In the village of Kamianka, tucked into a valley near Izium in Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region, Victor and Larysa Sysenko were in triumphant mood: Victor had just managed to finish getting a roof on their house, in time for winter.
Kamianka got very unlucky last year. Soon after the launch of the full-scale invasion it was caught between the Russians as they tried to advance towards Donetsk from the north, and the Ukrainian defenders. Over the spring and summer, the village was occupied by the Russians and reduced to ruins.
A couple of weeks after the area was liberated on 11 September last year, the Sysenkos returned home to a terrible shock. Burned-out tanks and armoured vehicles lay strewn in the lanes. Their house was roofless and cratered, and “there was so much mess, so much garbage and waste of the Russians”, said Larysa. “They’d been eating here, shitting here, it was full of their clothes and underwear.” There was no electricity and, since the departing occupiers had stolen the pump from their well, no water.
There was no chance of making their home habitable over the harsh Ukrainian winter, so they left for Odesa. But they returned this March and immediately started to clear up – and rebuild their shattered home.
One of the village’s most pressing needs is for windows. Amid the rest of the destruction in the village, hardly a window remains, a problem that stretches across Ukraine since every missile or rocket attack on a building will probably also blow out the glass of its immediate neighbours. One of the characteristic sounds of the war is the harsh tinkle of broken glass as it is swept up. In cities such as Kharkiv, many city-centre windows are boarded up – or crisscrossed with tape to lessen the danger of flying shards in the event of a blast.
Returning villagers have been helped in their reconstruction efforts by a small-scale Kharkiv-based volunteer organisation, Unity and Strength. The villagers are using windows supplied by one of the organisation’s partner projects: Windows for Ukraine, which was the basis of the prize-winning Polish pavilion at the London Design Biennale this summer. The project, organised by Poland’s BRDA Foundation, gathers unwanted windows – those removed during renovation projects, for example – and sends them to Ukraine to be recycled into damaged buildings or used in new-builds.
Which is why several of Kamianka’s houses, including the Sysenkos’, are sporting rather jaunty pink-framed windows from a recently demolished office block in Warsaw. And why their friends Volodymyr and Liudmyla Korniycha have chosen a window for their daughter’s bedroom that was donated, so its label says, by someone called Veronica from Dalston, east London.
The Sysenkos and the Korniychas had been reluctant to leave after the full-scale invasion began last year. As small-scale farmers, like most of the village’s inhabitants, their homes were their livelihood: they had their cows to think of, their crops, their chickens, their greenhouses, their fruit trees.
Soon they had little choice, however. “The scariest thing was the fighter jets dropping bombs,” said Larysa. “First they hit the agricultural building where Victor works. Then they hit the school and the petrol station.” After the Russians hit their neighbours’ house with a Grad rocket, on 11 March, the couple got in their car and drove out.
It has been a similar story for the Korniychas. They returned to the village to find just a single wall of their house still standing, and their cows either lost “or shot and eaten by the Russians”, said Liudmyla. Even so, they did not hesitate to move back this spring. “We don’t have a choice,” she said. “We can’t move and we don’t want to.”
The families’ return has been painful and difficult – but also a remarkable act of resilience. Volodymyr was determined to sow a small field with sunflowers. But before he could do that, the field had to be demined, and since there was no outside help he simply set about it himself.
For this dangerous task he used a shovel and a pair of long-handled secateurs – the tool the family usually uses for picking fruit ripening on the highest branches of their pear trees. For the Korniychas to farm on the usual scale the land will need to be properly demined by specialists. As soon as Unity and Strength can find the funding, there is a Swiss demining NGO ready to help.
The Sysenkos took a similarly pragmatic attitude to unexploded ordnance: “When I was doing some weeding, if I saw a mine, I’d get my husband. He’d carefully pick it up on the shovel and put it on the bonfire. Then we’d run away,” said Larysa. Since March, the Sysenkos have found eight anti-personnel mines in the garden, and Liudmyla has cleared 25 shells from the Korniychas’.
Despite the difficulties, the two families – some of the 165 people who have returned to the village, out of more than 1,240 residents before the full-scale invasion – are making steady progress. The Sysenkos’ house is still not habitable, strictly speaking – they are living and sleeping in one tiny room, with a fridge and cooker powered by solar panels. But in late September their greenhouse was full of tomatoes, pink petunias were blooming in the garden, and chickens were scratching away in their coop.
Natalia Serhiyenko, who runs Unity and Strength, said the organisation was helping to rebuild an initial five houses in the village – “stubbornly trying to push it through” against the odds. Many larger NGOs are focusing on the sites of atrocities such as Bucha and Irpin, which, adjacent to Kyiv, are safer for charity workers and higher profile, she said. By contrast, “no one cares about villages like Kamianka”. But they should, she said. “People don’t understand that the people here have nowhere else to go.”
In warm late September, the villagers were harvesting plums and grapes, to a backdrop of thrumming cicadas. Volodymyr was planning to build a storehouse for his sunflower seed crop out of some of the many wooden ammunition crates discarded in the village. “I wish I didn’t have to use them. I don’t want to look at them. But unfortunately, we have no choice,” he said.
But the families were working against the clock before the cold weather sets in, probably in a few weeks’ time. Will the Sysenkos make it through the winter in their one tiny room? The older villagers, said Larysa, had it worse: they can remember their families living in self-built dugouts, burrowed half underground, for several years after the second world war. “It will all be OK,” she said. “Aren’t we Ukrainian, after all?”
