Special to The Ukrainian Weekly
PISKY, Ukraine – Hryhoryi, 54, and his wife, Halyna, 52, began living in their basement in the village of Pisky in mid-July 2014, when pro-Russian separatists attacked for the first time.
They carried down their beds and sacks of potatoes, and are heating the concrete-walled cellar with a stove. Firewood isn’t a problem after many trees were felled by shells; candles and kerosene lamps provide lighting.
Since then, the frontline between them and Ukrainian forces has crossed through the village numerous times, leaving devastation in its wake. Its population of more than 2,000 has dwindled to only 70 – mostly elderly folks who have no place to go or simply don’t want to leave the only place they’ve ever lived.
“You’ve come back,” said Halyna upon seeing a group of volunteers arrive on January 10, wondering how we got to the village amid the bombs and bullets flying about. We were delivering food (buckwheat, sugar and sunflower oil), blankets, coats, wax candles and paraffin lamps from the Wings of Generosity and Care charity launched in Kyiv to help the war’s afflicted civilians.
Pisky is just nine miles from the Donetsk airport, which has been the frontline of the Donbas war ever since the failed Minsk ceasefire protocols were signed in September 2014.
Ukrainian forces have been fighting against attempts by pro-Russian separatists backed by Moscow to expand westward the territory under their control, despite the agreement setting boundaries that were not supposed to be crossed.
The frontline has crossed through Pisky several times, with the village being mostly under the control of Ukrainian forces as of January 19, when the latest battle was raging. Its capture is important since it offers the only northern route that enables supplies to be delivered to the airport.
The first time we were in Pisky, on December 29, 2014, we took pictures and recorded how people live, with Halyna asking if she could send a video greeting to her children who have taken refuge in the Kyiv region.
Maia Mikhaluk
Oleksandr from the village of Opytne shakes hands with a Ukrainian officer.
Standing near a Christmas tree in her basement, all she could manage to say amid tears was, “We are fine. We are fine. We will have some meat and salad for our New Year’s dinner. Do not worry about us.”
The volunteers found her children, played them the greeting and offered to deliver anything they had to offer to Pisky.
“We’ll think about it,” they said. But they didn’t call back.
Instead, Halyna and her neighbors have only volunteers like the Wings of Generosity and Care charity to rely on for donated food. When they can, the Ukrainian soldiers share their meager rations too.
Yet some things can’t be offered. Pisky has been without electricity and natural gas for cooking for many months. In the first days of the new year, temperatures dropped to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.
Liudmyla, a neighbor who came for food, boasted that the temperature in her house was as warm as 44 degrees, but that was only during the last few days.
When we descended the stairs to Halyna’s damp, frigid basement, we could smell fumes in the air. Like others, she had no choice but to heat the room with firewood, but there were no ventilation ducts for the resulting smoke.
We also visit ruined apartments in a damaged four-story building whose remaining walls were black from fire. Most of its windows were shattered, and bricks were scattered about amid snow-covered toys and kids’ shoes left behind.
In another apartment, a cage on the ground contained two dead parrots that either starved or froze to death. Those who lived here left in haste, worried solely about saving their own lives.
One flat was destroyed by mortar fire from the separatists’ side of the frontline. Luckily, nobody was injured, Halyna said. The family escaped in the summer with the first wave of refugees.
Some of the broken windows were covered with plywood or plastic by those who returned to live in the regions.
“Soldiers, please do not break down the door. We have keys and can open it. We are in the basement,” read a note on one door. When this reporter asked what that was for, a woman said in a low voice, “Soldiers rob apartments.” Ukrainian soldiers, that is.
The army officers with us confirmed that could be true, “This is war. Anything is possible. We have different people here.” Recently, Ukrainian commanders began checking packages that soldiers send home from the Donbas in order to discourage looting.
We asked the people of Pisky about their needs. Some of them expressed anger that the Ukrainian government had abandoned them and stopped sending pensions already in July. They could have registered to receive them in a safer village not far from Pisky, but they have no transport to take them there, nor money to pay for it, for that matter.
On many levels, they are stuck between life and death. Geographically, they are between the Ukrainian mainland, where life has gone on, and the Donbas devastated by war. And they can do nothing except just wait and hope that they will survive being the crossfire.
On our first visit, the village was under mortar fire and the army officers with us said the enemy noticed us and set their sights accordingly. Shells fell precisely at the places where the locals came to take food from our cars, 10 minutes after we had moved closer to the four-story building. What surprised us most was the reaction of people of Pisky. We were standing in helmets and bulletproof jackets and they had none, but showed no panic. They just listened to the explosions, crossed themselves and said: “God, when will this war be over?”
We swiftly departed during a break in the gunfire to avoid getting caught in Pisky once the sun set. During the second trip, we heard only a few explosions, far from us.
It was much more tense in another village close to the airport, Opytne, to which we had supplies to deliver. We came under artillery fire as we made our way to Zarechna Street, at the very edge of the village, where only about 30 people live at the moment. Not even soldiers go there because it’s in the line of fire.
We heard a deafening boom as we passed by a large ruined barn.
“That was close – about 20 meters. Those bastards are sharp,” commented one of our accompanying officers. We didn’t get as much as a scratch because the shell fell into the ruined barn. We finally got to Zarechna and wasted no time in distributing food and medicine to the locals.
Neonila Radytenko, 70, showed us a hole in her yard where a mortar shell killed her dog months ago. She and her husband Vasyl, 74, were inside at the time. Their two sons abandoned Opytne in the summer, one settling in separatist-controlled Donetsk and the other in the embattled factory town of Avdiyivka, which is under Ukrainian control but nevertheless under artillery fire.
Neither is willing to risk his life to take their parents out of this hell, Ms. Radytenko tells us, starting to cry. Even if they wanted to, she said, they can’t leave because of the roadblocks. They live off the vegetables grown in their garden and food from the soldiers.
“We have nothing, only bullets whistling by everywhere,” she said. She and her neighbors rarely see bread. A grocer from Avdiyivka sometimes brings food to Opytne, but the prices are too high.
One neighbor, 74-year-old Oleksandr, thanked us for the supplies, but urged us not to risk our lives.
An apartment in Pisky ruined by shelling.
“You better not come here next time. We will survive,” he said, alluding to his homegrown vegetables. He is pro-Russian, as are many others here, whose only source of information is the falsehoods and hatred spread by the Russian television news.
They don’t see Ukrainian TV because the main tower is situated in Donetsk and the separatists are jamming signals. The extent of how Russian propaganda poisons people’s minds was noticeable just by traveling from Pisky to Opytne.
The former haven’t seen Russian news for months and, though they have no love for Ukraine, they aren’t hostile either. The folks of Opytne differ, believing Russian news like the Gospels and repeating its propaganda word-by-word.
Oleksandr said he loves Russia and cannot explain why. He misses the Soviet past and rejects any notion of a Ukrainian state.
As we were talked, explosions came closer and closer. Our officers said that a gunner in the village noticed our arrival and tried to help the separatists target our cars for annihilation.
A crowd had gathered in the village center by the time we returned, most of them standing in a queue, taking food and silently disappearing.
Yet a woman in her 40s saw our video and photo cameras and angrily shouted, “Stop shooting or I will break your camera! You’d be better if you stayed with us. We have been under attack since May.” Opytne was safe until the Ukrainian soldiers arrived, she went on. The separatists have had to fire only because of retaliation for Ukrainian attacks.
“Before you came here, nobody attacked us. Get away from our land,” she told Lt. Col. Oleksandr Gvozdkov, who escorted us.
He got irritated and returned the hostility. “You are telling me, a Ukrainian soldier who risks his life every day protecting his country, to go away?” he said. “If you hate us, then why do you take food from us?” The woman turned around and left.
Some in the crowd said that they feel sorry for the Ukrainian soldiers dying at Donetsk Airport.
As the explosions got closer, we took cover behind an empty bus. For all we knew, the shooter could have been among those who had just taken food from our car. We decided we had to leave.
It was the fourth trip overall for Wings of Generosity and Care, which has delivered more than 15 tons of food and 850 gifts of sweets to the most vulnerable residents of the towns and villages freed by the Ukrainian army.
Its organizers draw their support from donations made by France, Great Britain, Germany, the U.S., New Zealand and Kazakhstan, among other countries.
Maia Mikhaluk, a coordinator, said she is willing to help even those who are hostile, even praying for them, all the while not knowing whether they will ever change their attitude towards Ukraine and its people.
“But I do believe it’s possible” she said. “We need to provide support and show that we do care and will not leave them.”