KHARKIV, UKRAINE — The anxiety gnaws at you every minute that you are awake and most of the minutes you are asleep. It jolts you out of dreams. I meet Ilya, 24, in line for the one supermarket that is open in the slushy snow and my hands are shaking a bit typing on my phone as he speaks, but probably just because it is cold. “It’s absolutely terrifying,” he says. He keeps fidgeting with his mask and swaying back and forth and neither of us are doing particularly well with eye contact. “From this point, I have no words,” he says. “I didn’t expect it.… I didn’t expect it was going to go this far.”
When the shelling starts, Ilya and his mother go into a shelter near them, like almost every civilian living in Ukraine right now. They spent last night in one. He looks tired. When we woke up this morning, Kharkiv was blanketed in snow; a layer of thick white slush just…
