Observing Ukrainian counter-offense near Kharkiv closely every day, a lot of familiar names (of villages I didn’t expect anybody to hear of except locals). Some are especially close to my heart, and thinking about it accidentally unlocked a lot of childhood memories.

I don’t know who should care about private childhood memories, but I wanted to show what happened/happening to them due to the Russian murderous shit-show. So, some of the Ukrainian toponyms that are painfully personal, and what happened to them, in no particular order:

1. Lyptsi (the one close to Kharkiv and inspired this thread): a dacha of family friends is nearby. I spent a month there every summer when I was 9-15, and the daughter of that family friends was my first love.

A small dacha settlement between a large water reservoir and a small pond (we swam in both), it was warm, calm and safe, and we belonged only to ourselves. Reading, walking, tanning, swimming, building wooden houses, talking, kissing (cheeks!). It was my adolescent paradise.

Now: still occupied. I remember every settlement on Kharkiv-Lyptsi road, currently painfully regained by our army; I recited them on a bus to paradise every year.

We are still in touch with that girl. My current cats were stray kittens found by her near that dacha. Our mothers are still friends and took my daughters and that girl’s son to the same dacha, where they have swam, walked, built wooden houses.

Update from 2024: Lyptsi were deoccupied during Kharkiv counter-offensive in autumn 2022. They are still close to the front-line and shelled constantly, and nobody knows what have left of that dacha. Also, one of our two twin cats ran away and never returned.

2. Snizhne, Donbas. That’s where my father is from; that is where I spent a lot of time visiting my grandma. Small miner’s town, it was not like “grandma visit” in books (bucolic village and garden and stuff), but I loved it still.

My memories are naive childhood ones (we visited much less frequently during the mid-90s, a hard time for a family, and then my grandma died), but they are clear and dear to me.

(There was a cool fact-per-donate thread about the town by former resident @HuSnizhne.)

Now: Shizhne is in that part of the Ukraine where in 2014 Russian army without uniforms + thugs with Russian weapons pretended to be “separatists” and created a “people republic”. Then Snizhne became infamous as a place from where the BUK was fired at MH17.

Every time going to Snizhne, we had a few hours in the town/station of Debaltseve, which I remembered as some amusement park (my parents treated me and my sister with ice cream and cafes and some other fun). Now it is remembered as a place of harsh battles

The train was called “Kharkiv-Voroshilovgrad”. Voroshilovgrad was the Soviet name of Luhansk, after the Marshal Voroshilov. Oh, they want to rename it back right now, did you hear? Also, it is the name of an important Ukrainian novel.

3. Crimea. That was the place of the sea. The place where everybody went or dreamed of going to every summer. The hot, beautiful, messy port-franco (where Russians went, too, the Moscow-Simferopol train went through Kharkiv, and no international passport was required). The place with a stormy history and complicated ethnical composition, it belonged only to itself—and to everybody.

In childhood, for many years, we went to Chernomorske and I had one-summer friends there from all over the “former SU”. Then (after a few hard years when we didn’t go to sea at all), for a few years, we visited Alupka, and I adored its mountainous landscape. With my father, we went for long hiking trips through most of the coast. In my late teens/early twenties, with my friends/loved ones, I lived in naturist Fox bay (which I am currently writing a novel about). With my wife, we have fond memories of April Yalta. It was the first year of our marriage (it is 19th this year), we had no money whatsoever, and lived on, like, 40uah ($8) for three days…

Now: in 2014, after a propaganda war and a mock “referendum”, Russia annexed Crimea and made it into a spearhead of its “because we can!” politics. Many fled, leaving everything, human rights are abused constantly, and Crimean Tartars are aggressively discriminated against, “but at least there was no war”, right?

I mean, I know my personal grief is minuscule compared to those who lost their lives, their loved ones, their homes. The one thing I am saying: Russia made us all lose things precious to us, and that was intentional. That’s what they do.

Please proceed with your day.