Rockets Over Donbass
The elderly of eastern Ukraine have survived war and famine. Now violence has returned, bringing a hardship that many thought had vanished with their childhoods.
Words Alex Hacillo
Illustration Paul Willoughby
Photography Chris Nunn
Alexandra Nikitishna remembers the last war, when the Nazis rolled through eastern Ukraine, pushing onwards to Stalingrad. The Germans went from town to town, rounding up the partisans who would periodically creep from the forests to hit the rail lines. Alexandra was a small girl when the Wehrmacht lined up the entire population in the middle of her village. The village chief co-operated and named names, pointing the finger at a group of strangers, there to trade food and basic goods. The Germans took them and shot them. For harbouring the partisans, the chief was strung up, and the entire population — men, women and children — paraded past his hanging body.
Now Nikitishna has lived through a second war, one that hasn’t matched the first in apocalyptic brutality, but has taken a heavy toll on the ageing population of eastern Ukraine.
The Donbass is coal mining country, the ruins of deindustrialisation often more visible than war damage. But what damage there is is subtle and jarring: against the backdrop of crumbling Soviet factories are villages and towns left deserted, razed to the ground by shelling. Elsewhere are the occasional tell-tale signs of conflict: tank tracks cut into the road, bullet holes in shop fronts, trees charred and stripped of branches by artillery fire.
People like Nikitishna thought the days of tanks rolling through Shchastya and Tr’okhizbenka were over, the days of blocking up windows to protect from artillery re, of groups of young men with assault rifles patrolling the countryside. The collapse of civil order was rapid and unexpected. After the Maidan revolution in 2014, separatist groups demanding autonomy rose up and armed themselves. The Ukrainian army pushed back.
Alexandra Onuhina is 67 and lives in Tr’okhizbenka, a village sitting on the banks of the Donets river. It lies in government territory, but the separatist-held Luhansk People’s Republic is visible just across the river. In the summer of 2014, Ukrainian troops set up a major checkpoint on the river. Grad rockets and mortar shells began to arch over from separatist territory, hitting residential districts.
After living the Soviet proletarian dream — building a house and working on the local sovkhoz (state-owned farm) — Onuhina settled down to a well-earned retirement. But then the fighting and bombardment began, something she calls the “sheer horror”. Over the winter of 2014, shells and rockets began to break the silence in Tr’okhizbenka as the village became the setting for some of the most intense fighting in the Donbass.
Onuhina and her husband were forced to take shelter below ground. “We spent a month in the basement of my son’s house, without light, without anything. I don’t know how we managed to get through it. When we were sitting down there, we could feel the earth trembling.”
Artillery creates terror, and an intense feeling of vulnerability. You don’t know where the shells will land. You don’t know where you can hide. You can only wait and pray that the next rocket isn’t meant for you. Onuhina started going to church more — almost every day — to pray for peace. Over that winter, death became routine. Onuhina would leave church in the morning and discover corpses. She remembers finding the body of a child, killed by artillery re, lying in the street.
“Over that winter, death became routine. Alexandra would leave church in the morning and discover corpses. She remembers finding the body of a child, killed by artillery fire, lying in the street.”
This generation isn’t fragile. Those over 65 in eastern Ukraine, particularly those who saw the last war, are a tough breed. Many of them know real hunger and have always worked long hours in demanding physical jobs. But they are vulnerable in times of conflict. Those who can leave the area often do — the UN estimated that over one million people had been displaced from eastern Ukraine by March 2015, and around 60% of those were pensioners. Older people are often far less mobile, and unable to escape conflict zones. Unless they are relatively well off or have family able to take care of them elsewhere, they have few options but to stay in their villages. Aside from the logistical difficulties, many find the idea of leaving hard to swallow. It is a difficult psychological step to leave self-built homes and villages where parents and grandparents were born and buried. Huge numbers cannot or will not leave.
Lyudmila Stepanovna is one of them. “I cannot leave this place, my house,” she says. “Four generations worked to have what we had before the war. It’s just impossible for me to leave it as it is now: destroyed, devastated.”
The fighting has eased. A fragile ceasefire signed in February 2015 has held despite frequent infractions and skirmishes between separatist forces and the Ukrainian army. The fear of shelling isn’t so pronounced, although sporadic bursts of gunfire, or the rumble of artillery, can sometimes be heard in the distance. The problems faced by the rural elderly remain.
“The geopolitical complexities of the conflict seem to melt away in the face of the human cost. Few of the elderly seem to buy into the war as a cosmic clash of civilizations.”
For Onuhina, the situation has improved. Electricity has been returned to her home, and locals help them out with firewood to last through the Donbass’s bitter winters. Although the shells no longer burst in the village, trauma lingers: she still trembles at sudden, loud noises. Aid agencies are doing vital on-the-ground work but are unable to provide the necessary care for all of the rural elderly, or even access those beyond the border in separatist territory.
The state has been good at ensuring that pensions come through, but with prices high, many struggle to afford essential medicines. For those with chronic medical conditions, like Onuhina and her husband, the cost of drugs eats into their income. Savings have been exhausted, and there is a sense that lives built over generations have been wiped out by this sudden conflict.
But there is resilience. In this hardy generation, hopelessness so often gives way to a spirit of defiance. Rosa Trofimovna is 76. After the Second World War, famine once again came to the Donbass, but she managed to survive by eating wild grasses. Now she prides herself on her resourcefulness, on being quick on her toes. “I have days when I feel that I have no energy to keep living,” she says. “But I just say to myself, ‘Why are you drooping? Look, your garden is waiting for you’. And I just go to work in the garden and feel that I have no time to droop anymore.”
Others have found their own ways of supporting one another locally. Stepanovna, who broke her wrist during the shelling, took to meeting with the other villagers every morning to check that no one had been wounded during the night. “We only managed to cope because of that sense of unity, and the decision to live against all the odds.
“When you’ve got everything you’ve ever needed and lose it in the glimpse of an eye, you come to realise that material things mean nothing against life itself.”
The geopolitical complexities of the conflict seem to melt away in the face of its human cost. Few of the elderly seem to buy into the war as a cosmic clash of civilisations. Many see the futility of the violence, violence that they thought had faded with their wartime childhoods, and pray for a resolution. More than anything, they just want to enjoy later life without being afraid, without being lonely, without worrying about medicines and medical care.
Nikitishna — forced to witness the hanging body of her village chief — asks God only for peace. “I feel pity for all of them — people from both sides. They all suffer and their mothers cry. How is this all possible?
“The main thing is that this war has to come to an end.”
Interviews and translation by Anna Sukhova.
What now?
Take action! Support HelpAge International and Médecins Sans Frontiéres
This article wouldn’t have been possible without the support of HelpAge International and Médecins Sans Frontières. Both charities are providing vital, on-the- ground support to the elderly in eastern Ukraine.
To explore the subject of ageing we teamed up with The Powerful Now, an IDEO + SYPartners initiative poised to creatively redefine ageing as a path of continual growth instead of decline. Together we wanted to explore the ways in which health, money, work and communities will exist in our future, and initiate discussions to find radical new solutions.
This article is taken from Weapons of Reason’s third issue: The New Old. Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
