A year in hell: Ukraine remembers the day the Russians came in force

There's a thoughtful silence that typically follows when you ask people in Ukraine where they were and what they were doing the day Russia dropped the pretence and launched an all-out invasion.

It's almost as if they haven't had time to think about it.

Or maybe they don't want to remember that moment — as if looking back would somehow prevent them from moving forward.

When they do get around to answering the question, some Ukrainians in their 20s and 30s compare it to the day the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

CBC News has been on the ground covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine from the start. What do you want to know about their experience there? Send an email to ask@cbc.ca. Our reporters will be taking your questions as the one-year anniversary approaches.

They refer to Feb. 24, 2022 as their "9/11 moment" — a temporal fork in the road that makes it obvious to everyone that the world has changed irrevocably.

But there's a difference between how the West recalls 9/11 and how Ukrainians remember the start of Russia's war.

Ukrainians will tell you the invasion began not a year ago today but in 2014, with Moscow's annexation of Crimea. The legions of Canadian, American, British and Europeans who rushed to Ukraine's aid, meanwhile, more often compare the Russian onslaught on Feb. 24, 2022 to the indelible moment when the U.S. and its allies entered their two-decade-long "war on terror."

Still, for senior lieutenant Khrystyna "Kudriava" (her nom-de-guerre, meaning "curly hair"), just 28 and the second-in-command of a Ukrainian National Guard mortar unit, the events of a year ago had that life-altering quality.

At the time, she was at the front in the eastern Donbas region, where the intermittent shelling of the previous weeks was growing louder and more intense.

Khrystyna was on combat duty that morning when intelligence revealed Russian tanks and infantry were on the move. Their position was plastered by Russian BM-21 GRAD rocket artillery, effectively pinning them down.

"For the first time in 10 years, I allowed myself to swear and curse," Khrystyna told CBC News. "Before that moment, I assumed that my vocabulary was rich enough to express myself in every possible situation."

As the rockets rained down, and in anticipation of being overrun, she began deleting data from her phone.

Once done, she said, she wondered about her family. "Should I write to my mom? What should I write to her? And maybe, in this kind of situation, do I even need to write to her?"