Almost as soon as I returned from my first reporting trip to Ukraine, in October 2022, I decided to start Ukrainian lessons. Not as an act of solidarity, exactly, but as a marker that I was committed to returning. I wanted to know some Ukrainian in order to feel less helpless, to edge towards a better understanding of what I was reporting, and to be more courteous to those whom I encountered. And I hoped, in time, to be able to pull myself through a piece of poetry in the original.

I began meeting Olha, my teacher, by weekly video call later that autumn. She was in Ivano-Frankivsk, her home town in the far west of Ukraine, I was in London. With endless patience and humour, she led me by the hand through the unfamiliar letters of her language, those elegant, sensuous shapes of the Cyrillic alphabet.

I have not yet fully internalised them, as I have the Roman alphabet, whose shapes are so much part of me that I don’t see them any more. The unfamiliarity of Cyrillic characters, by contrast, allows me to enjoy the exhilarating ski-slope swoop of the Л (l), the generous expanses of the Ю (yu), and the majestic architecture of the Ж (zh), which spreads out its arms and legs like candelabra. (Enjoy, please, the extravagant double Ж in Запоріжжя – Zaporizhzhia – which has a particularly graceful etymology: it means “beyond the rapids”.) And, though I shrink from trying either to write or decode the curlicued Ukrainian cursive, just forming these letters is a joy for the hand: the twin sweep of a З (z) and the harsh angles of a Д (d), which I like to write as a triangle with a pair of sharp, inward-facing tails dangling from it.

Then there is the special category of Cyrillic letters reserved only for the Ukrainian language. You may see, for example, on a Ukrainian necklace or bracelet, or on a T-shirt, the letter Ї – like our letter I, surmounted by a diaeresis. The character, which expresses the sound “yi” – as in Kyiv (Київ) – is absent from the Russian variant of the alphabet, and thus operates as a subtle signifier of allegiance. In occupied Mariupol, in 2022, the letter Ї was seen scrawled in chalk on the streets – a single letter as an act of defiance. I enjoy the fact that in the transliteration of my surname, Гіґґінс, there is another Ukrainian-only letter, Ґ, which, from its jaunty upturned serif, one can tell is the rare hard g, most commonly employed for loan words; it was removed from the alphabet in Stalin-era reforms, and formally given back a place in the Ukrainian alphabet after the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in 1991.

There is a text artwork that I love, by the sculptor Nathan Coley, installed in a library in Edinburgh, which consists of the sentence: The Basic Material is Not the Word but the Letter. I often think of it when navigating a forest of Cyrillic signs. Thick accumulations of Ukrainian consonants conspire against my tongue and my memory: airless crushes of them, like the compressed folds of a concertina. I cannot tell you how many repetitions it took to memorise незважаючи на (nezvazhayuchy na) – “despite” in Ukrainian. It seemed important to master this phrase. How else could I say, “despite the war”? Emblematic of the many sound collisions in Ukrainian is the magnificent single letter Щ, expressed in English as “shch” – as in “fresh cheese” , as one of my grammar books puts it. After much deliberation, I have only come up with one word in English (with the exception of those we have borrowed, such as borshch) that contains this fricative-affricative alliance: “pushchair”. Four whole letters in English for a single pair of glorious, fat loops in Ukrainian.

I had studied classics at university, and recklessly, perhaps arrogantly, felt that I needn’t be defeated by a tricky language. I knew, at least, what I was getting into with Ukrainian nouns, which, like those in Latin and Greek, come in three genders – masculine, feminine and neuter – and are inflected, meaning their endings change depending on what role they perform in a sentence. Even so, I feel that seven case endings, which is one more than Latin, and two more than Greek, is a lot. Their usage is almost baroque in its excess: I have a kind of stunned respect for a language in which some numbers – but by no means all, and for no perceptible reason – demand to be followed by the genitive case. One says п’ятдесят доларів (pyatdesyat dolariv), meaning $50, the genitive case; but п’ятдесят два долари (pyatdesyat dva dolary), $52, using the ordinary nominative. On the other hand, $51 has yet another ending, because the crucial extra dollar bill you have added to your 50 means that it is, according to the Ukrainian language, a singular, however hard you may protest that you are, in fact, clutching a fistful of dollars.

I had heard rumours of the perils of Ukrainian “verbs of motion”, which turned out to be more than well founded. Speakers of Slavonic languages describe movement at a level of subtlety that, to an anglophone, seems absolutely bewildering. Ukrainian has two basic verbs where we have one to express the idea of “to go” – the first used for travelling on foot and the second for travelling by some form of transport. Both of those, in turn, come in different forms depending on whether you are moving in one direction only, or going there and back again. That is true for other verbs of motion, right down to, say, the verb to crawl. Is your baby moving across the floor in one direction? Or is she planning on taking an indirect route, or perhaps undertaking this journey regularly? Answer these questions before selecting your verb form!

Learning Ukrainian, it turned out, was more than a side-interest, an extracurricular activity. It forced me to look at myself in entirely new ways. In my 50s – treading the pleasant plateau of knowing broadly how to do my job after all these years – it was confronting to be back at the bottom rung of knowledge, out of my depth. There would be moments – when Olha was speaking to me, or when I was trying to keep up with what Ukrainian friends were saying, or even during a seemingly predictable encounter in a cafe – when I would feel an unfamiliar, blind panic rising to engulf me. It would start out well, I would be clinging on to comprehension, and then there would be a block, a word or phrase I would snag on, or an unexpected conversational current – and I would lose my grip. I recognised the feeling from only one other area of my life: playing chamber music. When you lose your place in a Beethoven quartet, say, and everyone else is moving onwards at speed, you can feel stranded, as if you are watching the vessel of the music slip into the distance without you. The redeeming fact is that attempting to speak even terrible Ukrainian in Ukraine is met, in my experience, with a response on a scale set between courteous acceptance and ecstatic (and undeserved) gratitude.

But my new language was also the language of war. From the very first, the experience was quite unlike that of studying Italian, the only other modern language in which I can claim any kind of proficiency – a language, for the learner, full of the pleasures of ordering cappuccino and gelato, for asking directions to the duomo, and exclaiming over the splendour of il paese più bello del mondo – the most beautiful country in the world. The very first sentences in Ukrainian that I read – when Olha introduced herself – were coloured by her wistfulness for a life that war had forced her to leave behind: До війни я жила в Києві. Я дуже люблю це місто і хочу знову там жити. “Before the war I lived in Kyiv. I love this city very much and want to live there again.”

It would be wrong to suggest that every lesson was filled with darkness. We laughed a lot. Olha often steered us towards a world of red wine and ice-cream, of opera and music and reading. The Ukrainian delight in the consumption of delicious food (a constant pleasure, thanks to the excellence of produce grown in the чорнозем, or chornozem, the fertile black earth) was present in our lessons. Soon I learned the words смачний (smachnyi), tasty, and смачного! (smachnoho!), bon appetit! – lip-smackingly onomatopoeic vocabulary, full of the joy of the Ukrainian table. But the war leaked into every lesson. Indefinite pronouns were explained to me via the example Ніхто не любить Путіна – “No one likes Putin”. The impersonal expressions communicating necessity, треба and потрібно (treba and potribno), were illustrated via a speech made on the eve of war by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, about the urgent need to be equipped for battle. Треба готуватися до війни – “We must prepare for war.” Нам треба мати ресурси, потрібно 300 танків – “We need to have resources, we need 300 tanks.”

My vocabulary grew to include the words for drone and rocket, explosion, bomb shelter and air-raid alarm. There is a Telegram channel that is commonly consulted when an air-raid alert goes off in Ukraine, as it provides details on whether there are drones on the way, or ballistic missiles, and their direction of travel. For ease I switched this channel to English, using an automatic translate function. With every new siren, it leapt into life, asking, “Why the anxiety?” It took me a while to figure out that the word used for air-raid alarm, тривога (tryvoha) also means “anxiety” in Ukrainian. (The English word “alarm” behaves similarly, being both the mechanism that produces the sound, and the feeling it engenders.) But still, every time I checked it I imagined it was asking me, yet again, a sarcastic question about my state of mind.

As Christmas 2022 arrived, Olha and I read a speech of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s that contained a nice example of the compound future tense formed by an auxiliary verb and the infinitive: Ми будемо співати колядки – голосніше ніж генератор. “We are going to sing carols – louder than a generator.” The noisy chugging of generators side by side on a pavement, servicing a row of shops during a blackout, would become a familiar music to me. In the same speech, the president also provided an introduction to impersonal adverbial constructions suggesting a state or condition. Нам може бути темно, холодно і складно. Але нам більше не страшно. “It may be dark, cold and difficult for us, but we are no longer afraid.” That winter truly was dark. Even in far-western Ivano-Frankivsk, Olya was affected by Russian attacks on power infrastructure designed to freeze Ukraine into submission. Blackouts meant the cancellation of several lessons.

In time a kind of intimacy sprang up between us: there is something vulnerable-making about learning a language, when your normal ease of expression crumbles and you have to start again like a child acquiring speech for the first time, but oh, so much more slowly. You open yourself up to being and sounding foolish as you reach for ways to say what you mean. You build fragile little linguistic structures, and they collapse time and time again. You want to cry like a child with frustration. Olha – younger than me by a good 15 years – reassured me like an encouraging parent.

Soon I was speaking excitedly of plans for another reporting trip. Olha’s notes recorded our dialogue. У які міста ти будеш їхати? Я буду їхати у Київ, у Ізюм, у Харків і теж яхочу їхати у Херсон. “What cities are you going to go to?” “I am going to go to Kyiv, Izium and Kharkiv, and I want to go to Kherson, too.” Olha must have asked what my partner thought of all this – an extremely good question. I offered the truthful although carelessly incomplete reply, Мій чоловік розуміє, як це важливо для мене. “My partner understands how important this is to me.”

When I returned from that trip – it had been my first time to eastern Ukraine and to territories recently clawed back from Russian occupation – Olha asked for my impressions. I described seeing зруйновані вулиці, мости, будинки – “destroyed streets, bridges, buildings”. Це було дуже стресово для тебе? “Was it very stressful for you?” she asked. Another good question. Було стресово бачити міста зруйновані. “It was stressful to see destroyed towns,” I replied, evasively, perhaps enjoying wrapping my tongue around the word зруйновані – zruynovani, ruined. At that moment I lacked either sufficient insight into my own emotions, or the linguistic skill to explain precisely how stressful this trip had in fact been. It was a world away from any kind of journalism I had done before: the mass grave site; the hours with the grieving parents of a killed son; the sorrow of it all.

In Lviv, a couple of months ago, I attended an intensive language programme. I put great hope into this course, as if it were not a series of lessons but rather a magical linguistic wand that would offer me the gift of tongues. When we arrived – the 20-odd students, an eclectic group of mainly Americans, some with Ukrainian roots, some at university, some volunteering for the Ukrainian cause in one way or another – we were given a written test and an interview. On the basis of this, I was placed in what became understood as the “top class”. I spent two weeks in this class, with three excellent female classmates, taught by a gentle and learned teacher, having my sense of myself as a competent person systematically undone. No English was uttered in these classes, as we discussed such subjects as the wartime rifts in Ukrainian society and were tasked with preparing presentations to the assembled staff and student body – something I would shudder to do even in English.

Every evening, I went home to my flat fighting the urge to weep, convinced that there had been an error and I was simultaneously “holding everyone up” and “letting the side down”. One of the Americans – a level-headed economist who, when she finished her course, was told she held the record for speed of learning – gently pointed out that we had been placed in our classes based on our scores in a test. Perhaps, she offered, my response was gendered? Would many men be flailing around in quite this level of self-doubt? I despairingly messaged a colleague and friend who’d learned Russian as a teenager, who briskly informed me that he had cheated an aptitude test in his youth precisely to be in a confounding top class; that he had observed at work that I was a very competitive person; and that I should sit back and enjoy the sensation of not being the best at something.

I had not expected to be recalibrating my relationship with myself, or to be confronting the gap between my own and others’ perceptions of myself, in this way. There were other moments of inner tumult, too – the day we discussed Victoria Amelina in class: a Ukrainian novelist who had become a friend, and who died of her injuries after a Russian cruise missile targeted a pizza restaurant she had just sat down in. Or the morning we were asked to read out our favourite Ukrainian poem. I chose a very recent work: My Day, by poet and film-maker Iryna Tsilyk. It anatomises the peculiar state of being that engulfs people living behind the lines, where incompatible experiences (sheltering in the corridor from an air raid, making pancakes for your son’s breakfast, attending a funeral, dithering over whether to buy zinfandel or pinot noir in a supermarket aisle) are crammed together in bizarre and uncomfortable proximity. I read it aloud, as directed, fairly competently until the line “I cried in the park” (Плакала в парку – plakala v parku), at which point I felt a surging desire to cry myself. Natalya, our teacher, gently took over the reading. It wasn’t just me feeling overwhelmed at times. You don’t turn up in wartime Ukraine for an intensive language course just for the hell of it.

I try not to envy the young. There are many reasons not to. But I did come to envy brains that could more readily absorb, memorise and parrot languages than mine. Ukrainian vocabulary is, to me, truly difficult to remember. It is an Indo-European language, which helps up to a point – it shares deep roots with English, such that some basic words are familiar (such as мати, сестра, maty, sestra – mother, sister). But it is a much more distant relation than, say, German, or the Romance languages. In Italian, for example, the verb “to use” is usare. Fine, done. In Ukrainian, the verb “to use” is використовувати, vykorystovuvaty. No apparent connection to English, an absolute pain to memorise, seven syllables.

And yet, while ordinary, everyday words such as the verb “to use” seemed almost unconquerable, somehow I found it easy to memorise words and phrases in two distinct categories: pointlessly poetic, or plain rude. For my own satisfaction, for example, I made an English translation of Tsilyk’s My Day. It contains a line about the sound of distant rockets; the noise is described as шелест (shelest), a word that describes the whisper of leaves in the wind. I spent ages puzzling over how to translate the word in the context of her poem, since, though I could see that a very distant rocket might make a kind of shivering sound like a wind-shaken tree, the English word “rustling” felt wrong, and I couldn’t imagine rockets doing it (I settled on “eerie thrum” in the end, although I’m not entirely satisfied with it). Of course, that left me with a perfect recall of the Ukrainian word for “rustling” – but what good was this piece of knowledge, when I couldn’t even remember the verb “to use”? My friend Mariana cheerfully informed me that the word, in verb form, appeared in an older famous poem, by Pavlo Tychyna, dating from 1911: Ви знаєте, як липа шелестить / У місячні весняні ночі? (“You know how the linden rustles / On moonlit nights in spring?”). I memorised it with ease. I suppose it might come in handy sometime, if I’m ever passing a lime tree with a Ukrainian on a breezy May evening.

In 2025, I visited the Kharkiv studio of the artist Pavlo Makov. He was finishing a work – a large, bright drawing in pastels – of a very battered-looking, ordinary plant. A weed, many people would say, but it is not a weed: it is a humble and in its way rather handsome plant, which also grows in Britain and the US, with oval leaves and modest flowers on little spikes, often seen on verges and in the cracks in the pavement. I confess I did not know the English word for it, until I sent a photo to my brother, a botanist: it is the common plantain. (Not to be confused with the fruit, a different species altogether.) In Ukrainian, Makov told me, it is called подорожник, podorozhnyk – because it lives along (по, po) the road (дорога, doroha). The drawing was, he told me, a kind of portrait of himself and other Ukrainians, who – battered but alive, ragged but tough – are metaphorically living by the road, just a rocket or drone strike away from losing a home and being displaced. Подорожник is also known as a healing plant in Ukraine – you pick a leaf and press it against a scratch or a sting. Now, every time I see this inconspicuous little plant in England – something I couldn’t name in my own language before I could in Ukrainian – I am tugged back to Kharkiv, my mind filled with thoughts of lives full of instability, but pursued with a kind of rooting toughness.

As for the bad words – yes, I can swear like a Mykolaiv dockworker, and have a repertoire of disreputable phrases, many of them learned on long car journeys on reporting trips. On one occasion, I was in the car with two much younger female colleagues. We were looking at some photos. I regret to inform you of the occasional low level of chat among us, but one of these photos was of a good-looking young man, with a hipster moustache. Finding a boyfriend, for many of my female Ukrainian friends, presents certain difficulties: men are absent, at the front, on the whole. But I’m always keeping half an eye open for them. Just in case. As we appraised this particular image, one of us giggled and uttered the phrase усики – пропуск в трусики (usyky – propusk v trusyky) which I suppose, loosely translated, means, “a ’tache is a pass to your panties”. Utterly memorable, nicely rhyming in Ukrainian, it stuck at once. Not entirely useless, either, if you decouple the vocabulary from the particular phrase: пропуск, propusk, could be your pass for a festival or workplace, or the gap left on a form for you to fill in your information. Tрусики, trusyky, is a perfectly respectable word for underwear. As a phrase used in its entirety (judiciously, of course, in the right company), it causes Ukrainian men to finger their upper lips nervously and Ukrainian women to erupt in laughter.

Even when I was not working on Ukrainian stories, and was immersed in writing about culture in the UK or the US, that act of plugging away, however slowly, at Ukrainian kept a thread of connection with the country, and with my friends there. Though, at times, it would have been easier to forget about Ukraine, because the memories could be so painful: the rescue workers gently easing a corpse from the ruins of the smashed Kyiv apartment building; the crumpling face of the mother who had lost her son; the young artist with the radiant eyes who was haunted by guilt after a brother soldier had been killed beside him. Through all of this, it was impossible to forget that, though I wasn’t learning Ukrainian to make any kind of political point, the Ukrainian language itself was deeply concerned with the war.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, repeatedly claimed that the invasion, or special military operation as he initially called it, had been mounted in order to rescue Russian speakers in Ukraine from a repressive state. This seemed especially ironic given that the Russian military bombed and killed thousands of civilians in, for example, Mariupol, a largely russophone city. In the wake of the invasion, and Putin’s propaganda, many Ukrainians have switched away from the Russian language (including the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy). New Ukrainian-language bookshops have blossomed, despite the war, on the streets of Kyiv and other cities. “People began to understand that the Russians came here to kill people simply because they were Ukrainian,” Bohdana Laiuk, an editor and cultural manager, now Ukraine’s deputy minister for culture, told me. “So people are asking: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Literary culture gives us the place to understand who we are.” Since the Maidan protests of 2013-14, and especially since 2022, embracing the Ukrainian language has, for many, been an active, personal act of decolonisation.

But the politics of language are also a matter for passionate debate. “If you are ever short of conversation at a Ukrainian party,” joked Olha once, “just ask about language.” I remember witnessing an argument between two friends. One, much more positive about Russian-speaking Ukrainians, was an academic based in western Ukraine. The other was a Ukrainian-speaker from the Kharkiv region, who remembered being bullied as a child for speaking his own language in the big Russified city, and who argued that the Ukrainian language should be protected by strong legal frameworks.

Artist Pavlo Makov, who was born in 1958, took a different view again. Although he was born into a Russian family, his father insisted he should be able to speak Ukrainian. So he grew up bilingual, loving Ukrainian-language children’s books and comics. “Being a citizen of Ukraine means much more to me than the fact that I am ethnically Russian,” he said. But “we should maintain our knowledge of Russian”, he argued: Ukrainians needed to understand the country across its eastern border. For him, it was a complex and personal matter. “Russian is the language of the enemy, yes – but it was also the language of my mum.”

I talked to friends who had stopped using the Russian language. It takes years to set aside the language of your mum. Even if you speak your chosen language perfectly, you might think in the old language, or dream in the old language, and when that is all past, there are still things that may persist in the old language – memories of the books you read when you were little, for example. One of my friends, writer and cultural manager Sasha Dovzhyk, wrote a remarkable essay about her rejection of Russian. “My mother tongue tastes like ashes,” she wrote. “I felt the taste of my mother tongue most acutely while driving through Borodianka, Bucha and Irpin two months after these Ukrainian towns in the Kyiv region were liberated by the Ukrainian army from the Russians’ ‘brotherly’ embrace.” Her rage and horror turned inwards, into her own body, into the very words she had first formed as a baby on her mother’s lap. “Russian,” she wrote, “is my mother tongue and liberation means ripping it out of my throat.”

You think about time a lot when you are learning a language. How much time do I have to devote to this pursuit? How much time will it take me to get where I want to be, linguistically? The curious thing was that the horizon of desire kept receding into the distance, and likewise, the time it might take me to get there also moved into the barely perceptible future. When I first started Ukrainian, I wanted only to be able to read road signs, exchange pleasantries and order coffee, but soon my desires stretched – from booking a pedicure on the phone, say, to understanding my friends so that they didn’t always feel the need to switch to English. At the same time, I had to keep revising my short-term expectations downwards, making peace with the fact that, after four years, I was still only OK at Ukrainian, and often stumbled over basics.

One day, early in 2026, I went to a gallery in London showing a work called Repeat After Me, by the Ukrainian artists’ collective Open Group. I had first seen this work in 2024 in Lviv, then later that year at the Venice Biennale. The work is a video installation, with screens on which Ukrainian refugees imitate the sounds of war, and then invite visitors to “repeat after me”, karaoke-style. On one screen, Svitlana, from the Luhansk region, re-created the sound of a Ka-52 Alligator – a Russian attack helicopter designed to take out tanks and infrastructure. Antonina came next, singing the mournful, gut-clenching wail of the air-raid siren. Iryna imitated a T-80 tank, while Boris, from Mariupol, mimicked the keeeeen-thunk sound of aerial bombing. “Repeat after me,” he said, “so you’ll remember.”

This was also the language of war, a new unwritten dialect of violence that Ukrainians had learned and absorbed not out of choice, but because they needed to – so you could hear the direction the Shahed drone was moving in, or differentiate between the outgoing crump of air defence and the sharp blast of incoming explosions. At the gallery opening I chatted with one of the artists, Anton Varga, who complimented me on my Ukrainian – so much improved, he said, since the last time he’d heard it. I thanked him. But it was not because of my diligence, I realised. It was just that time had passed. Even a lazy student – or to be kinder to myself, a time-poor student – will get somewhere after four years. My progress, I understood, was just a clock – a clock that marked the painful pace of war.

This is an adapted extract from Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War by Charlotte Higgins, published on 20 August. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

On Wednesday 30 September, join Charlotte Higgins and our panel of acclaimed Ukrainian writers to reflect on the profound connections between war, art and life. With Olia Hercules, Sasha Dovzhyk, Olesya Khromeychuk and Shaun Walker. Book tickets here