One evening in late March, Liudmyla Zarutska, a vigorous woman of 80 years, left work and headed to her apartment on the left bank of the Dnipro River in Kyiv, Ukraine. A member of the cleaning staff at the city’s Palace of Children and Youth, Zarutska planned to retire on April 1. Winter’s chill was easing. She had just completed her final Saturday shift and looked forward to life as a pensioner, timed to begin in the warming weather of spring.

Upon reaching the nine-story residential building where she lived for decades, she rode the elevator to the top floor, unlocked the steel door to her three-bedroom apartment and entered a space that smelled delightfully of coffee. Comfortably at home, Zarutska, who went by Liuda, settled in to watch the news, as Ukrainians anxious about the war with Russia often do. Talk at the time orbited around the possibility of a cease-fire brokered by the American president, Donald Trump. Ukrainians were skeptical. While Washington pressed unfavorable terms on Ukraine, Russia ordered more troop assaults along the front and intensified attacks from afar on Ukrainian cities. Air-raid alarms wailed almost every night across much of the country, followed by the engine noise of long-range drones, a sound resembling dirt bikes passing overhead. Sunrises illuminated fresh destruction, wounding or death.

After watching the news, Liuda spoke with her son, Mykola, by telephone. He lived near the front in Sumy, hours away by car. But the weather was tolerable, and Mykola hadn’t seen her in almost a week. He offered to visit that night. Liuda would not have it. She reminded him that he was starting a new job in Kyiv on Monday and would then spend weeknights at her apartment. They would share much time together, she said, very soon. It was his last conversation with his mother. Her insistence almost certainly saved his life.

Liuda had long been lucky. Born in 1944, months after the Red Army drove Hitler’s Wehrmacht from Kyiv, she survived threadbare years of reconstruction to live a good life. In the 1960s, when a new housing complex opened in an agricultural field on the left bank, she promptly moved in. It was a prime apartment with a view to Pechersk Lavra, the serenely beautiful monastery on the opposite bank’s green slopes. The city built a kindergarten below her kitchen window and other schools nearby, allowing Liuda to raise her son in a pleasant neighborhood outside the capital’s center.

Mykola became a standout basketball guard, then a junior military officer and finally a manager in the agricultural sector of independent Ukraine. Liuda doted on him throughout — cooking hearty solyanka and borscht, baking black-currant pies and putting her vintage Singer sewing machine through its paces. Decorated with colorful filigree, the machine was a utilitarian heirloom. Liuda’s father returned with it from Germany after World War II to present to her mother, who passed it to her. In the waning years of the Soviet Union, when fabric was more readily available than fashionable attire, Liuda labored at it to make clothing for her son. She also embroidered pillows, including one with a geometric cross-stitch pattern for Mykola that she kept in the living room. According to Ukrainian tradition, the pattern protected him from harm.