By Lizzie Johnson and Kamila Hrabchuk
IZYUM, Ukraine — Newly 16, she likes to walk alone, hands shoved in pockets, music loud in her ears, for mile after mile.
If Kate Kobets walks far enough, she can escape into her own world. It is a place where her childhood hasn’t been destroyed — her home loud with war, her soldier stepfather locked away as a Russian prisoner of war, she and her mom confined to a bomb shelter for much of the year after she turned 14.
She is part of a generation of Ukrainian teenagers living through a conflict entering its third year with no end in sight. Raised during a pandemic — then through gunfire and bloodshed — Kate, like many of her peers, is unsure what it means for her future. She knows she is luckier than some of her friends — who have lost their homes or even their lives. Still, it is difficult to make sense of it all.
Kate feels frozen, she said in interviews during three days of visits to her home, her life suspended when Russia invaded her country in February 2022, then overtook her city a month later — a brutal occupation that lasted half a year. Kate’s mom didn’t want to split their family up. By the time they decided to evacuate, it was too late.
Kate was there as 80 percent of Izyum was razed, as more than 1,000 of her neighbors were killed. She was there when the city — an important transportation hub in eastern Ukraine with a preinvasion population of about 45,000 — was liberated in September 2022.
Her classes are still online. Her friends are displaced. Her crush is in a different country. Her beloved woods contain mines and at least one mass grave. Still, she thought that 16 would be different — more freedom, more maturity. But her birthday came and went on Dec. 4, and now, it is just more of the same.
“I thought, ‘Wow, cool. I will be so grown up,’” Kate said. “And I feel like a 10-year-old child.”
Nearly every day, she walks — remembering what her life was, escaping what it has become — until her legs ache and her mind goes blank.
Remembering
Strolling Izyum’s downtown, Kate walked through her memories.
The city changed, but the streets stayed the same, and she finds comfort in them. It was late December, and she walked with slow, sure steps — as if she could go unseen — in a donated women’s parka she has yet to grow into. Red hair poked from beneath her beanie, her cheeks a sandstorm of light freckles.
She stopped at each crosswalk — looking back and forth, back and forth — as military vehicles roared by, exhaling black smoke.
She walked by her old school, the red and white brick crumpled, the roof open to the sky. In the winter, Kate remembered, students used to pour an ice rink out front. Once, a girl slipped and broke her arm — back then, big news.
“It seems as if I will wake up in the morning … and everything will be as before,” Kate said.
Past the schoolyard, she cut through the city’s main park — shorn of trees, the fountain at its center dark. This was where her parents met and fell in love at 19. They were just three years older than she is now, but Kate could not yet imagine a love like that. Her parents divorced when she was 7 — what she thought then would be her hardest year.
Kate used to spend a lot of time at the park. Picnicking on the grass with Kira and Nastya in the summer — cold lemonade, mushroom sandwiches. Borrowing Olya’s skates to zip around the main square, rolling so fast it felt like she was flying.
Now, only Kira is left. “Promise always that we will be together,” she wrote in Kate’s birthday card that month, stamping her hand in red paint on the front.
With the card, she gifted Kate a friendship bracelet with beads of pastel shells.
Kate walked down a long street to the Donets River. The girls once celebrated the end of summer here, diving into the cool water, their clothes dripping wet. At Nastya’s house, they used a hair dryer on Kate’s outfit to hide the evidence. Her mother — who had forbidden Kate to swim — never found out.
That was before Nastya moved to Russia with her family.
Kate walked to the next road, then stopped abruptly, her face like another collapsed building.
Olya — killed in a shelling at 14 — once lived down there.
