It was well after midnight in Mukachevo, a city of paved streets that had put Ukraine in the western tip of Ukraine, and a group of students lingered through the river and debated about what to catch from a 24/7 supermarket. A van stopped and spilled a router crowd of young men – loud, tipsy and visibly thirst for more.
It seemed on a classic Sunday evening before the working week starts. But in wartime Ukraine – Where evening clocks and Russian air strikes have turned the nights into something between tense silence and sudden explosions – it was an exceptional scene.
“We don’t hear the sound of explosions here, we don’t have rockets, we don’t have a frequent air alarms,” said Oleksandr Pop, 20, one of the students. “We don’t have the same war experience.”
The capital of Ukraine of Kiev has been demolished from various recent nights of Record-breaking Russian drone attacksWith air striking warnings that yellow for almost 130 hours in the past month. For comparison: Mukachevo and the surrounding area of Transcarpathia have only kept under alert one tenth.
In more than three years of war, only a few drones and missiles have hit the remote, mountainous region of Transcarpathia. It is the only Ukrainian region without a nocturnal evening clock, making it a rare bag of relative calmness.
Partially it can be protected by geography. The region borders on four NATO countries-Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia-value the risk that every off-course Russian strike could spill in a wider war. There are also few military locations in this region, which is so far to the west that it is closer to Venice than to the eastern Ukrainian city of PokrovskA hotspot of the fighting.
The relative safety of the region has made it a magnet for citizens who flee attacks in the east. More than 145,000 people have redesigned in TranscarpathiaMost of them in Mukachevo and the nearby city of Uzhhorod, which is on the border with Slovakia.
For them, moving to Transcarpathia means that they adapt to a shocking new reality. They fled Places reduced to debrisOnly to arrive in cities strewn with high -rise buildings built for newcomers. From Transcarpathia one can see how commercial aircraft streak over the air of neighboring European countries, a long forgotten face in the rest of Ukraine, where the only visible aircraft are the rare, ominous silhouettes of fighter jets.
War usually only reveals itself indirectly – in the silent procession of one Soldier’s FuneralIn memorials in the cases that originated on squares or in service providers roaming the streets.
News on the front also filters back from Transcarpathias 128th Mountain Assault Brigade, one of the oldest units of Ukraine, who experienced heavy losses during the country’s counter -offensive in 2023. But the first thing every newcomer in the region notices is the calmness.
“It was a bit of a shock,” said Tetiana Bezonova, who fled Pokrovsk a year ago about her arrival in Mukachevo. She paused and corrected herself: “It was not a shock, but a relief. That people live quietly somewhere. People live normally somewhere.”
“For me personally it is like an oasis in Ukraine,” said Mrs. Bezonova, 30,.
Transcarpathia was separate from the rest of Ukraine long before the war started.
The region became part of the Soviet Ukraine around the second half of the 20th century, after decades under Austrian-Hungarian and then Czechoslovak rule. That history was a separate identity-visible in pastel-colored facades and paved streets that resound Vienna and Budapest. The Hulking Soviet era high-rise buildings are absent about many Ukrainian cities. In Uzhhorod, Hungarian plaques still mark buildings, a memory of the layered past of the city.
The first well -known attack on the region came more than two months after Russia launched his full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when a rocket struck a railway facility. Since then, strikes are so rare that the locals have difficulty remembering the latter.
Only in Transcarpathia can partygoers still dance in night clubs in the early morning. That is a scene that is now unthinkable in Kyiv, where the city Famous electro clubs Open early and closed at 11 p.m., one hour before the curfew starts.
“Life goes on,” smiled Daria Podde, 19, a waitress in a nightclub in Mukachevo who also works part -time as a bartender. On a recent evening she leaned about the countertop to show a video that she had made the month earlier in the nightclub. It showed partygoers who jumped on the rhythm lights flash. The time stamp on her phone Read 5:40 am
That feeling of normality surprised Daria Markovuch, 33, when she arrived in Mukachevo in March 2022, after she fled the besieged city of Mariupolwhich is now under the Russian occupation.
“You live through hell, and then you come to a city where it doesn’t exist, where people drink coffee, girls have lipstick and stylized hair,” she remembered. “I just wanted to grab everyone and say,” Run away from here. Just run away. Because hell exists and it’s not far from here. “
Over time, Mrs. Markovuch said that she would appreciate the calmness of Transcarpathia. She now runs a local group that helps people to settle in Mukachevo, and notes that newcomers continue to appear every month.
The reality of the split screen with the rest of Ukraine can disturb feathers. The region also has a reputation as a gateway for design -dodgers trying to escape from Ukraine by crossing to neighboring countries, sometimes A risky dive brave over a river to Romania.
DMYTRO Vorobiov, 45, a soldier who lost his right foot in battle last August and now recovers in a hospital in Uzhhorod, northwest of Mukachevo, said he was irritated when he said a young local that he was’ the war ‘tired of the war’.
“I have something like:” Are you crazy? Maybe you should get closer to the front? “, Mr. Vorobiov remembered. Yet he said, like many soldiers recovering in the region, that some of the reason he is fighting so that others can live in peace.
Sitting in a tavern-like café in Uzhhorod, waving oil lamps over the head and the war with a world road, Andriy Lyubka, a well-known Ukrainian poet and resident, acknowledged ‘a kind of tension in the air’, while the locals quietly wonder what others do for the war effort.
Just like many other men of military age in Ukraine, Mr. Lyubka, 37, can be drawn up in the army. But he said he still had to receive a service.
“If you walk here with your daughter, for example, many of the people – actually women whose spouses are in the army – they look at you with a critical look,” he said. “They have questions in their eyes.”
Mr. Lyubka’s answer is that he collects money to buy vehicles for the army. So far he has bought more than 360 cars and delivered them with friends at the front – a total of 58 trips. Every journey, he says, serves as a useful memory that the peace of Uzhorod is ‘false, an illusion’.
“It is very nice here, but it doesn’t mean everything will be fine,” he said. “The peace that we feel here depends entirely on what is happening on the Eastern Front.”
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