CNN —

On the banks of the Dnieper River, parents sunbathe on the beach as their children splash in the cool, refreshing water.

A girl dances, twisting and twirling in the sand as a busker on the boardwalk beats his drum to the rhythm of a pop tune.

With bars and cafes humming with activity, the vibe feels similar to that of countless European summer hotspots.

Yet this would be a strange place for a vacation. These are snapshots of life in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, barely 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the front line in the war with Russia.

It is a stark and disconcerting contrast to the scenes I witnessed on a visit to this city three months ago.

Back then, Russia's invasion was two months in; most of the city's businesses were shuttered and much of the population was on the run.

Gone now are the convoys of cars fleeing westward across Ukraine, many with the words "children" taped to the windows.

Instead, despite the closeness of the front lines and the ever-present threat of long-range artillery fire raining death from above, life in this country at war can appear deceptively peaceful.

People still go to work, walk their dogs and play with their children in the park.

"We've gotten used to this. And it is horrible that we've gotten used to it," said ballerina Katryna Kalchenko, as she limbered up for a performance at the 135-year-old opera house in Odesa.

Here too, in this port city on the Black Sea, there is that jarring dissonance between the madness of war and the mundanity of every day life.

Odesa was once known as Ukraine's "Pearl of the Black Sea," a holiday spot popular with poets, writers and musicians. Even today, it retains much of its charm, though its tranquility is occasionally punctured by Russian strikes -- such as the two Kalibr cruise missiles that hit just hours after Moscow had signed a grain export deal with Kyiv brokered by the United Nations.

Ballerina Kalchenko was forced to do her warm-up in the basement of the opera house, because an air raid siren had sent the entire orchestra and dance troupe rushing for shelter just half an hour earlier.

And yet, Kalchenko and her fellow dancers emerged for the first act a few stretches later with enough poise and serenity to leave their audience spellbound -- until, that is, the threat of another Russian missile attack forced a premature closure of the show.

A victory of morale

It is as if, five months into the war, many Ukrainians have come to accept their new reality.

This is partly a reflection of confidence in those fighting on their behalf.

Ukrainians are fiercely proud of how their soldiers beat back the attempted Russian blitzkrieg on Kyiv in the north of the country in the spring.

Many now hope there will be further successes as their forces fight a grinding war of attrition on the eastern and southern fronts, where they hope to regain cities and towns lost to the armies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It's a fight that takes a heavy toll. An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at one point said the country was losing up to 200 soldiers a day on those front lines.

And yet it is clear that among those brave defenders there is a willingness to endure whatever it takes.

Take Serhii Tamarin, for example.

I first met him in March, when he had recently emerged from a military hospital and was recovering from a spinal injury and broken ribs suffered while commanding a Territorial Defense battalion of some 400 troops, battling northwest of Kyiv.

"It's not so scary to die, it's much more scary to lose," he said at the time. Within days, he had returned to the front.

When we reconnect, he is back in hospital, this time for injuries sustained as a special forces operator fighting in the south.

Is there a word in English, he asked, for when something blows up near your head?

A near miss from a tank round left him heavily concussed, and he now has trouble thinking straight, he said.

But he insisted he was feeling well enough to return to the fight.

"I think in a few days, they should send me back to my platoon," Tamarin said.

Defiance

But the embrace of Ukraine's new reality is not only about confidence in men like Tamarin. It is borne of defiance, too.

Soldiers describe the war in existential terms, an invasion ordered by a Russian president who questions Ukraine's right to exist as an independent country.

"They came to capture our territory," said Senior Lt. Andrii Pidlisnyi, who commands a company of around 100 men in the Mykolaiv region.

"To kill maybe my parents and just destroy my house and live here and say it was historically Russian territory."

Civilians often express their seething anger by using Russian rhetoric -- that it is "liberating" Ukrainians from their own democratically-elected government -- and flinging it back in the Kremlin's face.

"Thank you for 'saving me' from my home, from my family, from my child who is in another country and who I miss every day," said Anastasia Bannikova, another ballerina I met in the basement bomb shelter of the Odesa opera house.

Like so many others, in the early days of the war Bannikova fled Ukraine. Now she has returned to work in Odesa -- though she has left her daughter in the relative safety of Moldova.

Choosing life

Nearly everyone you speak to in Ukraine has lost something due to the war. Many have buried loved ones. Others have seen their businesses fail, houses destroyed and futures upended.

How does a farmer plant next year's crops or a high school student considering enrolling in university while this war rages with no end in sight?

One answer may be that many have concluded that, amid all the death and destruction, simply continuing to live as normal a life as possible is the biggest victory there is.

The Ukrainians I met all accepted their hardships with a quiet stoicism; rarely did they complain or wallow in victimhood.

Sergei, a cargo ship captain who has been unable to go to sea since the Russian navy blockaded Ukraine's ports, said he was raised on the stories of sacrifices his grandparents suffered during World War II.

"Now it is our turn," he said.

Great efforts have been made to close the gender pay gap. But not all fields of work are created equally.

Alexandra Light, who has been doing ballet since she was two years old, says even the dance world is dominated by men at the top.

“A lot of people on the outside of the dance world still don’t realize," she said. "In the industry, it’s still very much a boys’ game."

Tracey Rockett, who teaches management practice at Texas Christian University, said she can point to any number of studies that show the wide gulf between women and management. That gulf persists even in fields dominated by women.

“In public schools, for instance, men make up the minority of teachers, but to keep them, very often, they will be offered promotion opportunities much earlier than women are,” Rockett said, “You see that in the restaurant industry, in education, in healthcare, and in dance.”

According to the Dance Data Project, among the largest 150 ballet companies in America, a quarter of works produced last year were choreographed by women.

Light is a principal dancer. She’s at the front of the room, but she knows the hurdles in reaching a position where she’s at the front for good.

“You know, there's a choreographic workshop, and you don't sign up for that because you're like, ‘Well, I need to, I need to dance,’” Light said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, women quit the workforce in larger numbers. They reported larger rates of burnout while taking on the extra burden of child care. At companies where women often take the lead on efforts of diversity and equity, they typically don’t get additional pay or substantial recognition.

But Rockett sees hope in Light’s generation.

"That is one thing we are seeing in particular with Gen Z. They will leave, and they will leave without a backup job. They will leave without a plan. If they're dissatisfied, they're going to take off,” Rockett said.

“I think a lot of dancers sort of face it at some point that, you know, there’s a lot of problems with our career. Like, we love dance so much, but there’s a lot of work to be done,” Light said, “Even when I was a little kid, I loved choreographing. I would go with my best friend. We would go down to the dance studio together and bring my boombox. As I got into my professional career, it completely waned.”

Light took the path she was steered to take, but she has plans to go beyond that path.

“I have goals for where I want to be in the future, but I’m really proud of where I am now,” Light said.

NEW YORK —

Yeva Hrytsak, a ballet student at the American Ballet Theatre Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in New York City, remembers the "unthinkable" phone call she received on Feb. 24, 2022, from her family in Ukraine four days after arriving in Switzerland, where she was temporarily studying at Zurich Dance Academy — a phone call that threw her life into turmoil.

Hrytsak, 17, was some 1,200 miles from her hometown — Dnipro — with her family suddenly engulfed by war.

"What if I cannot see them again? And I just started to cry," she told CNN. "I just I didn't know what to do. How can I help, what can I do? I felt like a little girl."

Four days earlier, Hrytsak had boarded a plane in Kyiv to pursue her dream of dancing on an international stage. She says she was on one of the last flights out of Ukraine before she realized, "all the airports are bombed. I cannot even take plane and go home."

But that same day, Hrytsak says she made an important discovery about the power of dance. For the next twelve months, ballet would become her salvation.

"I went to school and then I did a class," she said. "That's when I realized that I can just like distract myself, just tune it (war) out, even if it's for a brief moment."

Hrytsak did her best to tune out the war at home, honing in on her dance instead until December, when she took the dangerous journey back to Ukraine.

"I knew that it's not safe," she said. "I knew that there is always a risk, but for me it was very important that I do this. I saw with my eyes what's going on in my country."

The teen documented her hometown via photos and videos. It's a place she barely recognized after nearly a year of conflict.

"It was tough to see army everywhere around the city," she said, referring to Dnipro. "There is like the places that I used to have fun and I remember like from my childhood, and then I see this place is destroyed."

Back in the U.S., Hrytsak rejoined 10 Ukrainian ballet dancers at Youth America Grand Prix (YAGP), says Larissa Saveliev, founder of the group, the world's largest student ballet scholarship competition.

"It doesn't matter if it's the earthquake or if it's a war," said Saveliev, a former ballerina from Russia who once danced for Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. "They have to train."

Saveliev defected to the U.S. in the early 1990's and started the YAGP a few years later. On the one-year anniversary of the war, she reflected on her family and what the invasion means to her.

"It's painful for me to see what's happened with Ukraine because I have a family there," she said. "I'm torn in all different directions. I have family who doesn't talk to each other again."

CNN caught up with Saveliev and Hrytsak at a New Jersey dance studio. Although the conflict looms large on both their minds, together they find solace in dance. Ballet slippers and a tutu seemingly wipe away any of Hrytsak's worries and transform her into a stunning performer who exudes grace and eloquence.

A ballet barre replaces conflict and borders when the pair unite. Speaking in her native Russian, Saveliev coaches her protégé on technique, hailing her as "the most beautiful out of all Ukrainians out of 251," referring to the amount of Ukrainian dancers YAGP has placed with dance companies around the world since the war began.

"These are young men and women who have probably never ventured out (of Ukraine). Some of them didn't have a passport," she said.

Saveliev says the connections she has established with ballet schools all over the world since the 1990's placed her in a unique position to help evacuate the young dancers out of Ukraine as soon as the Russian invasion began.

"We sent an email to partner schools with a profile of the kids and said, 'guys, those are the young dancers and we have got to get them out,'" she said. "All of the schools immediately said, 'absolutely.'"

She described the first few weeks of the invasion as a "mass exodus." She says she would receive phone calls in the middle of the night from worried parents. Those parents, she said, are "willing to do anything if it means getting their children to a safe place and further in their careers."

As the war enters its second year, Saveliev expects to place more Ukrainian dancers in the U.S. Her group has received additional funding from organizations like The Howard G Buffett Foundation, which invests in conflict migration and public safety.

"We were just trying to deal with the situation how best we can," she said. "Nobody get the memo how to place ballet students in the middle of the war, at least I didn't."

Hrytsak is auditioning for other ballet schools around the country, hoping to continue to dance on the international stage. Although she remains thousands of miles away from Ukraine, part of her remains in Dnipro.

"The more I think about war, the more I feel really like sad and heavy inside," she said. "The ballet, that's what helped me and supported me to get rid of this pain."