Tulips, bombs and a love story in Lviv | International

In one of those places in Ukraine where, despite the war, the population feels (or felt) safe, this morning a missile fell, killing four people and injuring more than three dozen. It is a quiet, tree-filled residential neighborhood in a city, Lviv, through which refugees pass on their way to Poland and to which many internally displaced people have moved, seeking the safety they do not have in the cities and towns closer to the front lines. Right there, in a cafeteria next to the attacked building, two colleagues from the newspaper and I interviewed Dasha two months ago, a 30-year-old woman who moved to Lviv from Kharkiv to escape the constant bombings. In that cafeteria, in that neighborhood, in that city, she felt safe. Opposite there was an immense park full of tulips, children and soldiers walking with their families in one of those rare moments of tranquility and peace that war leaves behind.

We had met to talk about love. About her love story with a soldier, about how a relationship is built in the midst of a war that barely allows them to see each other in person. Very carefully, without haste, she told me. So carefully that it took them a while to tell themselves that they were falling in love, that they had already fallen in love. “Everything was so fragile and so tender at the same time that I was afraid to break it with big words,” Dasha recounted. They talked every day, they sent each other messages, photos, gifts.

We had seen him days before amid the sound of tanks firing at military training near Kramatorsk, a difficult front. He told us that when a gift from Dasha arrives from Lviv, he does not open it immediately. Look at the package, any detail he can imagine about her, how he packed it, he sent it, the handwriting of the recipient's name, the sender's name. He keeps it for a few days before opening it because he wants to enjoy it longer. He is 31 years old, he is not a professional soldier, he had never held a weapon before, he is fighting to defend his country and the relationship with her is almost the only thing that returns him to a normal life for an instant after more than 16 months in the Army in the middle of a savage war conflict. "I have understood many things in this time," he reflected. “That love is not only a feeling, but also an act of will, a decision. It is not easy to decide to fight, as I did, and it is not easy to decide to truly love someone. And it happens when it happens, like war”.

Seeing the images of the unexpected attack in Lviv and the photos of Luis de Vega, who was also with Dasha that day in May, we have both returned to that day, to that conversation in a cafeteria that now stands next to the rubble of a building in which its inhabitants, until today, lived peacefully believing themselves safe. A heinous attack to terrorize civilians by reminding them that wherever they live, there is no safe place in Ukraine. War goes through everything.

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