Is a just peace in Ukraine possible? With this question, and with the caveat that the opinion is not an expert one, we turned to Anastasia Altukhova, an opera singer at the Stara Zagora Opera, born in the eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhie:

She remembers how in the first week of the invasion her mother and grandmother stayed at a friend's villa, not expecting the conflict to escalate. Almost immediately afterwards, however, they managed to leave for Germany to stay with Anastasia's aunt, who helped them settle down and start a new life there. Although she thinks it sounds too much full of pathos, Anastasia says that she dedicates every performance she performs on the stage of the Stara Zagora Opera to Ukraine.

"I give my all, hoping that God will hear me and grant peace to Ukraine. It may sound very emotional, but I believe it. I always make sure that the posters say that I am Ukrainian, so that people know that they are coming to listen to a Ukrainian singer. At every convenient moment, I try to perform Ukrainian music, so that people know that Ukraine also exists in the cultural world."

"When we talk about past events, we are used to relying on the memories of people who experienced them. However, memory is not a sure thing, and if there is documentary confirmation that something happened, you cannot say that it was invented. That is why it is important for the whole world to know that it happened. The fact that there was a war in Ukraine will be preserved at the genetic level in the children who grow up there today. We grew up with stories about World War II, and the current generation of children will also live with the idea that they experienced war and will have memories of it. So I don't think it is possible to be friends with Russia again in 100 or 200 years." ‎

Her compatriot Oksana Kharkiv, a lawyer from Kyiv, has a less fortunate professional fate in Bulgaria. Oksana arrived in Bulgaria at the beginning of the war, but cannot practice her profession and is currently a housewife at home. Oksana is rather skeptical about the attempts to end the military conflict in her homeland and believes that the decisions will hardly benefit her compatriots:

Nevertheless, both women hope that when it is possible, they will return, without fear, under the peaceful sky of their free homeland. Until then, their home is Bulgaria.