,” says Yakimenko. But, he says, “you don’t feel the war here in Lviv.”

Before returning to Lviv to complete his studies, Yakimenko was a legal advisor with a mobile reconstruction team in the Kherson region. Organized by an NGO called the Right to Protection Charitable Foundation, the team was made up of social workers, psychologists, lawyers, and other specialists to help internally displaced Ukrainians return home. At times, Yakimenko’s team was working 30 kilometers from the frontlines. He remembers putting on a helmet and flak jacket to dole out legal advice to returning Ukrainians.

“I felt like I was doing something very important,” says Yakimenko. Nevertheless, people struggled to resume their normal lives. “I heard a lot of difficult experiences,” he says. Many of the returning residents had lost limbs or seen their homes destroyed. 

After seeing the costs of war up close, Yakimenko is more open to trading land for a durable peace deal. He holds up the faint possibility of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU for added security. The biggest question, however, is when normalcy will return. 

“When am I going to be able to walk normally in the street?” Yakimenko wonders. Everyone, he adds, is asking themselves the same question. 

Prospects for Peace

Two vital issues hang over Lviv’s future. The most pressing concerns the incoming Trump administration, which has promised to come to terms with Russia and quickly broker a peace deal. Despite Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s vocal support for the Ukrainian cause and Trump’s skepticism, many Lvivians are cautiously optimistic about their chances after the election. 

The terms of an eventual peace deal are still up for debate. Yakimenko, the former reconstruction specialist, is willing to at least consider a land-for-peace deal. So is von Manstein, the French volunteer coordinator from Versailles. 

“I’m more pragmatic [than others],” says von Manstein. “We’re losing territories. If we’re just continuing, there will be no Ukraine.”

“With Trump, at least there’s a chance,” he continues. “I don’t see any options to win the war. Better to risk a peace deal now because the current strategy isn’t working.” 

Onufriichuk, his Ukrainian colleague, is not convinced. Like Hnylko, she fears that territorial concessions will only embolden Vladimir Putin.

“As Ukrainians, we know what Russia is,” she says. “I have friends in Russia, family in Russia.” 

The UCU students tend to agree. Despite a fervent desire for a return to normalcy, they are afraid of another invasion if Russia is not decisively defeated.

Looming in the background is the fear that the outside world has moved on. 

“Now most people abroad are tired of Ukraine,” says Shakhova, the psychology student. “But it’s not a movie for us, it’s people we know. I don’t want us to be just another news story.”

East and West

The second question concerns Lviv’s place in post-war Ukraine. Despite more than a century of political, cultural, and economic upheaval, the city has retained its distinctive character. Some think that it points the way forward for the rest of the country. 

“[Lviv] is very different from Central and Eastern Ukraine,” says Yakimenko, whose childhood was spent in the country’s industrial heartland. “The language is different; people have the Galician dialect.”

“Culturally, it’s very different,” he continues. “Most people [in Kryvyi Rih] speak Russian or a mix of Russian or a mix of Russian and Ukrainian.” 

Viewed from a certain angle, you can see the outlines of a prosperous post-war Ukraine in the Lviv city center, with its beautiful architecture, charming cafes, and efficient public transportation network. In the historic downtown, passengers swipe phones and credit cards to seamlessly buy tickets on the city’s new buses and trams, a system that would be the envy of many American cities. Meanwhile, Lviv has gained a reputation as a burgeoning Eastern European tech hub, thanks in part to the young people drawn to its universities.  

Step back, however, and the picture becomes more complicated. For many Ukrainians, Yakimenko’s industrial hometown of Kryvyi Rih is closer to their everyday lives. Lviv’s beautiful architecture and close proximity to Central Europe are impossible to replicate further to the East. Even on the city’s outskirts, reminders of the “old” Ukraine persist in the form of Soviet-era apartment blocks and the ubiquitous “Marshrutkas,” mini buses that travel between towns and villages and only accept cash, usually handed up to the driver from passenger to passenger.  

Although Lviv has acquired a reputation for entrepreneurialism, Ukraine’s economic center of gravity still lies further to the east, in Kiev and the industrial provinces that are centers of heavy industry. The Eastern city of Kharkiv is now known for enduring brutal aerial and artillery bombardment, but before the war it was a regional economic powerhouse. 

“Kharkiv used to be a place you can find opportunities,” explains Yakimenko. In neighboring countries like Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, Western regions are typically wealthier and more developed. In Ukraine, much of the country’s pre-war economic output was concentrated in Eastern regions like Donbas, with its mining and machine tool factories. 

Lviv, at least, has escaped Kharkiv’s fate. Cathedral windows are covered and the grand statue of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz is draped in protective netting, but the structures still stand. Lviv’s distinctiveness may prevent it from becoming a model for other Ukrainian cities, but it also makes visiting special, even in wartime. Services at the city’s venerable Armenian Cathedral are sparsely attended, but the church’s interior, all gilt and incense and beautifully preserved images of saints and martyrs, is a portal back to the 14th century. A few blocks away, an ornate tower rises next to the Orthodox Church of the Dormition of the Mother of God. The Polish-American novelist Józef Wittlin, himself a native Lvivian (he would have said Lvovian), wrote that the tower is “the prettiest erected in the Renaissance style on Polish and Ruthenian lands.” Wittlin died in New York in 1976, a refugee from the calamities of the Second World War, but he remained a partisan for Lviv (or Lwów) his whole life. Elsewhere in the city, you can stroll by the rococo brilliance of the Catholic Cathedral of St. George, which Wittlin preferred to the Vatican. There are not many European cities that can bear such a comparison. 

Back at UCU, the girls are stressed  over their final exams before the Christmas break. Marharyta Savchuk, the 19-year-old political science major who spoke of mental exhaustion, has to excuse herself early to take a math test. The conversation trails off as we discuss prospects for peace in the New Year. Yelyzaveta Shakova, the psychology student from Chernivitsi, suddenly laughs.  “Humor is the best coping mechanism,” she explains. Her schoolmates nod in agreement.