The two Ukrainian women sat laughing on a sunny bench during a days-long lull in Russian shelling, arguing about how it feels to be at war.

The ruins of their village Bilozirka stretched along a rutted road, behind which lay trenches and artillery pieces trapped in the Ukrainian Battle of Kherson.

The Russians have been firing volleys from the south end of the road since they were routed and withdrew from the village in the first month of the war, March.

Ukrainians have tried to push a more recent counteroffensive past Russian positions into areas around the Crimean peninsula that the Kremlin captured in 2014.

Anzhelika Borysenko told her older friend that anyone can get used to anything — even in a full-blown war that few would believe would break out.

The 20-year-old mother of two had spent March trying not to be noticed by Russian soldiers who were setting up camp at a school across the street.

She had spent the ensuing months of Russian shelling either hiding in basements or figuring out a safe time to head out in search of water and food.

“At first you only thought about when it would finally end. But now it feels normal. We got used to it,” Borysenko said of the war.

Natalia Popesko frowned, implying that her younger friend missed the point.

“Personally, I feel dead inside,” said the 38-year-old.

“We didn’t get used to it. We just accepted that this was real.”

Ukraine’s lightning-fast counterattack in the north and ever-deeper pushes south have created new tracts of land that neither side fully controls.

The village of Bilozirka hides in one of these poor gray areas.

Some of Bilozirka’s stronger residents are returning, and Ukrainian troops feel safe enough to use the village as a rear base.

But there is no functioning government or established means to support the few hundred residents who have filled the village’s better-preserved houses.

The school where the Russians set up their headquarters is now a shattered shell after facing a devastating Ukrainian attack.

This state of neither total war nor any semblance of peace leaves Anastasiya Kuplevska vacillating between despair and hope.

“If there’s no shelling, you wake up and you suddenly want to do something,” said the 40-year-old single mother.

“But when they start shooting, you immediately feel helpless again.”

Kuplevska’s biggest problem is how little she can do on a good day when she’s in a good mood.

The only jobs in the village are selling basic groceries from the nearby town of Mykolaiv.

Most of the local residents worked at a juice factory down the driveway.

But the road’s bridges were blown up during the fighting and the side streets are still heavily shelled.

“I don’t even know if it’s still standing,” Kuplevska said of her factory.

She also balks at offers from well-wishers, which she feels are misguided help.

“They flooded us with food,” Kuplevska said of the various humanitarian aid programs.

“But you can’t build a house out of food.”

The debates and grievances in Bilozirka come at a crucial time in the war.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive has drawn Russian retaliation aimed at putting much of the country into the winter months without heating and electricity.

Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be counting on the need to break the Ukrainians’ will to fight.

But the months of suffering have had exactly the opposite effect on the two women on the bench.

“Many of us had relatives in Russia. We spoke to them. We saw them as normal people,” Popesko said.

“We consider them animals now.”

The young mother simply said she refused to talk to her Russian friends.

What Borysenko struggled with more was the mere idea that there was a war.

“You see it and you feel it and you understand that it’s true — but you still kind of don’t realize it’s real,” she said.

“You get it, but you can’t believe it.”