Unfortunately, for over 850 days now, Ukrainians have been living under the threat of continued attempts by Russia to invade and occupy their country. While the threat is a constant looming presence, many Ukrainians don’t let it stop them from trying to live their lives as normally as possible, as one recent video perfectly demonstrates.



In it, we can see a group of women participating in an outdoor exercise class on a roof in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea in the south of Ukraine. Pedaling on exercise bikes as Hannah Montana’s “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home” blares in the background, the women are seemingly unconcerned by the column of black smoke in the background, the result of a Russian missile strike on a warehouse in the city.


The only reference to the attack is in the caption, which reads, “They think they can kill us, but they don’t know what it means to be UKRAINIAN!” Taken literally, being Ukrainian means working out to Hannah Montana songs and choosing not to acknowledge Russian attempts to destroy your town, which sounds pretty badass, honestly.



One poster likened the video to a viral video from 2021 in which a fitness instructor inadvertently recorded the start of Myanmar’s military coup in the background of her aerobics video. As she’s happily working out in the foreground, a convoy of large black Jeeps and SUVs can be seen in the background heading toward the country’s parliament. Another commenter argued that this wasn’t the same thing, as the aerobics woman was genuinely oblivious whereas the Ukrainian women are choosing not to let Russian bombardments bother them.


Either way, the moral is the same: Exercise is the best distraction from political crises.