I refresh the page again. @monitoringwar. The timestamp reads early morning, October 5th, 2025. The clinical language of the military briefing can’t disguise what happened in the darkness: another massive combined strike. Geran-2 drones. Kalibr cruise missiles. Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles. Decoy drones to confuse air defenses. At least 600 targets launched in a single night.
I read the list of cities struck: Odesa. Kharkiv Oblast. Sumy. Chernihiv. Zhytomyr. Kolomyia. Stryi. Drohobych. Lviv. Zaporizhzhia hit with both drones and aerial bombs. Energy infrastructure damaged again. Partial emergency blackouts already reported.
And all I can do is sit here, thousands of miles away, watching my aster bloom.
The Unbearable Asymmetry
There’s something obscene about the casualness with which I can check these updates. I’m safe. Warm. My lights work. My biggest concern today was whether to water my new Ukrainian aster (I have others too, but they are not comparable to what those who lost their home are going through right now). Meanwhile, in the cities I just read—cities with botanical gardens and flower markets and people who also love asters—families were huddled in shelters, children woken by air raid sirens, older adults struggling down dark stairwells because the elevators don’t work without power.
The briefing will note casualties in the morning report. Numbers. But behind each number is someone who had plans for today. Someone who maybe also had a garden. Someone who won’t see another autumn.
What Missiles Destroy
Russia targets energy infrastructure with calculated cruelty. It’s not a military strategy—it’s a campaign of exhaustion, of making normal life impossible. No electricity means no heat as winter approaches. No water pumps. No internet to know if your family in another city is alive. No lights to do homework. No power for hospitals.
I think about the people in Lviv tonight (my birth place), that beautiful city of cobblestones and café culture, now enduring another night of explosions. I think about Odesa, the pearl of the Black Sea, under attack again. I think about Kharkiv, so close to the border, which has endured this for over three and a half years now since full scale invasion and more than 11 years since February 2014.
Six hundred weapons launched. In one night.
Russia had the resources, the planning, the industrial capacity to produce or source 600 instruments of death and launch them at civilian areas. Imagine what could be built with those resources. Imagine the hospitals, the schools, the infrastructure. Instead: deliberate destruction, night after night after night.
The Exhaustion of Bearing Witness
There’s a particular kind of helplessness in being a distant observer. I can donate—and I do. I can share information, stay informed, not look away. But I cannot stop the missiles. I cannot give back the stolen sleep, the lost childhoods, the lives cut short. I cannot restore the power or rebuild the homes or heal the trauma.
I read @monitoringwar because someone needs to witness. Because information matters. Because when the morning comes and Russia inevitably lies about what it targeted, the truth is already documented. But there’s a cost to this vigilance. Each notification carries weight. Each map update represents someone’s worst night.
How many more people will die tonight? Tomorrow night? Next week? Russia shows no sign of stopping. It has nothing better to do—no higher purpose, no grand vision—than to keep striking everything possible, to keep trying to break a people who refuse to break.
The Defiance of Blooms
This morning, I went out to check on my Aster dumosus Early Blue. New blooms had opened overnight, those small blue-violet stars, undeterred by the cooling temperatures. And I thought about Ukraine.
The plant’s Ukrainian name—морозець, “little frost”—suddenly felt like more than a description of its cold-hardiness. It felt like a metaphor for the Ukrainian people themselves: blooming despite the frost, despite the darkness, despite everything designed to kill them.
In Ukraine right now, even as people emerge from shelters to assess the damage, even as power slowly returns, someone is probably also checking on their garden. Someone is noting which plants survived. Someone is already planning what to plant in spring. Because that’s what you do when someone tries to destroy not just your infrastructure but your spirit, your culture, your future.
You keep growing things.
What We Owe
I cannot stop refreshing these updates. I cannot stop tracking the strikes, the casualties, the relentless grinding horror of a war that targets civilians in their beds. It’s exhausting. It’s heartbreaking. It feels inadequate—watching from comfort while others endure.
But looking away would be worse. Letting it become background noise, just another distant war, would be a different kind of obscenity. These are real cities. Real people. Real children who deserve to sleep through the night. Real grandmothers who deserve to water their asters in peace.
So I’ll keep watching @monitoringwar. I’ll keep bearing witness to the missiles Russia launches because it has nothing better to do. I’ll keep supporting however I can. I’ll keep saying the names of the cities under attack: Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Kolomyia, Stryi, Drohobych, Lviv, Zaporizhzhia.
And I’ll tend my Ukrainian aster, this small living connection to a country that keeps blooming despite the frost, despite the missiles, despite everything.
Here it the link to the photo https://t.me/monitoringwar/20833
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