So it finally happened. After three years of fighting you applied for, and were assigned to a post away from the front. You texted me last week, told me your transfer had gone through.

Officially and fucking irreversible, you wrote. Drinking gin in Dnipro and waiting for my train.

We wrote a book together about your time in combat. Had over a year of video calls. I translated your words, your experience into my own language – I added images, things you did not tell me about, that turned out to be very close to the truth. Other soldiers would know better what your life was like, but as close as a writer can come, I came.

There were times you thought you’d almost had it with all the fighting. I wanted to tell you then to quit, that it had been more than enough, but I never did. I respected your decision to stay on, admired you for not turning away, though I cannot say it made me happy.

At the end of every conversation, before hanging up, I told you to not get shot. And you promised me you wouldn’t – every time. I like to think that us writing this book together, your visit to Amsterdam for the promotion of Mens blijven, somehow made a difference.

I remember walking through my city with you on a sunny autumn day, you marveling at how intact everything was, how relaxed and friendly all the people were. I like to think that you coming to dinner at my house and getting to know my family and friends helped you see that life in peace time could be something worth returning to. That all the excitement and promised glory of battle – the great adventure, as you called it – would at some point end, and that you might be entitled to more. A life after all that.

War makes you cold inside, you told one of the interviewers during your stay with us. And I have been finding ways to remain warm. Being here has reminded me there are other possible futures for me out there.

The man I had collected from the airport had had a whitish gray about him, a fine and icy dust clinging to his hair, his coat, his luggage. The Andrii who held our book up to my colleagues and friends at the launch smiled tentatively, like someone slowly getting used to warmer waters.

We have been scheduled to speak at a conference in April. It looks like we’ll be having that drink in peace time – be it, for now, your own private kind of peace. But who knows what the coming months will bring.

You, my friend, have survived three years at the front. That shows us anything is possible.