SALTIVKA, Ukraine – On a recent Saturday morning, Yevhenia Botiyeva weeded the flowerbed outside her apartment building, a habit she has carried out since returning home in late spring.
She works methodically, seemingly unaffected by the apocalyptic landscape of burned buildings, shattered windows, and sometimes the sound of firecrackers all around her.
Her husband, Nikolai Kucher, who has survived a heart attack in Covid-19 and is now suffering from cancer, will soon emerge from their first-floor apartment to light firewood in a black kettle with coffee. get high. But now only Ms. Botiyeva, 82, is taking care of the overgrown lilies.
It’s an eerily cozy scene for a war zone – a testament to how even menacing and surreal begin to feel normal when given enough time.
“Tea or coffee?” Botiyeva made the suggestion, pouring hot water from a plastic thermos as she sat at a folding kitchen table located outside the building. A vase filled with orange lilies and deep yellow wisteria pays homage to a picture of the Virgin Mary plastered on the wall near the building’s entrance.
“The mother of God protects us,” she said serenely, urging her guests to try their “wartime sweets” – savory biscuits topped with honey cream taken from a jar.
Planned in the 1960s as a bedroom community on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, Saltivka was once a district of half a million inhabitants. Now, in the abandoned apartment blocks, which once housed thousands of people, only dozens remain.
Botiyeva, a retired ophthalmologist, and her husband, a retired engineer, said they would rather endure hardship than join the millions of displaced Ukrainians relying on the kindness of those far away. strange while waiting for war. In the process, they created a community with others who stayed.
Every visible building had scorched walls and shattered windows. Stores that are still standing have been on the board. Nearby, an apron and other pieces of clothing hung from the upper branch of a tree, caught up in it by an explosion, according to residents.
Playgrounds are empty – families with children have run away.
There is no running water, no heat and no safety in continuing the Russian attacks.
Better understanding of the Russo-Ukrainian War
But very few residents leave the apartment complex because much of the suburb is badly damaged and there are no buses – and the nearest grocery store is now an hour’s walk away.
A notice scribbled on an abandoned truck partially blocking access to the apartment complexes warned that no residents had approached the area. That security ban, imposed during the worst of the shelling, has now been lifted. However, for the most part, only security forces and volunteers deliver food here.
“We survived another night,” said Halyna Zakusova, a neighbor, hugging Botiyeva after stepping out of the sixth-floor apartment she shares with her son.
Zakusova, 65, sat at an outdoor table and petted a black and white cat, Musa, that jumped into her arms.
The two women, ordinary acquaintances before the war, became friends. Zakusova, a retired city worker, moved into the building 31 years ago during the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union.
Because their apartment building – number 25 – is on the edge of the complex, police and volunteers drop food donations nearby and residents distribute to neighboring buildings.
“We take what we need and we give the rest to others. When we don’t have something, we can go to them,” Botiyeva said. “Life is like a boomerang: how you want to be treated, you should treat others, even those you don’t know.”
Botiyeva said that the two women meet every day for coffee, and when they make something cool, they share it. A few days ago, Ms. Botiyeva made cherry vareniki: dumplings filled with sour cherries picked from a nearby tree, cooked on a hot plate.
Outside the adjoining apartment complex, another woman, Larysa, sat at a wooden table that was pocked with cherries to add sugar and freeze for the winter. “They have vitamin C,” says Larrysa. Suspicious of foreign guests, she did not want to give her last name.
“Some of our neighbors have left abroad, some to western Ukraine and some to other regions,” said Lyudmyla, 67, a retired accountant sitting next to her. “Those who have no money stay here.”
Lyudmyla showed off the fruit trees she planted when she first moved into the building in 1991. She also declined to give her last name for privacy reasons but personally handed out the sour cherries.
Near the cherry trees, there are apricot trees, walnut trees, and apple trees.
Botiyeva’s husband, Mr. Kucher, said there were also flowers “for the soul”.
In addition to packaged food, the police also drop dog food to donate to abandoned pets. Outside Building 25, minutes after a stray tabby finished his bowl of dry food, two pigeons stepped up to finish the rest.
Every day, Zakusova’s son Oleksandr Ihnatenko, 37, trudges to the edge of the complex with a bucket of grain to feed dozens of pigeons racing in a two-story pigeon aviary for an absent neighbor .
Ukrainian artillery aimed at Russian forces. After Russia failed to capture Kharkiv during the invasion in February, Ukrainian forces pushed them back – in some places back to the Russian border. But Ukraine’s second largest city is of such strategic importance that Russia is expected to eventually launch another all-out assault on the city.
After the horror of their early days as they huddled in the basement, the remaining residents have become experts at recognizing scary noises, Botiyeva said.
“At first, you’re scared, you’re confused, you can’t accept the situation,” she said. “Now we understand what is going, where is entering. We are not afraid of every sound. Now we have experience. But it’s better not to have this experience.”
Botiyeva and her husband left the apartment a few months after the war started, not because they were scared but because they froze to death, she said. They stay with friends and when spring comes, they return.
Mr. Kucher said they were full of welcomes. His wife offered a more elegant reason to return.
“A home needs to feel that it is loved, that it is not abandoned, that it is not left behind,” Botiyeva said, adding, “So that it can take us to later and We can live here in peace.”
Ms. Zakusova and her son stayed through the winter despite the low temperatures. She said they poured boiling water into a hot water tank and buried it under blankets to keep warm.
As the summer rolls on, and with what could be a larger Russian offensive looming, peace seems elusive.
“We thought we would be a generation that doesn’t know war,” Zakusova said. Her mother, 88, survived the Second World War but is now trapped in a village in the Russian-occupied Kherson region.
“We couldn’t reach her by phone, we couldn’t go there,” she said. “We don’t know what is going on. Does she have food? Does she have medication? “
Ms. Zakusova said that if the war is still raging when winter comes, she plans to go find her mother and stay with her. Her son will stay.
“He will survive, but my mother will not,” she said.
“It will be all right,” she said, not only with conviction but with remarkable serenity considering all the hardships she has faced and is likely to still come. “We’ll be fine.”
