Rostyslav Ivanyk

“These guys were protecting us, and we had a chance to help them. In the military system, everyone must do their job. For a doctor to work adequately and provide proper help, they need to be in a protected building, in relative safety. It’s a symbiosis of a sort.

… This was a brotherhood in arms, where you saw anyone in uniform with a gun as a brother, no exaggeration here. This is an unmatched feeling. You won’t see anything like this anywhere else but at war. When you’re at war, it’s like with small kids – they see no gray, only black and white, good and evil. Adults live in shades of gray. It wasn’t like that here – we lived by these childlike concepts: there were absolute brothers and absolute enemies. And that was it. This feeling makes you recall the war in a positive light. Everyone is equal here; everyone is the same because you are all in the same conditions. You can go to the toilet and never come back. And it can be anyone – commander or soldier. Social differences just vanish. That’s probably why so many soldiers coming back from the war want to return. Because they face the fact that everything is different in civilian life. But there, everything was honest, fair. And that’s what I remember most about the airport. It was an honest place.”