Solidarity: Why Kharkiv Will Always Be My May 1st

For most of Europe, May 1st means marches, speeches, banners, flags, union halls, politicians at podiums invoking the noble idea that free people have rights and must stand together to defend them. Solidarity as ceremony.

My May 1st is a 3,500-kilometer journey in a diesel pickup, an air-raid alarm cutting through a sunny spring morning, and two soldiers driving away, towards russian positions, just 30 kilometers away.

May 1st, 2025, 7am. My copilot/wife Priscilla EC and I were hauling ass toward Kharkiv. The mission: hand over a long-bed pickup, driven all the way from Norway, to guys in the 3rd Army Corps. We’d been on the road for days. You accumulate a certain kind of focused calm after enough kilometers. You stop thinking about the destination, and start thinking about the next fuel stop, the next border crossing, the next stretch of highway. But at some point east of Kyiv, the destination stops being abstract. The (sometimes jammed) GPS distance to Kharkiv ticks down in real numbers, and you feel it in your chest.

Millions of people had the day off inside NATO borders. We were going the other direction.

Leaving Kyiv was strange. Clear spring morning, traffic humming along, the city trying to act normal. Kyiv does that; it tries very hard to act normal. Cafés open, people walk dogs, construction cranes swing over half-finished (or bombed) buildings. You can almost convince yourself you’re somewhere ordinary, until you can’t. The air-raid alarm on my phone cut through the cabin without warning. That sound, if you haven’t heard it, is not a polite alert. It is a shriek designed to override your nervous system. We checked what was coming, drones or ballistic. We kept driving.

The further east we drove, the more the alerts changed. At first they were general, regional, background noise we’d learned to filter: Drones are “ok” while you are driving. Missiles are bad, but whatchagonnado. But crossing into Kharkiv Oblast, the notifications stopped sounding like warnings and started sounding like weather reports for an active battlefield. Street fighting here. Heavy artillery there. Seek shelter immediately. My wife and I didn’t talk much in those kilometers. There wasn’t much to say. We’d chosen to come. We kept the windows up and watched the landscape flatten out into wide, open fields.

Kharkiv surprised us. I don’t know exactly what I expected; rubble, I suppose, or at least the visual expression of catastrophe. Instead we found a city on a gorgeous day, doing its best. The scars are real and visible: buildings punched through, facades blown out, historical statues protected by sandbags. But around those scars, the city was moving, working, alive. People were out. A grandmother walked slowly with a shopping bag. A kid on a bicycle cut between parked cars. Kharkiv has been shelled as much as anywhere in Ukraine. It has decided to exist anyway.

The handover took maybe fifteen minutes. Not much ceremony, not much paperwork. Instead we met two smiling soldiers from the brigade in a parking area, shook hands, and started passing phones back and forth with translation apps open. No common languages except what smiles, nods, and what technology offered. There was warmth in it, genuine friendliness. In another context this would have been a perfectly pleasant 15 minutes. In this one, it sat alongside the weight of what the truck was actually for and where they were going.

Then their phones started to blare.

We had muted our own phones by that point. The alarms went off so often and weren’t always immediately relevant to our exact location. You learn to read the room, not the alert. But when the soldiers’ phones went off and they looked at them and straightened, we understood without translation. Hands were shaken fast. They climbed into the pickup. The engine turned over, that same diesel hum that had carried us from Norway, and they were gone. Kharkiv is a front-line city. Russian positions were 25, maybe 30 kilometers from where we stood. Those guys weren’t going home.

We stood in the empty parking area for a moment.

With the mission completed, we found ourselves at loose ends in a city we didn’t know, on a day when most places were closed, with hours to kill before the night-train back to Kyiv. Almost everything was closed. We had no plan beyond “don’t stand in the open for too long.” Wandering aimlessly in a city where the missile response window is brutally short wasn’t appealing, but it was what we had.

So we wandered. Which is how I ended up literally nose-to-nose with a very large, very drunk man on the Kharkiv metro.

The car was mostly empty when he boarded, about sixty years old, built like a steel mill, and very interested in me specifically. He stepped directly into my space and started shouting. Seemingly aggressive, but not exactly, and with the total conviction of a man who had no concept of volume control and a great many urgent things to say. I had no idea what any of it was.

I don’t speak Ukrainian (or the eastern imperialist dialect). When a human-sized pit-bull is screaming in your face over the roar of a subway car, it’s funny how completely your mind goes blank. I’d studied a handful of phrases before the trip. Every single one of them evaporated. I stood there making what I hoped was a neutral face while he continued at full volume, and I thought: I survived the drive to a front-line city and I am going to be killed by a drunk on the metro.

Suddenly I picked out a word that sounded like a question: ”Anhliyi?” English?

I shook my head. This seemed to matter. A beat passed, and then: ”du Deutsch?”

And just like that, we had a language. My long-forgotten school German turned out to be roughly equivalent to his drink-soaked, time-eroded German, and between the two of us we could almost hold a sentence together. He wasn’t hostile at all. This was Enthusiastic Friendliness, capital E, capital F. He was apparently quite lukewarm on the British, but Germans he loved. I gave up trying to explain I’m from Norway. My working theory, which I felt was not the moment to test, is that he, in his youth, had spent time in the Red Army stationed in East Germany and came away with some positive associations. We exchanged simple words about nothing in particular until my stop came up. I have never been more grateful to see a platform.

Still needing somewhere to wait out the remaining hours, we made the tactical decision to stay close to a metro entrance, the stations double as deep air-raid shelters, and we’d calculated we could be underground in under two minutes if we had to. We found an open restaurant near one.

What we walked into was genuinely disorienting. Kharkiv, 30 kilometers from Russian positions, under regular bombardment, apparently also contains one of the best fusion restaurants I have ever been to in my life. Kobe beef. A cocktail list. Lighting that suggested someone had thought carefully about ambiance. We sat down in the urban elegance of it and ordered food and looked at each other and didn’t quite know what to do with any of it. We ate a world-class meal while running the two-minute shelter calculation in the back of our heads every time a sound came from outside. It was absurd in a way that went past irony into something else, some very specific register of this war, where a city refuses to become only its suffering. It was exactly where we needed to deflate after our completed mission.

As night fell we made our way to Kharkiv train-station and boarded the train west. Kharkiv slid past the window in the dark, quiet, holding itself together. I watched it go.

The very next night, Kharkiv was hit by the, until then, biggest wave of missiles and drones armed with thermobaric warheads. Residential areas. The kind of attack designed not for military targets but for morale, for exhaustion, for making people feel there is nowhere safe. Just another night with terror from the east.

We could leave the war behind. The people we met couldn’t.

Kharkiv, May 2nd (from YouTube)

It is a feeling I can’t shake: You carry it, this gap between what you were able to do and what the situation keeps requiring. You drove a truck. Delivered it. You ate some beef. You caught a train. And somewhere behind you, two soldiers drove that truck back toward the line.

So every May 1st now, I’m not thinking about union speeches or political rallies. I’m thinking about those two soldiers climbing into the cab and driving away. The drunk on the subway who turned out to love Germans. The chic elegance of that restaurant and the two-minute calculation running underneath it.

I’m thinking that true solidarity requires action, and I’m thinking about a city that decided to live.

Kharkiv is my May 1st.