(short story)

When the Russian-Ukrainian war came to Mykola’s doorstep, he was not prepared. His village, located just outside Kharkiv, had always been a quiet place surrounded by golden wheat fields. He was a farmer, like his father before him, and his hands had long been more familiar with the weight of a shovel than that of a rifle. But in February 2022, everything changed. The Russian-Ukrainian war, which had lingered in the east for eight years, arrived with explosions that shook the ground beneath his boots.

At first, Mykola resisted the call to fight. “What can a farmer do in a war?” he asked his wife, Oksana, as they watched their village fill with military convoys and neighbors fleeing westward. But when the first Russian tanks rolled down the highway and artillery struck their neighbor’s barn, he realized he could no longer stand idle. The land he had plowed, the land his family had nurtured for generations, was under siege.

Mykola signed up to join the Territorial Defense Forces the next day. He was handed a worn-out AK-47 and shown how to use it. His unit was made up of people just like him—teachers, mechanics, truck drivers, and other farmers. Men and women who had little military experience but shared an unshakable resolve: no invader would take their home.

The war was not what he imagined. The first time he heard the whistle of incoming artillery fire, Mykola fell in the mud, his heart pounding. In moments of quiet, his thoughts drifted back to his farm—the smell of freshly tilled soil, the way the sun warmed his face in the early morning. It seemed impossible that the same hands that once planted seeds now gripped a weapon.

In late spring, Mykola’s unit was tasked with holding a village just a few kilometers from the frontline. It was there that his farming skills unexpectedly came in handy. When fuel for military trucks ran low, Mykola rigged an old tractor to help transport supplies. When soldiers needed shelter, he patched up broken barns using tools and wood he salvaged nearby. “A farmer’s job is to make something from nothing,” he joked, but the others called him “the village hero.”

Through it all, Mykola never lost his hope. Letters from Oksana kept him grounded. She told him about the farm—how the cows missed his voice and the fields were overgrown without him. It hurt to hear, but it also gave him strength. “I’ll come back and fix it all,” he promised her in every reply.

Months later, Mykola stood at the edge of his wheat fields again. The war had scarred the land—craters dotted the soil, and barbed wire cut across what used to be fertile ground. But as he knelt to touch the earth, he knew the land was still alive. Just like the people who defended it, the soil was resilient. “Next spring, we’ll plant again,” he said quietly to himself, looking over the broken horizon.

The war had turned farmers into soldiers, and soldiers back into farmers. Mykola knew life would never be the same, but he also knew one truth: as long as Ukrainians had their land, they had their future.