Feb. 24, 2022. 4:00 a.m. A deafening boom. The ground shudders. Misha Prokutin ’28, age 15, sits up in bed, blinking back sleep. His heart hammers in his chest.

“You feel it with your whole body,” he later recalled. “The penetration of the earth.”

Another boom. “Fireworks,” he tells himself. And another one. “Who the f–k is setting off fireworks at 4am?” he wonders. But he can’t accept the alternative.

He drifts in and out of sleep. 5:30 a.m. His mother enters the room. The war has started, she tells him.

On Monday, it will have been three years since Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In that time, the conflict has killed over 12,300 Ukrainian civilians, wounded almost 30,000 and displaced 10.2 million. Although Ukraine has managed to recapture 54% of occupied territory, Russia still occupies 18% of the country.

Some 1,700 Ukrainians are currently studying in the United States. Prokutin is one of seven Ukrainian undergraduate students at Stanford. 

When he felt the first missile strikes on his hometown of Kharkiv, the easternmost city in Ukraine, Prokutin didn’t know how to feel. Although there had been speculation about an invasion, it still came as a shock.

Later that day, Prokutin heard a deep rumbling and looked outside his window to see a group of tanks on the street below, looking like “the definition of death.”

“You think that in the 21st century there are no wars,” he said. “You don’t believe it until you see it for yourself.”

Prokutin and his mother spent the next five days in an underground parking lot, where the neighborhood had gathered to take shelter from air strikes. It was impossible to sleep.

“Every time a missile hits… every car in the parking lot jumps, and you jump with it,” Prokutin said. “We realized from the first day that we needed to leave at any cost.”

Prokutin said he and his family were extraordinarily lucky. While no man between the ages of 18 and 60 could leave the country due to martial law, Prokutin was not yet 18 and his father was abroad at the time. He and his mother drove to Slovakia, where he began applying to boarding schools in Europe.

Unlike Prokutin, Oleh Ivankiv ’28 – a student from the city of Iviv in western Ukraine – felt angry and disappointed that he was under 18 at the time of the invasion, because it meant he was unable to volunteer for the Ukrainian army.

Seeking to support his country another way, Ivankiv secured a job building drones for the war effort. He plans to take military education classes at Stanford through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) so he can return to Ukraine after graduation and join the armed forces if the conflict is still ongoing.

Ivankiv has relatives who have died in bombings in Ukraine. “[The invasion] put me in a state of misery, and I still feel that now,” he said.

The war has also taken an emotional toll on Sasha Luchyn ’28, a student from Zalishchyky, a small city in western Ukraine.

During the first few months, he felt “a numbness,” he said, adding, “You can’t think straight. You’re just living. You’re doing things to stay alive.”

Although that initial numbness has mostly subsided, Luchyn said that living in a state of uncertainty for the past three years has made him more indecisive and less self-motivated.

“I had very clear goals and directions in life I wanted to go [before the war],” he said. “But now I feel like I still haven’t found anything I’m very passionate about.”

Andrii Torchylo ’25, a student from a small town called Stara Lishnya in northwestern Ukraine, had a different experience from Luchyn and the others because he was already a first-year at Stanford in February 2022.

He learned the war had started when he received a call from his sister, who, at the time, was running into a bomb shelter in Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv.

“There’s this feeling of helplessness that… no matter what you do, you cannot protect the lives of those who are truly important to you,” he said.

Aiming to combat that feeling of helplessness, Torchylo and others formed the Ukraine Support Alliance at Stanford (USAS). Over the past three years, they have organized events, resources and humanitarian aid for Ukraine. Torchylo, now a senior, serves as co-president for the undergraduate chapter of USAS. 

According to Torchylo, public interest in the war has waned at Stanford over time. He said that few people attend USAS events anymore, and that it has become much harder to fundraise than it was a couple of years ago.

Prokutin also highlighted the tension he has observed on campus between Russian and Ukrainian student populations. Once, while walking on campus with his Russian friends, Prokutin passed by a couple who — after hearing him and his friends speaking Russian — told them, “We hope you die,” in Ukrainian.

“Not every Russian person is a Russian soldier; not every Russian person is a person who supports Putin,” Prokutin said. “So, I just would like there to be less hatred, and in particular between those two communities.”

Neither Prokutin, Ivankiv, Luchyn nor Torchylo know when they will be able to return to their homes in Ukraine.

Steven Pifer, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and an affiliate of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said that it is difficult to predict how the war will unfold, especially now that President Donald Trump has taken office.

He worries that Trump will make an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would not accept.

“The settlement can’t be just between the United States and Russia,” he said. “The Ukrainians have to be at the table. The Europeans have to be at the table.”

In his opinion, American support for Ukraine is a worthwhile investment. “If the Russians win in Ukraine… Russia becomes a much greater threat to Europe and to American security interests,” he said. “I don’t believe President Trump understands that.”

Pifer says that Russia had a better year in 2024 than Ukraine did, but that it came at a huge cost — one that likely isn’t sustainable. In fact, what has surprised him most over the past three years has been Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

He believes this is in large part due to Ukrainian morale. “For many Ukrainians, this is an existential fight,” he said. “They figure, if they lose this war, Ukraine as they know it is gone.”

Prokutin, however, said he has lost his sense of patriotism since the war began.

“I wouldn’t care if my city was given to Russia, honestly, if it would result in less human death,” he said. “In my opinion, Ukraine is Ukraine as long as there are Ukrainians, and if they’re dying in the war day by day, it doesn’t matter if we have 40,000 square kilometers of territory or less.”

He hopes a treaty will be negotiated soon. “There are casualties and sacrifices that we need to take to finish this conflict as soon as possible,” he said.

On Feb. 24 of this year, Prokutin will sleep soundly in his college dorm room. He will wake to the sound of his alarm, not the aftershock of a missile strike. But the fear he felt three years ago will continue to haunt him.

Stanford will mark the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion on Monday with a panel of Ukrainian leaders, who will discuss the war’s impact and the country’s future. The event, titled “Three Years of War: Updates from Ukraine,” will be hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Bechtel Conference Center from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m. 

The USAS will also host a rally in White Plaza at 5 p.m. to demonstrate continued support for Ukraine.