“I felt like the whole world was trying to break me once more, like it was against me again,” says Polina Skvortsova, about the moment Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February.
Skvortsova, a 36-year-old trans woman living in Kyiv, says that before 24 February she’d only just started to emerge from a period of financial struggles, worsened by poor mental health. The invasion crushed her hopes for the future: in the past year she has had to move from one unstable housing situation to another, been unable to work and partially lost access to hormone therapy.
“I had a bad financial situation even before 24 February,” says Skvortsova, a self-taught and self-employed computer technician, who takes orders for repairs via Facebook. “But I had a clear plan for how to get out of it, and it was working. Because of the war, I fell backwards again.”
