Memories
Was I ready to kill him? Yes. The automatic rifle hung on his shoulder too carelessly, as if a weapon. It would take me seven seconds to grab it and shoot it. He stood in our office, as if at home, as if we had come to him, and not the other way around. He had a surprisingly unnaturally grey beard and plump lips. I never personally communicated with him, but I knew: that person was playing a familiar scenario for the second time. Only now it was all happening, not on the news, and not in Donbas, but in my Zaporizhzhia Region, in my city of Vasylivka. In our city council, here and now, in our office. He was waiting for a Russian-language script from us for the May 9 festivities. While the whole world honours the memory of those who died in the Second World War, he was used to celebrating that day on a grand scale. He needed children who would recite poems in Russian and sing Russian songs. I’d like to disappear, to evaporate, not to see this person. How did I end up here? I close my eyes.
Memory 1: windows
February 24. The twenty-sixth session of the Vasylivka City Council. The city hall, third floor, wide, spacious windows. Physically I am in the room: I have a camera in my hands and a phone in my pocket with the recorder turned on. I can’t take my eyes off the long line at the Privatbank ATM. Panicky people try to withdraw as much cash as possible.
I went to my aunt’s after work. She decided to pack the most critical items into her suitcase just in case. My cousin and I sat in the kitchen, updated the news, looked out the window to take a good look at the military vehicles. Two hours later, I found out that my uncle lost a leg and was in intensive care. He and his colleagues were driving trucks in a convoy that was on the move somewhere in the Nova Kakhovka area. A helicopter with Russian markings fired at three unmarked trucks. Empty trucks. Three hours later, I found out that my aunt and my cousin evacuated, after all. In tears and despair—that’s how my war began on the evening of the 24th.
Memory 2: sounds
The first artillery shelling of the village. In the basement there is a musty smell of dampness, which I had noticed every time when I’d taken canned jars over there. I didn’t think that this smell would bother me so much. But I have allergies. I blow my nose all the time. This really annoys my brother. After a few hours it got very cold in the basement. My prolonged sitting in one position caused body cramps. Dad brought down a bottle of mulled wine that my aunt had brought from Poland. My parents didn’t open it—they kept it in a bar, saving it for a special occasion. It was supposed to be drunk hot, of course. After a small glass of the cold drink I started to warm up. I never thought that I would see my parents convincing my fourteen-year-old brother to drink alcohol. Dad brought down some blankets and foil insulation. He found an old vacuum cleaner and started building a heating furnace. During several minute intervals between the shelling, my brother came out of the basement and gathered wood chips near the firewood shack. We started to use the furnace a day after the power was cut. At first, we couldn’t breathe, because of the carbon monoxide, as Dad’s product had a far from perfect ventilation system. But day by day the heating furnace got modernised.
Every now and then, Dad turned on the generator to save fuel. We heated the kettle and washed ourselves in “a spoonful of water”, as my grandmother used to say. Mom baked cookies (also called pyshkas). That made up for the lack of bread. I will never eat cookies again in my life.
In a few days, the shelling got more intense. Dad covered the top of the basement that looked like a small hill on level ground, with iron sheets—I thought that our basement, half a S-300 missile deep, was the safest place in the world. That evening, we heard automatic rifle fire on the Kharkiv–Simferopol highway for the first time. We sat quietly and listened. The sounds were different from those we were used to hearing—it was a new symphony for the ears. I didn’t know if it was possible to root for someone in this situation. A bullet’s lethal range is approximately 1500 meters. We lived 450 meters away from the road. Late at night, when many minutes had passed since the last shot, we left the basement. I froze before entering the house: a military vehicle was on the road with its headlights on. Black specks were visible next to it and along the section of the road that was visible from my yard. Those were the bodies of dead soldiers that were taken away two days later. My temples were throbbing, as if my head were a kettle that had boiled. I didn’t allow myself to cry, because I didn’t know which side those dead soldiers belonged to.
A few days later, Serhii Anatoliyovych called me: “It’s dangerous to stay in the village. You either go to the occupied Vasylivka, or to Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia.” That’s how the riskiest fifty-four days of my life began.
Memory 3: office
Volunteers brought parcels. Sashko was the name of the person in charge of their operations. They went to Zaporizhzhia, where relatives, friends and simply caring people gave them medicines, house cleaning products, fast food, and less frequently, money, Ukrainian mobile SIM cards for address deliveries to our community members. We have sunk so much into deficiency of everything that old people started reminiscing about the Soviet Union times. At that time, when the Russian military allowed volunteers to travel with Ukrainian goods to the occupied territory, our office looked like a Nova Poshta branch (a Ukrainian postal and courier company). About a thousand parcels passed through my hands, with some of them ripped up and plundered at enemy checkpoints, even the ones with the inscription “Urgent! Insulin for Masha”.
We always had a woman with us at city hall who helped with parcels. Olia (that was her name) communicated perfectly in Russian and didn’t have the “g”, so characteristic of the Ukrainian accent. She often left the office when the Russian military entered the building and wandered through the corridors. The rest of us, on the contrary, sat still. She often went to the management office where there was no one except the Russian military. She explained her behaviour by wanting to get her mug from the office. I saw her weird smile and the way she behaved around the Russian invaders. As one of the administrators of the administrative services centre, a huge database was on her computer screen all this while. I didn’t understand why she was worried about the damn mug and not about the information she didn’t bother to delete. A few months later, she started working for the enemy.
Serhii Anatoliyovych, the mayor of the already occupied municipality, entered the office. Once a handsome man in formal suits, he was now hunched over, wearing two jackets, with a phone in his hand. All the time I worked under occupation, I never saw him without a phone. His face was disfigured by wrinkles that I hadn’t noticed before. I don’t know how many hours a day he slept—his eyes weren’t just tired, they looked right through you. Risking his own life and health, he negotiated with the Russian military commandant, convincing him of the need for the so-called “green corridor”. My mission in this large-scale process was photo and video recording of the evacuation process. We had to show other occupied territories that it was possible to evacuate through our city. Videos spread on social networks. “Nastia, come. They are allowing people to evacuate.”
I left the town hall. I was a kind of signal for those who regularly evacuated people to Zaporizhzhia in their own cars. They knew that I would only come out when there was a hundred percent confirmation that people were allowed to leave. I was afraid to go out without a reason or unaccompanied. Serhii Anatoliyovych got on the buses, calmed people down, and said a few parting words. The woman sitting in front was not just crying—she was sobbing. Her gaze was unfocused, she looked at the church, then at the confused child next to her. She was saying something, but all one can figure out from that crying is that she didn’t want to leave her home, and she demanded the mayor to promise that she will return soon. Embraces. I put my phone down, I couldn’t take a picture like that. I was crying. Nobody ever said parting words to the bus drivers, but I saw those handshakes and hugs. As if for the last time. Everyone who came to see the evacuation convoy off and pray for them understood where the bus was going.
The first obstacle was the enemy checkpoints, where the soldiers toughened their routine every day. The road was the second one. Talk of a “green corridor” didn’t always mean a “safe corridor”. No one wanted to risk people’s lives, but the Russians’ words “we won’t shoot” were the only hope for evacuees willing to leave. What should a driver do when, halfway to the drop-off point, the shelling begins? What should the people on the bus do? There is no manual for that. Obstacle number three was the drop-off point. Buses headed to the village of Kamianske. There was a bridge that had been blown up. There was no more road. People got off the buses, crossed the river on stones, and headed to where the volunteers were waiting for them, to take them to Zaporizhzhia. One hundred meters to be walked in the village, where artillery shelling doesn’t stop for a second. One hundred metres of trail: not a step to the left or to the right. Everything around was laid with mines. It often happened that people would walk or crawl for hours to traverse those crucial hundred meters. I don’t know what thoughts they had when they reached the volunteers’ vehicles that always had a white cloth on them.
Memory 4: colours
The Vasylivka city hall has always flown three flags: the EU, the Ukrainian and the raspberry-red flag that was, actually, the flag of the Vasylivka Region. The administration building was located five hundred metres from city hall. The flag the Russians put up was the exact same flag that the USSR troops once raised over the Reichstag in 1945. Armoured personnel carriers with Russian flags were parked near the entrance. That’s how our main city square lived for fifty-two days: Ukrainian, EU, Vasylivka, Russian and Soviet flags. It so happened that we had to constantly be in contact with the enemy personnel, in order to support the community and not leave people to the mercy of fate. One day, one of the important figures of the occupation authorities aggressively asked Serhii Anatoliyovych about the EU flag on the city hall. To this day, we remember the mayor’s clever answer: “Our city is a unique case in the history of modern Ukraine. The country didn’t become a member of the EU, but our city did. I photograph this flag every day and send the EU a report, do you understand?” He seemed to have understood. The flag wasn’t touched for another two weeks.
Memory 5: daily routine
A nucleus is the central part of an atom. It holds the particles together. If the nucleus is overloaded with energy or suffers negative influence of external factors, it becomes unstable and can cause destruction. Serhii Anatoliyovych Kaliman was the nucleus or the core of our work during the occupation. The man who vowed to be with people, as much as his own health and Russian military with guns would allow. He tested their patience and his fate.
“Put your hair in a bun and wear your hoods tightly when you go to the city hall”—was the beginning of the office meeting. Each day at city hall started with an office meeting, announcing the action plan until the evening, and recording a video message for the community residents. Those videos pursued several goals: to support people who were intimidated to death and to show that the team was there and working. Usually, the video contained words of gratitude to the city hall, the parliament members and the volunteers who worked twenty-four seven. The issue of electricity, gas, and water supply was always raised. Due to non-stop shelling, several villages in the region were always without electricity. The videos mentioned the possibility of signing up for evacuation by school buses and joining the general convoy with your own car. Serhii Anatoliyovych gave an update on the shelling impact: how many facilities had been damaged and destroyed, the number of wounded and killed. Every time he reminded the audience about information hygiene and the importance of trusting only official sources. The videos always ended with the words “Take care, let’s stay strong, see you later.”
Videos showing the evacuation, with the caption “it was a success today”, spread on the social networks, and people from the south and east of Ukraine began to join our convoys. As cars and buses were added to the convoys, the waiting time at checkpoints got longer. We accommodated and warmed people who fled in slippers and light jackets in our kindergartens, schools and the lyceum, all of which were converted into temporary accommodation places. We used 100% of our humanitarian supplies to meet the needs of those people. That decision was made after shops had partially reopened, were stocked with essential goods and were able to accept payments by credit cards. We provided local residents with the opportunity to purchase the essentials, and we used all our resources for helping those who spent the nights in cars and our “invincibility centres” or temporary shelters.
The situation worsened when chaos got into people’s heads. There were moments when no one wanted to understand that humanitarian aid tends to end, that the mayor can’t influence the frequency of shelling and amount of destruction, that the Russian military won’t leave the city. Serhii Anatoliyovych emptied his own farm’s warehouses in his native village nearby, in order to provide people with at least some vegetables. A few thanked him for his care, the majority were unhappy that they got only half of the cabbage. We explained that if it were not for such a division, there wouldn’t be enough for everyone. I felt exhausted.
A dangerous critical point was reached when the city hall employees started chatting about rumours of the shooting of the mayor, the pressure from the Russian authorities increased, and their military’s visits became more frequent. I knew little, which was a blessing at the time. The less you knew, the less interesting you were to the Russian authorities. That’s why, posing for another photo with Serhii Anatoliyovych with city hall and the Ukrainian flag in the background, I didn’t know that it was our last one. Thank God he managed to leave, because by April 25, the Russian flag was already flying over city hall and a new administration was in charge.
The new government of the temporarily occupied Vasylivka community adored provocations. But more than that, it seemed to me, they loved not to think them through. All their provocations were immediately debunked. While the new authorities were posting on their Telegram online channel that the morning shelling was carried out by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, some locals would already be standing at the crater and seeing the opposite. Any person, even without strong analytical skills, could figure out that if an artillery shell flew from one side, it would land slightly slanted, tearing up the ground/asphalt on the opposite side. Sometimes we heard the release of a projectile, counted four to five seconds, and something would be hit in the city. The Russian authorities’ attempts to convince the locals that the city was shelled by the Ukrainian military failed.
The administrator of the Telegram channel with the largest number of subscribers made his position known on Easter. The man urged everyone not to be afraid, gave out the time and the three different locations for the Easter bread blessing, with the caption “The Pantsyr-S1 and S-400 ‘Triumph’ Russian air defence systems will be protecting us.” At the first announced location there was only the man who covered the event on his Telegram channel and the military. Even the priest didn’t come to the second advertised location—the school, where the believers gathered, was shelled. The Telegram channel administrator published the post with the subject line “New shelling by the Armed Forces of Ukraine”.
Thoughts are different when you are desperate. My despair began on the day the flag was changed on city hall, when our work stopped and when I realised that from then on I was helpless. I couldn’t be useful when I was at home, I didn’t have a possibility to help others alone. That’s when my acquaintance with the “ye vorog” (which stands for “there’s Enemy” in Ukrainian), a chat service launched by the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, began. In this Telegram service, Ukrainians could report the Russian military equipment and personnel positions. My first contribution was uploading a photo and a brief description of events in the city of Vasylivka. After processing the information, the operators called me. After seven days of non-stop phone conversations with various personnel, the operator Mykhailo began to correspond with me on Telegram on a regular basis. “Yesterday, there were about ten white cars of the Russian Ministry of Emergencies in downtown Vasylivka, the curfew was conditionally extended (it wasn’t announced anywhere). All those who came early to the market or the shops were dispersed. Shops were banned from trading yesterday. Today was “business as usual” was one of the messages I sent. On May 25, Mykhailo told me about the movement of an armoured train from the city of Melitopol to the city of Vasylivka, with many tanks on platforms and ammunitions in train cars. My mission was to observe the movement of the train at least until it arrived in Vasylivka. Ideally, count the tanks and other equipment. For safety reasons, I never went out without my mom or dad. That evening, I had a hard time coming up with an excuse why I wanted to go to the playground by myself. But it was all in vain—the armoured train never showed up, neither that day, nor later.
Maxim is my fiancé. He is a military medic and gunner, and has been defending the country in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces since 2019. It became extremely difficult to get in touch with him after the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. On May 30, I had a video call with him. The video quality started to deteriorate, I turned it off to call again. At 15:35, the mobile connection and the internet went down in the city of Vasylivka. For the first two days, we lived in hope that the connection would be restored. On the third, the occupiers started distributing newspapers with Russian propaganda in the city.
After several attempts by the “ground breakers” to find a network signal at least somewhere, rumours began to spread around the city that the best spot was near the church. Ironical. During the war, the church reached the peak of its popularity—first it served as a gathering point for people who were evacuating, now it was a place where you’d get two Vodafone bars on your phone.
We went to that church like it was our workplace: every morning. It was the only way to call relatives and read the news. Next to the church was a park, which had been being reconstructed since 2021. There was a high fence around the excavated pit. After a month of regular visits to the church, the pit began to smell very badly. Over time, under the scorching sun, the stench became unbearable. Suspicions about the dead dog in the pit were not convincing—it seemed that there were people there. A strong, thick smell that tests your endurance—that’s what death smells like. It seemed to me that the Russian military were simply dumping their dead comrades, brought from the “grey zone,” there, but that was just guesswork.
After the attempts at catching a mobile signal and maybe five minutes on the phone if we were lucky, we would go to the market place. The occupation set us back decades. Obsessively, we grabbed at any opportunity to withdraw cash, because everyone understood—the longer we were in occupation, the fewer Hryvnias remained in circulation. The market reached its zenith in the first months of the occupation: open-air trade was not in demand in Vasylivka, where the infrastructure was well developed, but the Russian troops’ invasion affected absolutely all the aspects of life. The choice of goods wasn’t wide. Thanks to God and the brave people who had gone shopping in other cities, we were able to buy basic necessities. Prices were determined by several factors: how much fuel the seller used, how many roadblocks he crossed, and how well the product was preserved after hours of waiting for the pass at the roadblocks. Russian soldiers were always among the buyers. Crowds of people hustling, children looking for something colourful on the counters, sellers quickly packing your order and faceless men in military uniforms with assault rifles. Why faceless? I was always afraid to meet their eyes, so I cast a quick side-glance.
Every day you would meet a person with complaints about the Russian military’s inappropriate behaviour. No one had ever claimed what the reason for that was: alcohol, drugs or just an unstable psyche. Once, my mom and I were standing in line for vegetables. Two military men were standing nearby. They looked away and laughed. The reason for the laughter was their elderly friend with an automatic rifle. The man frightened those around him and caused them to raise their eyebrows with his behaviour: he mumbled some melody, waved his hands sharply and inconsistently, his legs were swaying and he was salivating. He came up to me and started talking about the sequins on my sweatpants. We never bought vegetables that day.
On another occasion, I once again happened to meet the invaders who appeared to be on some psychotropic drugs. This second time was in the park. My mom was able to get a signal of the mobile network Kyivstar under the fir tree, I got two Vodafone bars and tried to download a book onto my phone, and my dad was just waiting for us. Two Chechens in Russian military uniforms were passing by. One of them looked at dad and started shouting loudly “Hello, father, was it you who bombed Mariupol?” They stopped. We didn’t know how to react to that, so we smiled nervously. They liked our reaction and moved on. There was a children’s playground a little further. There the Chechens beat a rhythm with their feet, tried to do push-ups and went on a swing.
There were so many Russian troops in the city in general, that the ratio of civilians to soldiers seemed to be one to three. They were frequent “guests” on our street, because a member of the local Ukrainian government authorities lived next to us. This person was an elderly person with a wealth of experience, his own business, and influence and authority among the locals. I don’t know how the invaders tried to persuade him to cooperate, and he didn’t want to share it. I just saw their cars near his yard both at night and during the day. His wife said at the end of another visit one of the soldiers said: “Don’t hope in vain. We really liked your city, but if we retreat, we will burn everything here.” Our neighbour currently has no business, because the Russian authorities took away everything he had built up over the years, due to his disobedience. He has great hopes to see the Ukrainian flag in his native Vasylivka again.
Gradually, Russian soldiers started to take off their military uniforms and change into civilian clothes. I learned about these developments in a newly opened grocery store. My mom was talking to a friend about another bombing of a village near Vasylivka. A man dressed in a black jean jacket, a cap and blue pants intervened in the conversation with the question “Whose plane was it?” The Russian language had always been a common thing in our city. Some people communicated in Russian before the invasion, so when I heard that remark about “whose plane”, I took a deep breath and was about to answer. But I caught the shop lady’s eye. She looked at me with her eyes wide open and tried to signal something with her gaze. I kept silence. And that man went away. The shop lady whispered that it was a Russian soldier. It was good I stopped in time. Who knows what my careless remark would have cost me?
Memory 6: checkpoint
During the five months under occupation, I reassured myself and my family with the phrase “we’ll be liberated soon”. But I didn’t want to wait in vain. I found a young man who was delivering cars from the occupied territory to their owners in Ukrainian controlled regions. I made arrangements to go with him. Before the trip, I deleted all social media and messengers from my phone. At the end of July 2022, I left the occupied Vasylivka for the Ukraine-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia. Without make-up, in sweatpants, I hid my jewellery in my sneakers. The last Russian checkpoint. The last Russian in my memories. A lustful look and an ironic smile.
“Why are you leaving?”, he asked, looking closely at my passport.
“I need to settle some things, related to my studying at the university”, I answered calmly, looking into his eyes.
“And then you’ll come back?”
“And then I’ll come back”, I lied.
“What’s your major?”
Under stress, my blond head doesn’t operate as fast as I would like it to, so I honestly answered:
“Journalism.”
The expression on his face changed instantly, his gaze changed from hungry to hostile, hateful, the smile disappeared, and his muscles tensed up. He asked for my phone and started rummaging everywhere he could. He gave it back after a ten-minute check. The photo gallery, my contacts, the Google browser and even the calendar windows were open. He asked if I had a boyfriend and licked his lips. I answered that I did.
“And where is he?”
Where the war began in 2014, in the trenches of the Donetsk Region. Covered in sweat and blood, he’s been fighting to take every piece of our land back from the enemy who came to us with weapons in their hands. Where he takes the remains of his dead brothers and drives them in the vehicle with an eye-popping stench to the place of transfer of the dead. Where on February 24, 2022 the earth never stopped shaking and he called me to say goodbye. Remembering the first days of the full-scale invasion, he said that he was 100% sure that they wouldn’t survive, “We wanted to hold out for at least a day so that it wouldn’t be so embarrassing.” He is there so that we can live freely, with the right to vote. So that people under occupation have hope for liberation. I would like to give him that answer, but the self-preservation instinct kicked in.
“He is in Poland, for seasonal labour, building residential and office buildings.”
He nodded, and we drove on in a five-kilometre long line of cars. Passing the Ukrainian checkpoint, I started to cry. After five months of seeing Russian soldiers with machine guns, it was impossible to hold back tears when you saw your own. Those who checked your IDs and calmed you down, gave sweets to crying children. That was my first, in five months, slogan “Glory to Ukraine,” that I shouted so loudly.
Before the full-scale invasion, a trip from Vasylivka to Zaporizhzhia usually took a maximum of forty minutes. That day it took me eight hours. The Russian checkpoints and the ID check right before the entrance to Zaporizhzhia took the most time.
The Vasylivka City Council works from Zaporizhzhia now, gathering around it our community residents, most of whom also left for Zaporizhzhia. We arranged for them to get education in Zaporizhzhia and set up a coordination and humanitarian aid hub, to provide assistance to internally displaced persons from our community. We allocate funds to finance the needs of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Territorial Defence Forces. We are writing grant applications to receive funding for rebuilding our community after de-occupation. We work for Victory here and now.
