Traveling Through My Russian-Occupied Homeland
The place that has given me so many joyful moments, is nothing like it used to be.
In the spring of 2021, my grandmother died of coronavirus disease. She was still very young.
She spent her whole life in Yasenivskyj, a small town between Antratsyt and Rovenky. My 12 years of childhood there were full of many vivid memories. I loved eating my grandmother’s jam, walking along the river, and enjoying long summer evenings.
Since 2014, Yasenivskyi has been a territory occupied by Russia. To get there, you must have a passport of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic or a permit from the local pseudo-Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
However, there was no need for this because my closest relatives and I moved to Kyiv, and we kept in touch with others online. But when my grandmother died, we were to organize her funeral and pay our last respects.
It turned out that the permit to enter the occupied territories required two weeks to be issued. We could not wait for so long. So we got together, went to Stanytsia Luhanska, and decided to improvise on the ground.
The Stanytsia Luhanska checkpoint is the only place where you can get from Ukraine to the Russian occupied territory of Luhanshchyna, the easternmost province of Ukraine. This territory is often in the news. It was this village’s kindergarten that was shelled by Russian artillery a few days before the start of the latest massive offensive.
We had to go through the Ukrainian checkpoint, then the bridge over the Siverskyi Donets river, and then the checkpoint of the occupiers.
At the Ukrainian checkpoint, everything was fairly civilized, just like everywhere else in Ukraine. I remember modern vehicles of the OSCE mission, a Red Cross relief point, and a separate building for quick document verification. I knew from the news that Ukraine improved the infrastructure of this checkpoint regularly.
After passing the test, we walked the wide asphalt road to the bridge, which Ukraine had just restored. It was decorated with a torn, dirty flag of either the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic or the Russian Federation.
This symbol gave me the first strong impression that I was crossing not the Siverskyi Donets but the Styx, and at the other end, there was only death and emptiness.
Chaos began at the other end of the bridge. An unorganized queue waited for the local Cerberuses, representatives of the occupiers who had the Caucasian appearance and military uniforms, to check on them. One of them rummaged through my things, took my phone, and looked through it for half an hour.
In the end, the occupiers let us through. They didn’t seem interested in the documents.
After we buried my grandmother, I traveled a bit through my homeland. I saw Yasenivsky’s mounds, on which my grandfather, the deputy head of security at the local Vakhrushev mine, worked. I found a house built and left by my father and school №17, where I studied in Luhansk for a year and a half.
All of these places were painfully familiar to my heart, but now they seemed stuck in the past. Like the imprints of their best days, they still stood their ground but lost their souls.
Poor locals who hadn’t been very emotional before–maybe because of a lack of culture or of the hard work in the local mines–didn’t smile at all now.
We could not come here by car, because you need to have a local passport for that. Therefore, when it was time to return, we took away the only things that still made sense, the items that held the most of our memories. It was a suitcase with photos and a sewing machine, which my grandmother and mother loved so much.
Returning with them to the checkpoint was felt like getting out of the concentration camp. Before getting checked and passing the test again, I looked back at it realising that this place is no longer my home and probably, will never be again. But I hope that we’ll be able to come back here and see it being de-occupied from the barbaric hands of the Russian Federation.
When I found myself in Kyiv again, my friend and I organized an online meeting with my classmates. We all studied in Luhansk at the Lyceum of Foreign Languages. It was one of the best Ukrainian schools at that time, so it was not surprising that later most of us moved to different parts of the world — Munich, Beijin, Shenzhen, Abu Dhabi, Philadelphia.
We hadn’t kept in touch with each other for a long time, but we still couldn’t hold back tears as we reminisced about our native lands, distant and missed so much.
And while this new phase of the war brings infinite destruction, death, and heartache, it also miraculously restores hope.
The hope that my father will still have time to see his home again and maybe even live there for a couple of warm months each summer.
The hope that my mother and I will again travel to the places where we were so happy and carefree once.
The hope for the future for those lands and for the smiles on the faces of their people.
