"The guilt of being safe": What Ukrainians in Luxembourg ask themselves

Lëtzebuerger Journal meets Maryna Kumeda in Kyiv, next to the Holodomor memorial, high above the Dnipro River. It is an unusual place to talk about love. Behind us is a memorial to one of the darkest chapters in Ukrainian history; below, the Dnipro meanders through the capital. Kyiv is alive around us, but war is never particularly far away here. Neither, as Kumeda has discovered, is love. The Ukrainian-French writer, journalist and soldier returned to Ukraine after years in France and began looking for ways of writing about the war beyond the news. Love slowly became one of those ways. "I wondered whether this could be an angle from which to tell the war, this more human angle, " she says about the origins of the project.

The result is L'amour en temps de guerre – Récits d'Ukraine, published in France in 2025, built from dozens of conversations with Ukrainians: soldiers and civilians, new couples and relationships falling apart, widows, lovers and people who describe themselves simply as lonely. Near the front, Kumeda found that talking directly about love could be difficult. "Many feel loneliness more strongly in everyday life", she says. Soldiers in particular are almost never alone, yet deprived of privacy, tenderness and the person they actually want beside them. You can be almost never alone and still be desperately lonely.

An impatient kind of love

Another feature runs through Kumeda's stories: time. Relationships accelerate. Couples marry quickly. Decisions about children are no longer postponed. People say things that might once have remained unsaid.

One couple in her book consists of two soldiers serving in different units. When their paths cross, they have only two days to buy a wedding dress, organise what they can and get married. Ukrainian law allows military personnel to marry quickly, but the administrative detail says less than the psychological reason behind it. Death is no longer an abstraction somewhere at the end of a long life. It can arrive tonight.