‘For us there is one option – winning the war’

“Stop talking crazy, it’s harvesting season right now!” cried out Vitaliia Sass’s babusja (grandmother) when she had told her that she should flee from the war in Ukraine and come to Estonia.

“I have tomato plants in a pot – do you think, that I will just betray and leave them like that?!”

Vitaalia should have known never insult or offend a matriarch in such a way. Suffice to say, her grandmother stayed, as did the rest of her relatives, in the face of the Russian invasion.

We are talking in a boutique bar in Tallinn’s old town where the shops are currently displaying the work of Ukrainian and Georgian fashion designers.

She discovered her home country’s couture a couple of years ago in one of the shops on Kyiv’s main street, Khreschatyk.

“Super stylish, quality design – for 200 euros you’re able to own stuff that no-one else has,” she tells me excitedly.

“When I went shopping in Kiev before the war, it wasn’t to buy Louis Vuitton, it was to buy clothes made by local designers.”

As the war began, this young entrepreneur believed that all shipping would be discontinued. However, only recently, a designer from Odessa asked what to ship next. Almost unbelievably, the post service in Ukraine is still functioning.

“When we began discussing the details, he told me that he will call me back in eight minutes – they had just sounded the night alarm and he had to go to the cellar until safety was ensured.”

It sounds like a sketch, but as Vitaalia explains: “The government is encouraging people to continue living their normal lives as much as possible.

“Women are told to get manicures, go to the hairdressers, all of that, so that the economy doesn’t come to a complete halt.”

A New Reality

Vita has lived in Estonia for almost four years. She was born in Vinnytsia, a four-hour drive from Kyiv. A university town with a long and bloody history, in proximity to which was Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters Werwolf during the Second World War.

Before moving to Tallinn, she was constantly flying between India and Kyiv – to the first for modelling and to the second for her mother. To Estonia she was brought by love and whisked off to Ülemiste.

Even after having stayed away from Kyiv for years, news of the Russian invasion cut deep. “We all knew that something was going to happen, but no one never really wanted to believe it.”

She remains, however, defiant about the conflict’s eventual outcome.

“Ukrainians don’t talk about an abstract end of the war. For us there is one option and that is winning it.”