Russian attacks had left Ksenia Shetelia with no water, heat or reliable electricity during a brutal winter. So when the power briefly flickered back on one recent day in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, she took an electric clipper, stepped up to a mirror and, strand by strand, shaved off her blond hair.
While her young daughter was not happy, Ms. Shetelia, 37, would no longer have to worry about not being able to wash her hair. “I had a problem, and I solved it,” she said.
But please don’t call her “resilient.”
For four years, the people of Ukraine have been celebrated abroad for their perseverance in the face of hardship — the smaller country that bravely stood up to Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia. President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has called Ukrainians “unbreakable.”
Ms. Shetelia and many others, however, say they are fed up both with hardship and with being called resilient in the face of it.
“I see myself as a weak little girl who just wants to cry but can’t,” said Ms. Shetelia, a cook in a fast-food restaurant.
Ukrainians have been posting on social media that they no longer want to be labeled unbreakable. They are not superhuman. They break like anybody else. They experience pain.
They want the world to know that, and to offer compassion and help.
“If you present Ukrainians primarily by focusing on strength, people might think they don’t need support, that they are fine by themselves,” said Jonas Kunst, a social psychologist at the BI Norwegian Business School.
They aren’t fine by themselves. But Ukraine must project strength. If it appears to be losing or giving up, that could jeopardize support it needs to survive — money and weapons from Western allies.
“We have become the hostages of our heroic image,” said Olha Dukhnich, a social psychologist in Kyiv.
Mr. Zelensky acknowledged the sentiment in a speech marking the war’s fourth anniversary on Tuesday. He praised Ukrainians for their, yes, resilience but also said they were human — not “made of steel.”
Many Ukrainians do see themselves as strong and inventive. “The only unsolvable problem is when you are in the cemetery,” said Alyona Sydorenko, 38, who, with her husband, Serhiy, 40, trains children in martial arts.
But as she watched her son and daughter during training, she admitted she did not want them to have the life they have now.
February has been a cruel month, with hundreds of thousands in Kyiv left without heat as nightly lows reached about minus 10 degrees Celsius, or 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Ukrainians say that Russia has spoiled the first beautiful snowy winter in years.
Kateryna Chepurna, 39, a drama teacher, said life was “on pause.”
Her apartment has been cold enough at night for water to start to freeze. She is fighting mold climbing her walls. Her children keep getting sick.
She is divorced from the father of her first daughter but cannot live with the father of her second daughter, either. Both are in the army.
“Everything is on me,” she said. “This is sad and scary. I do not feel strong enough to live through it.”
When a Russian missile hit the power plant across from Liudmyla Dubinchenko’s home, causing a large fire, she ran outside. She was scared.
Ms. Dubinchenko, 62, told neighbors a different story, joking that she was “just trying to warm up” next to the fire, she said.
A neighbor, Andriy Holobivsky, 39, heard his 10-year-old son screaming after the missile strike. He ran into his room and saw the boy on the bed, covered in glass and Lego bricks.
He and others said they could not afford to be weak. “My brother is sleeping in a trench at minus 20, and you want me to complain?” Mr. Holobivsky asked.
What did he make of all this? “I feel anger,” he said.
Yuriy Zamlynny, who is from western Ukraine, came to Kyiv this month to cook food for people over a fire. He had loaded meat and friends into a car. He saw nothing special in it. “I just saw you struggling here in Kyiv, so I came,” he said.
Yevheniya Tsyhankova, 37, and her neighbors wrapped old clothes around pipes in their building, near the Dnipro River in Kyiv, so they would not freeze. She also saw nothing special in that. “If any other country were attacked like us, its people, just like us, would unite and protect their homes,” she said.
In a nursery, nannies fight the chill by filling plastic bottles with hot water and wrapping colorful towels around them to make them look like candy. Children hug the warm “candies” when they nap in the frigid room.
Most of the nannies have husbands at war. Their homes are cold. “Of course I am tired,” said one of them, Inna Khymych, 39. “I am not a robot.”
She put the children to bed, giving each a warm “candy.”
“Sometimes I just want someone to hold me close, the way you would hold a little child,” Ms. Khymych said. “I don’t want to be called strong.”
Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia.
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