I arrived in Kharkiv on September 27, joining two North Americans I met in Kyiv and the various small teams of humanitarians they were working with there. Among them was a Ukrainian woman, Olesya, who I wasn’t able to easily communicate with at first because she hardly spoke any English.
When I met her, she was busy preparing children’s supply bags in the apartment we were using as a base to load our vehicles. It wasn’t until later in the day, after having visited several villages north of Kharkiv, some just a few kilometers from the Russian border, that I was curious what her story was, and began using a translator to ask her.
Olesya told me that she is from Kharkiv, and just eight months before the invasion of 2022, moved out of the city to a nearby neighborhood in Tsyrkuny, where she was building a brand new home for herself, investing all of her life savings into it. It consisted of a main house and a smaller guest house. Only the smaller house had been finished, so she was spending her time living in it until the construction of the main house completed.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, her entire life changed. At 5:00 in the morning she woke up to explosions that were causing her house to shake, and upon looking outside she saw that “the sky was on fire”. The entire village had already lost its electricity supply. Realizing the Russian army was coming, she quickly ran out, in her pajamas, grabbing just a coat and her dog, and went to seek shelter in Kharkiv’s underground metro station.
After a week of sheltering, she described it as unbearable to live, from constant bombing and shelling, so she fled to Dnepropetrovsk. On May 5th, she finally returned with a full car of food and supplies for the army that had been defending Kharkiv all these months. Her town just outside of Kharkiv had been on the side that the Russian’s had occupied up until this point, and that’s when she discovered what happened to her home.
She found the remains of her home, both houses destroyed. The guest house was demolished, but the main house remained structurally intact, yet heavily destroyed. Russians had invaded her town, using the homes in her neighborhood as bases. Demolishing some of them for fun, and quartering in others.
Once we walked inside the door leading into her home, which looked like a bomb had been set off inside, we found her wedding dress, eerily laying on the floor beneath a wire with a clothes hanger. She said when she first arrived back and entered her home after it had been destroyed, she saw her wedding dress hung up from a wire; the Russians who stayed there dragged it from her guest home on the other side of her backyard to use it for some sort of sick fantasy.
Each of the homes were raided, with objects from one house being brought to others. Olesya told me her photo album, including pictures of her wedding, was taken from her guest house and found in a neighbor’s home down the street, by a bedside where Russian soldiers were sleeping. But it wasn’t just her wedding dress and photo album that were misplaced; all her documents were also lost.
I looked down as we were standing in her backyard and noticed a mattress laid out, and asked Olesya if it was her’s. She said she had no idea where it came from. Maybe a neighbor’s. She also mentioned that in one of the nearby homes, the Russians had dirtied the children’s room, the walls and even clothes in the closet, with poop.
I asked her what her plans are for this home, if she had any thoughts of repairing it and coming back to live there. But then she explained to me that, due to the beuracracy in Ukraine, she had not yet obtained all the necessary documents for her home, despite already having begun living in it. This meant that she could not file any insurance claim to cover the costs of her repairs. In one day, she had lost her entire life savings, which were put into the building of this home.
A couple days later, while visiting another town in the Kharkiv region, Vysokyi, where we delivered warm winter clothes and various supplies, I asked Olesya if she had moved on from her own tragic situation. She said that after she saw her entire home destroyed, losing everything she had in life, she was no longer worried about the past or the future, living life moment by moment. She no longer felt scared.
So then I asked her, what motivates you to continue? She said she dedicates all of her time now to volunteering and supplying humanitarian aid to children and others in need, who are currently affected by this war. And then it struck me. Instead of choosing to rebuild her life after having lost everything, she put that aside to help others. Myself and the other international humanitarian workers can always go back to our lives elsewhere in the world, anytime we want. But she doesn’t have a life to go back to. She’s sacrificing her future for others.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine affected the lives of thousands and thousands of people. Some, like Olesya, lost their homes. Others lost their loved ones. Whatever the individual story for each of the people in this country, the reality is that a tremendous amount of pain and suffering was brought into this world.