On a bright February day, over cups of coffee, my team gathers for a strategy meeting at our office in Lviv, 80km from the border with the EU. Our cultural and research institution – an NGO called Index – documents Ukrainians’ experiences of the war. The coffee is important: our charging station can power a coffee machine during electricity outages. A member of our board from Kyiv, which has suffered most from Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter, delights in this luxury. She is used to climbing 14 flights of stairs with water canisters and boiling coffee on a portable stove in her frozen apartment.

As we speak, our screens flash with an alert: a Russian ballistic missile is heading our way. “What shall we do?” a colleague wants to know. I want to finish both the coffee and the discussion. In a minute, we hear the sound of an explosion not far away. The missile has been intercepted. We resume our pondering about how to ensure long-term justice by sharing individuals’ stories of wartime Ukraine.

“Tell me that funny story about your injury,” I ask a soldier friend the next day and, laughing, he does. We have adopted a peculiar sense of humour: it is a story about running for his life from a Russian drone with a wounded comrade on his shoulder. In Ukraine, most of us have funny stories to tell: about injuries or displacement, airstrikes or long-distance relationships with partners in the army.

We have normalised war. We have normalised loss. We have normalised resistance. Many of us have accepted that these abnormal things will stay with us for however long we manage to survive Russia’s genocidal onslaught.

Four years and four lifetimes ago, there was a moment when we believed that this horror would be short-lived. We were convinced the world would not tolerate Russia brutalising a sovereign state while in effect dismantling international law and security.

Looking back, I remember a demonstration by survivors of the siege of Mariupol, which took place in the centre of Lviv in mid-March 2022. The protesters had narrowly escaped the industrial port city after enduring weeks of Russian bombardment, which had started in February of that year. Some had left relatives buried under the rubble of destroyed high-rises; others had lost contact with their loved ones. Holding hand-drawn signs that read “Mariupol is on fire”, they chanted “Nato, close the sky!”. Then working as a “fixer” for international media, I stepped out of the group of reporters filming the scene and screamed with the demonstrators at the top of my lungs.

But Nato – or any other international entity – did not close the sky then. It is not closing the sky now, as Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy system, including substations supplying electricity to nuclear power plants. Compromising the safety of civilian nuclear infrastructure – from the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to interfering with nuclear units in other parts of the country – is one consequence of the international community raising its levels of horror tolerance. It has not made the planet a safer place.

Back in 2022, we Ukrainians told ourselves and each other that the world would stand with our country if we showed that we were willing to defend ourselves. Hundreds of thousands of civilians volunteered to join the army and ousted the occupiers from the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions in the north of the country. Within six months, the Ukrainian army had also liberated the Kharkiv region in the north-east and Kherson in the south. Through grit and ingenuity, Ukrainians proved they were capable of fighting back militarily.

Civilian victories followed. The film 20 Days in Mariupol, which captured the first weeks of the Russian violation of the city, won the Oscar for best documentary in 2024. In his acceptance speech, director Mstyslav Chernov appealed to the Academy Awards audience to “make sure that the history record is set straight” and that the truth about Russian atrocities would prevail.

The Nobel peace prize 2022 went to the Ukrainian human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk. Her Nobel lecture exposed the crumbling of the international system of law and security in the face of Russia’s criminal war. Its title was “Time to take responsibility”.

The international community indeed took its time to respond to Russia’s aggression. With aid to Ukraine too slow, too limited and too fragmented, the country was left to fight in a protracted war of attrition. Ukrainians have been left with no choice but to normalise loss, war and resistance.

I revisit the statements of the early years of the full-scale war because it helps to recapture some of that moral clarity that prevailed then, before the public discourse became clouded with talk of compromise and concession. Even more revealing are the words of those who did not live long enough to become accustomed to horror.

In 2023, I travelled to the deoccupied Kharkiv region with a group of authors and volunteers and witnessed the devastation Russians left behind. We stopped by a mass burial of local residents in a pine forest near the liberated city of Izium. Wooden crosses marked human-sized holes in sandy soil – 447 of them. From one of the graves, the body of an executed fellow writer, Volodymyr Vakulenko, had been exhumed. In the last entry of his journal written under occupation, Vakulenko predicted Ukrainian victory.

Another writer I travelled with, Victoria Amelina, researched Vakulenko’s murder. She was planning to include his story in her nonfiction book Looking at Women Looking at War. Two months after our journey to the Kharkiv region, a Russian high-precision missile strike took her life. I became part of the editorial group which saw her book published posthumously. Uncompromising in the face of horror, Amelina’s testimony both documents Ukrainian thirst for justice and embodies it.

The words and lives of those people Russia took away from us are like bees in amber: they capture the untainted essence of Ukraine’s fight. They are a flame which the fatigue, betrayals and accumulated horror of the subsequent years are powerless to extinguish. As the war enters its fifth year, we should pause and look back in order to see the path ahead. Compromises that feed Russian impunity will not lead us to lasting peace. The political imagination to envision Russian accountability might give us a chance.

• Sasha Dovzhyk is a writer, editor and cultural manager. She is head of INDEX, a Lviv-based cultural and research institute that documents experiences of the war.