Today, we woke up to a rocket blast. The sound was so loud that it seemed to come from our building’s entryway. The windows shook, the parrot screeched, and the Doberman dashed into the bathroom. Good morning.

It was an Iskander: there was no mistaking it.

The blast had thundered in absolute silence: there had been no warnings on the online message boards. I even wrote to the neighborhood chat, asking whether this was the consequence of the U.S. refusing to provide us with intelligence or not. People suggested that there had been an alert, it had just lasted over eleven hours.

I got the engraved collar out of the closet. I don’t use it much: the color is too bright and it soils easily. But it has Hector’s name and my phone number printed on it in very big letters and numbers. I put it on him during heavy shelling. If there’s a blast nearby and the dog runs away from me in fear, I have a better chance of finding him.

We went outside. In the middle of the courtyard stood a young woman holding a baby in her arms. The baby was wrapped in a warm blanket, while the mother was wearing a robe and slippers. It was cold.

Having seemingly sized up my silent question, she made excuses in a recitative.

“He was frightened by the explosions, I couldn’t calm him down, he falls asleep better in the fresh air, I was scared to go out on the balcony because of the windows, so we ran out here.”

I offered to hold her baby while she went inside to get dressed.

The woman became anxious and clutched her bundle even more tightly, her hands reddened from the cold.

“No, no, God forbid!”

The maternal instinct is the strongest. That’s the way the world works.

I often remember a terrible story that happened in Kharkov. A gas cylinder exploded in an ordinary block of flats. It was December 2012. A man had brought the cylinder into his family’s flat, where he lived with his wife, three daughters, and tiny grandson. The cylinder exploded, the fire was fierce, and only one of the girls survived by some miracle.

I was working as a field journalist at the time. We were shooting a routine report nearby, and after our editor called, we rushed to the scene. We were the first to arrive, before the ambulances.

I won’t describe the horror we saw. Charred toys scattered around a yard were not a familiar sight in Kharkov thirteen years ago.

I will always remember what the eldest daughter did. Her name was Luba, and she was barely in her twenties. She was able to escape a room engulfed in flames onto the balcony. She was holding her seven-year-old sister Sasha with one hand, while with the other she clutched her ten-month-old son Klim to her chest.

Yes, I do remember their names.

Luba was screaming. People heard her and saw her, but they had no time to do anything. That young woman and very young mom jumped from the tenth floor — on her back. That was how she had tried to save her baby.

God, how strong her maternal instinct must have been to have stepped into the abyss like that, trying to save her baby.

I think about it often.

My daughter and I were chatting on the phone the other day as she was going home from work. She’s in Israel now, and we usually call each other when she’s on the bus home. Right as we were talking, Sashka read aloud the news that terrorists had planted bombs on buses in Tel Aviv.

“Get off the bus now!” I shouted into the phone.

It was another three minutes to the next stop.

In those three minutes, in those one hundred and eighty seconds, I didn’t just turn gray, age, and die. I killed and dismembered every terrorist on the planet, and I torched their homes, their cities, and their families.

Yes, it was maternal instinct.

Tomorrow is the eighth of March. The world has different ways of marking this day. In some places, the day is about gender equality and emancipation, while in other places it’s about the arrival of spring, a new hairdryer, and a teddy bear. But either way, it’s about women. There will be lots of flowers and lots of cards.

I also want to send a card to all the women of the world. With flowers, from Ukraine.

There’s nothing more monstrous than the “picture” on card. It shows Anya, my neighbor, and her only child, Artyom.

P.S. Whoever can, please pass my card on to the women in the American Congress who applauded their leader yesterday. Tell them that after their tumultuous applause and cheering about “billions of dollars saved,” a young woman stands in the middle of a courtyard in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. Wearing a robe and slippers, she rocks her baby in the cold. He was frightened by the Russian missile which struck the neighboring courtyard.

Source: Anna Gin (Facebook), 7 March 2025. Translated, from the Russian, by the Russian Reader. Anna Gin is a blogger, writer, and journalist who lives in Kharkov (Kharkiv). You can also follow her on Telegram. Thanks to Alya Legeyda for the heads-up.