Polyanytsia, Ukraine — Children in heavy snowsuits patiently waited to board the ski lift, holding on to their poles. A few families drove to the summit just to breathe in the fresh mountain air and walk among the tall pines that framed the valley below.
Ski instructors in red onesies led the students down rabbit slopes covered in snow churned up by machines, as the real stuff was in short supply across Europe this winter. Teenagers cried out in delight as they slipped on the ice at a nearby ice rink.
It was almost easy to forget that this idyllic scene – in the ski resort of Bukovel in the Carpathian Mountains of western Ukraine – was taking place in a country at war, with fierce fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces on the front lines a few hundred kilometers away.
Some of the Ukrainians on the crowded slopes were trying to escape the stress of besieged life. Some were simply trying to find jobs with reasonably reliable electricity.
“It’s a way to get a normal life back,” almost an act of defiance, said Yana Chernetska, 30, who came to the mountain from Odessa for a few days with her 4-year-old daughter and her husband. “No rockets should suffocate a normal childhood for my child.”
But for others, the battlefield was never far from their minds.
Taras Bihus – mentally and physically battered from his months as a soldier in the East – was hoping to rest and recover at the resort.
Before the war, the mountains were like a home for him. He spent winters here learning to snowboard and eventually competing professionally. Then he became a snowboard instructor in Bukovel, in the village of Polyanytsya. When the war started, he volunteered for the military.
After a few months of training, he was sent to the southeastern front of the county. He tried to describe what he saw.
“You seem ready,” he said, “but you see a very different reality when you get there.”
He was retired from active duty last fall when an old snowboard injury flared up and left him barely able to walk. After physiotherapy, he returned here in December to resume his work as an instructor.
“It’s all it takes for a person to stay sane,” said Mr Bihus, 29, of his work at the resort. “It’s like paradise here. As you go up the mountain, you see the clouds rolling in right in front of you.”
Many who visited Bukovel in mid-January reflected on the complexities of being here while the country remained under siege.
Last year, just before the start of the war in February, she fled to Italy, where she lives with her two children, except for her husband, who like most Ukrainian men of military age cannot leave the country.
“I was here two years ago and it was very different,” she said. “Everyone was happy, people drank mulled wine. Now many people have moved out of the country.”
While Bukovel is Ukraine’s flashiest ski resort, the more rustic alternative is the nearby Dragobrat ski resort. It’s only accessible via a dirt road whose successive hairpin bends climb steeply to the mountaintop, but when the snow finally fell heavily in early January, families flocked to its slopes.
Artem Mitin, 35, who owns a ski shop on the mountain, said the clientele has changed. Eastern Europeans did not come. Neither were large groups. And there were many newcomers.
“It’s not just about skiing,” he said, adding, “I think they come here to forget.”
One recent afternoon, a couple, both soldiers, were snowboarding with their twin sons on the last day of a short vacation. They said it was a way to release some tension, but added that getting off the mountain would be difficult given the uncertainty of when they would all be together again.
At the beginning of the war, many Ukrainians fled frontline areas for the relative safety and stability of the Carpathian Mountains, far from the constant threat of strikes.
In the fall, Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure across the country paralyzed the national power grid and left residents grappling with near-constant air raid alerts. The threat of air raids forced many to periodically flee to bomb shelters, making remote work difficult. This brought a new wave of people to the mountains.
Area ski resorts battled the ongoing power outages by deploying powerful generators that allowed them to make snow, run the lifts, and light the slopes — and allowed people to work.
At the Baza Smart Hotel in Bukovel, dozens of young creatives and IT experts gather every day in a restaurant that has become a makeshift co-working space. Electricity is provided by generators and even if it fails, a backup satellite internet connection allows them to stay online. Sirens rarely sound.
“It’s really like an island of stability in all of this,” said Lera Diachuk, a graphic designer who has been working from the hotel for weeks. “We try to live our lives and do our best to work.”
Ms Diachuk, 23, works for Headway, an education technology start-up that moved staff from its office in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, last fall. Each employee was allowed to bring a plus one, so Ms Diachuk brought her 14-year-old brother, who had fled her family’s home in an occupied area of the Kherson region. Your parents stay behind.
Mr. Bihus, the soldier, rents a room in one of the peaked log cabins that dot the mountainside for the winter and lives with other snowboarders.
But after his experience on the battlefield, he finds it difficult to reconnect with his old friends. They see him as a hero, but he’s uncomfortable with the idea.
“There’s a gap between us,” he said.
He didn’t feel like a hero, he explained while rubbing the wooden beads on his bracelet between his finger and thumb until they rested on a small cross. Before the war, he said, he hadn’t prayed since he was a child, but he started again at the front.
Mr. Bihus is now in the army reserve and if there is a full-scale Russian offensive in the spring, as many have been predicting, he could be called back into service.
But he tries not to think about it. At the moment he is concentrating on simpler things: hiking on mountain trails, swimming in cold mountain streams and reading more.
On the afternoon of the Orthodox Epiphany, he went to a lake on the outskirts of the village to take part in the annual tradition of celebrating Christ’s baptism.
He crossed himself as he walked slowly into the freezing water and took a sharp breath before fully submerging. He broke back through the surface with a heavy breath, slapping his arms and legs.
When he came out, Mr. Bihus said with a laugh: “It heals the body and heals the mind.”
