Ukraine: How a frontline changed two towns

Sukha Kamianka

The name of Valentyna Nazaruk’s village means ‘dry river’. 

The small waterway that divides Sukha Kamianka in the Kharkiv Region of Ukraine doesn’t always flow. Valentyna blames the beavers.

“They constantly block the river with trees and branches, pile up mounds of earth,” she tells us. “They have whole lakes along the river. No one bothers them. You can’t complain to them. You can’t take them to court.” 

She is only partly joking. Water is an issue, but it’s not all the fault of beavers upstream.

The frontline of the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine passed through Valentyna’s village more than once in 2022. “My nerves are still not OK,” she says. “It was the scariest thing.”

The consequences of the conflict are stark. 

Valentyna lives without regular access to electricity, water or gas. Her house has been destroyed and rebuilt. For a livelihood, her daughter keeps bees to sell honey. They have a greenhouse but rely on rainwater for the crop. Their village was home to 80 people, now just four.

Surrounding fields are littered with unexploded ordnance.

Everything has changed. People live, so to speak, one day at a time.

Valentyna

Valentyna has lived in the area for more than 50 years. “Once upon a time, the household was large,” she tells us. “We had cows, calves, geese, turkeys, chickens and ducks. We had everything. We preserved food for the winter. We never went hungry. But there was a lot of work.” Everyone was lost or destroyed in the fighting. 

Now, it’s just Valentyna and her daughter, as well as their dog, Borka, and two black cats.

They have a well with no water. “For two months now,” Valentyna says. In the ruins of a house across the village, there is another well that still works. They pump water from it, using a wheelbarrow to transport it back home.

Availability of water from the river, also polluted by the fighting, depends on increasingly dry and unpredictable seasons – and the beavers. Open plastic containers line the entrance to their house, just in case it rains.

Valentyna has lived without regular access to electricity since 2022. Electricity poles and wires were destroyed in the fighting. She and her daughter make do with batteries, flashlights and solar panels. 

But batteries need to be replaced and are expensive, while solar panels can be difficult to maintain. Valentyna tells us they go to bed at 9pm and wake up when it’s light.

“At first, it was difficult without electricity, as we were used to having light and everything working. When it went out, we walked around in the dark with candles, but they left soot and the house was black,” she says. 

“That’s how we live, and I’ve gotten used to it. But we’re waiting for something better.”

Bomb disposal experts have combed through the area, finding unexploded shells and other ordnance. Many that hadn’t been found exploded during a wildfire last year. 

But most of the surrounding fields still haven’t been checked. “Nothing is sown or planted there,” says Valentyna. White ribbons line the roads outside her village, marking the fields as not safe.

She and her daughter hear drones fly overhead regularly. “They buzz and whir, but we are already used to them,” Valentyna says. “When I see them, I think: ‘I hope it falls somewhere in the field, not near people’.”

Sometimes, Valentyna considers leaving – but doesn’t think that she will.

“You know,” she says, “we are getting used to this.”

Dovhenke

Not far down the road from Sukha Kamianka is the village of Dovhenke. 

Before the escalation of armed conflict, it had three shops, a hospital, pharmacy, village council and a new club that had just been rebuilt. There was electricity, gas, water and internet. 

Then, in 2022, the frontline didn’t just pass over the village, “the village was a frontline,” says Nataliia Kniazieva.

“Everything was destroyed,” says Nataliia’s husband, Anatolii. “Now there is nothing”.

Nataliia and Anatolii live and work on a farm in Dovhenke that goes back generations in his family. Their son, Ihor, works with them.

In 2022, their house was flattened – not a wall left standing. Their farming equipment was destroyed. They were cut off from regular access to water, gas and electricity.

Everyone fled here. Cattle were walking around – herds, without any owners… Cows were even blown up by mines.

Anatolii

Anatolii had a herd of more than 50 sheep. He stayed to care for them, for as long as he could, living in the cellar of their ruined home.

“It was under the house,” he says. “When it rained, it leaked a little, and we put a basin under it to stop it from flowing.”

He lived in the cellar for months, waiting for breaks in the fighting to care for his sheep. He would run out to give them food or water when the shooting stopped, then run back to the cellar when it started again.

If shooting started while he was outside, “I would drop down beside a wall,” he says. None of his sheep remain.

Since the frontline moved on from Dovhenke, only a few dozen from the hundreds of people who used to live there have returned.

Anatolii and Ihor rebuilt their home from scratch. “From whatever we had,” Anatolii says. Empty ammunition boxes littered the area – and were turned into the walls of the new house.

They found an old stove and built a system of heating pipes using discarded artillery shell casings. Destroyed tanks provided wheels for new farming equipment. Craters mark the earth around their new home.

But farmers need the land to live and Ihor, seeking to clear the fields behind their house, narrowly avoided harm when the tractor he was riding set off an explosion. The tractor caught the worst of it. Not everyone is so lucky.

Dovhenke went without electricity from 2022 until last year, when new poles were installed. 

Before that, Nataliia and Anatolii were given a small solar panel, which they used to charge their phones. They were given a generator to run a concrete mixer. But they used it sparingly. “Fuel is expensive,” says Anatolii.

The other issue is water. Limited access to electricity made pumping water difficult. Nataliia and Anatolii dug a 14-meter-deep well that worked fine at first. “But this year, drought – no snow or rain,” Anatolii says.

They rely on wells at other sites in the town, or travel five kilometres to a pumping station, and sometimes receive bottled water.

To help with farming when water and unpredictable seasons pose a challenge, Nataliia and Anatolii were given a greenhouse and drip-irrigation system. “A greenhouse is good,” says Nataliia, “if only there was more water.”

Despite what has been lost, Nataliia and Anatolii are proud of what they have rebuilt.

With the help of the drip irrigation system, their greenhouse is overflowing with kiwis and avocadoes, tomatoes and cucumbers. They’ve already harvested cabbage, onion and garlic.

We overhear Ihor refer to his mum as the boss. “Yes,” Nataliia confirms. “I am the boss of the greenhouse. The garden is mine.”

In times like these, even the smallest possessions can mean the world.

The frontline is still just under 30 kilometres away.