Açorianos testemunham horror da guerra na Ucrânia durante missão de solidariedade

Two young men from the Azores—Martim Medeiros from Faial and Álvaro Borges from São Miguel—traveled to Lviv in September to attend the Enlargement CEmp, a conference bringing together Portuguese and Ukrainian youth to discuss the future of European integration. What they encountered was not a seminar held in isolation from the world, but a direct confrontation with the weight of an ongoing war.

Medeiros arrived with the expectation of intellectual exchange. He found that too, but the texture of the experience was shaped by something harder to quantify. He spent time with twenty Ukrainian counterparts, each representing different regions of their country, and through their accounts he began to understand the war not as a headline but as a geography—the intensity of attacks varying by location, the patchy availability of electricity and water, the vast difference between how Kyiv or Lviv functioned compared to the countryside. What struck him most, though, was a paradox: Ukraine's digital infrastructure, even amid invasion, had leapfrogged much of Europe. The government had built a mobile application so efficient that citizens could resolve disputes, access licenses, pay fines, even marry and divorce through their phones. It was less bureaucratic, more responsive, more human in its design than the systems back home in Portugal.

But the war was always there. Lviv itself maintained a surface of normalcy—cafes open, streets populated—yet military personnel were visible, and a mandatory curfew governed the nights. When Medeiros visited what had once been a public park, he found it transformed into a cemetery. Before 2022, families had picnicked on that grass. Now it held graves decorated with flowers and the blue-and-yellow flags of Ukraine. Benches sat beside some of the plots so that the bereaved could sit, remember, grieve. A Ukrainian woman told him something that stayed with him: when war gets romanticized, this is what happens. She pointed to the ground. The real weight came when he watched families move through the cemetery—parents, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, friends, wives—making their visits among those flags. He understood then that this single cemetery was merely one among countless others scattered across the country.

Álvaro Borges, the lawyer from São Miguel, described the journey as intense and disorienting, shadowed by the uncertainty of whether the ground beneath them was truly safe. He and Medeiros had come with a specific purpose: to listen to their Ukrainian peers and to carry Portuguese and Azorean solidarity into a moment of profound national suffering. The young Ukrainians they met carried stories of loss and endurance. Some had lost family members to the conflict. Others had been forced to abandon their homes, now occupied by Russian forces. The weight of these narratives, Borges said, was almost impossible to articulate, yet it was also clarifying.

During the conference, Borges met with Ukraine's prime minister and told her that the Ukrainian people ranked among the world's most courageous, resisting since 2022 an illegal and brutal invasion that violated every principle of international law. The Azorean flag was raised in meetings with Vadym Halaichuk, the first vice-president of the committee overseeing Ukraine's integration into the European Union, and with the mayor of Lviv. The Ukrainian ambassador to Portugal received a letter from the president of the Azorean regional government, expressing gratitude for the islands' support and signaling an intention to visit soon.

The most searing moment came at the Lychakivske cemetery, where approximately 1,200 military personnel have been buried since February 2022. Watching mothers, children, and widows weep there, Borges felt the horror of the war move from abstraction into his body. Twice during the debates, air raid sirens sounded. The young people did not flee. Instead, they reinforced a conviction: youth cannot surrender to fear. For Borges, the journey was more than a diplomatic mission. It was a testimony to courage—a moment when the soul of the Azores was carried into a country fighting for its survival, and a voice was raised on behalf of a generation that refuses silence.