A War on Their Doorstep, Ukrainian Millennials Enjoy a Night Out in a Front-Line City

A War on Their Doorstep, Ukrainian Millennials Enjoy a Night Out in a Front-Line City
On a bluff overlooking the Sea of Azov outside of Mariupol. Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal
Nolan Peterson
Updated:

KYIV, Ukraine—In Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city on the Sea of Azov only about 10 miles from the front lines, you can frequently hear artillery exploding from inside the city.

Sometimes it sounds like tree branches knocking in the wind. Sometimes it’s loud enough to rattle windows.

I was at dinner with a group of young people from the city. I had met some of them earlier in the day when I gave a talk about journalism to a university class, and they had invited me to hang out with their friends that night.

We had burgers and beer at a restaurant called Sito Piano, which was on the ground floor of Mariupol’s City Hall. The rest of the building was still a burnt-out carcass—torched when pro-Russian separatists briefly took over the city in April 2014 in the opening days of the war.

Mariupol's City Hall was destroyed during a battle for the city after pro-separatists took over in April 2014. (Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal)
Mariupol's City Hall was destroyed during a battle for the city after pro-separatists took over in April 2014. Nolan Peterson/The Daily Signal
Nolan Peterson
Nolan Peterson
Author
Nolan Peterson is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an independent defense consultant based in Kyiv and Washington. A former U.S. Air Force Special Operations pilot and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Peterson has more than nine years of experience reporting from Ukraine's front lines.
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