Yegor Polyakov

I still remember the smell of the sea, mixed with diesel fumes and fresh bread, on my morning walk to university. Odessa, Ukraine, always had this strange mix—beauty and roughness, charm and chaos. I used to complain about the traffic, the bureaucracy, the old trolleybuses that never ran on time. Now I would give anything to be back on one of them, watching pensioners argue with the driver over a coin.

I'm 26 now, but I feel older. My body still moves the same, but something inside has stiffened. It’s like I’ve stopped believing in softness. When the full-scale invasion started, I hesitated. I’m not made for war—I’m a photographer, or at least I was. I liked documenting people in quiet moments, catching the way light falls across a market stall or how a kid looks up at his babushka when she tells him a story. That’s what I was good at. Not this.

But everything changed fast. When the missile hit the building next to ours, I knew there was no waiting anymore. We pulled three people out of the rubble that day. The silence after the explosion is what haunts me most—like the air itself didn’t know what to say.

I signed up the next week. Training was a blur. Then came the front. Dirt, fear, noise, and the endless need to stay alive. I’ve held a friend’s hand as he bled out. I’ve slept next to men who didn’t wake up. I’ve seen houses burned, dogs wandering through broken streets, and once, a piano still standing in a destroyed home, keys half-melted but somehow intact.

Sometimes, I hate that I’m getting used to it.

My parents are still in Odessa. Every time I call, my mother pretends she’s fine, says she just made borscht and that the neighbors are holding up. But I can hear the tension in her voice, the fear she tries to hide.

I don’t know when this will end. I just know that I’ll keep going. Not because I believe in glory or heroism—but because this is my home. And no one has the right to take it.