24th July
Yesterday and today I pretty much spent organising photos and videos and trying to translate and edit the videos of the army chaplain who had been killed. I did go for a couple of walks for exercise and to clear my head. I walked literally to the other side of the tracks (across the railway station). I noticed it was a much poorer part of town. There seemed to be a lot more Roma here and there were also military men everywhere (mostly off duty I think). There was also row after row of military gear shops. You could deck out several armies here I reckon. I went into one shop to have a look and noticed that there were a few young foreign guys in there- British and American I think- buying military kit. I jumped on the train at 8pm and settled in for a bumpy night on a hard bed.
25 July Arrived in Kryvyi Rih in the South East of Ukraine at 6.20 am on the train and Irina was there to meet me. She’s so full of energy and love- we’ve never met but she hugged me like a long lost sister. She doesn’t speak English (‘only’ Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese!) so she brought with her one of the volunteers who also speaks English to translate. He is a lovely 23 year old lad called Andriy who got to go to the US when the war started to stay with friends and most of his family fled to Canada. But he had a realisation in the US that he ‘didn’t want to live like this, just living for myself’, so he headed back here and has volunteered to work with Irina serving the deoccupied villages.
She took us to her flat – well it’s not her flat really. It belongs to her friend who has gone to Poland. She has no house. She has been a missionary in China for eleven years and her life was over there . She came back for a visit and was in Ukraine when the war started. She had jumped straight in and started helping- she was telling me stories of helping villagers and taking aid to them even under rocket fire. And now she is needed and she knows that for now she can’t go back even though everything she owns is sitting there in China.
She has now started holiday programs for the village children that are coming back to the deoccupied villages as well as providing humanitarian aid and relationships. The children now ask her to promise that she won’t leave….
After the Russians blew up the Khakhovka dam which supplied most of the water in this area- the needs shifted from food to water.
Even in the city in her flat she only has water two hrs a day now and she has to buy water to drink.
Before dropping me to my hotel she made me coffee and some breakfast. As we sat in her kitchen the air raid sirens went off. I looked to see what they would do. They just smiled and said that if they ran to shelter at every siren they’d have no life! Andriy said he sees it as being ‘like a lottery’… ( except instead of a million dollars you can get annihilated by a Russian missile.
I started hearing some ‘pfft pfft’ and Andriy says to me – “hear that? Shaheds! That’s air defence working.” In other words their air defence had just shot down Iranian made Shahed attack drones that had been sent in by the Russians.
The sounds stopped fairly quickly and I was dropped off to my hotel where they were going to meet me later for lunch.
We went out for lunch with her pastor, Oleg, who also does village visits with her delivering humanitarian aid and comfort. We ended up talking and interviewing for 8 hours.
The perception they had was that a lot of International NGOs just drop aid and leave. They are grateful for this aid but what they’ve seen is how important it is to come back and be there for the people.
When I told Irina about the army chaplain who’d died- she looked like she wanted to cry but she didn’t. She said ‘there is too much pain , there are no tears left to cry. If we cry now we’ll implode. Crying will come later- when this war is finished.”
Many of the young men of her church have gone to the front and two of the pastors have gone as army chaplains, risking their lives to minister to the soldiers physically and spiritually. Oleg’s wife is also an army chaplain who goes to the front- he calls her ‘my hero!’
We had lots of interesting discussions. The pastor told me that his father was ‘Russian’ – or more correctly from an ethnic group indigenous to Siberia that had been colonised by Russia. And that being in a Russian speaking area he had spoken Russian all of his 53 years. But that with this Russian invasion, something inside him changed, and that he can no longer stomach speaking Russian- and he has switched to Ukrainian for the last year and a half. I have met so many people like this. Lots and lots of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who are now determined to only speak Ukrainian.
I’ve also found more than one person who has made it clear that most Ukrainians view being Ukrainian as being about your soul and love for your country, not your ethnicity or ‘race’.
On settling into my room I noticed that the hotel has a big list of safety procedures including what do under bombing and what to do in a nuclear radiation emergency. That reminded me how relatively close to the Zaphorizia nuclear power plant we are here. Air raid sirens went off again last night.
26/7
Another gut-wrenching day in Ukraine.
Andriy from Irina’s team came to pick me up and took me to the church where they were loading up all the gear ready for the kids camp they were going to run over three days in some destroyed deoccupied (occupied by Russians in the invasion but now liberated) villages.
I was allocated to go with Pastor Oleg and a young guy called Christian who was going to do some basic translation for me.
Christian is an interesting young guy who is only 18 but already studying quantum physics computing and maths ( or something like that!) plus a few psychology classes in his spare time, plus does professional photography with vintage cameras for some income and on his holidays does missionary work. Oh and he is from Kharkiv and witnessed the Russian attack on his hometown early in the invasion. He has great dreams for Ukraine though and wants to use his education to help with building his country after the war.
As we packed toys and food and games for the kids, Pastor Dima pulls out what looks like a fenestrated rocket. He then proceeds to tell me through the translator that this is cluster munitions and describes in detail how it works and how the bomblets fly out and are designed to incur maximum death across a wide area. Turns out won’t be the last time today I see these. I ask where this is from- he assures me I’ll see more as I’m going to the village where it’s from.
Pastor Oleg wanted to take me to the village that he does visits to- it is further on from where the camp is. It is a village called Bilihirka in Kherson oblast that sits on a rise overlooking Mykolaiv oblast and was therefore a strategic site early in the war for the Russians. It was occupied by the Russians and was the site of lots of battles and bombings. So many of the villages around here are bombed though. And farming villages is all they were. The road in was long and bumpy. The roads had craters in them from bombs and artillery, and were rutted and damaged from tanks. Where a bridge had been destroyed they’d had to make a temporary crossing that detoured a lot of the trucks via back roads and the village roads were now completely wrecked. When rain comes it’s going to be a disaster as people will get bogged in the dug up roads. (Note- later on the way back we indeed saw a truck had got bogged in a dug up section of road)
A few people had either stayed and/ or come back to rebuild and these were the people that were being visited.
Then when we got to the villages we could see that pretty much every house had been bombed or shelled or damaged in some way. In Bilihirka every single house had been destroyed.
Our first stop was at Sergei and Tania’s place- or what was left of it…
This lovely couple’s house had been blown to smithereens but they had been slowly rebuilding. There wasn’t much there but ruins and debris. But they welcomed us with what they had and had set up an outdoor table in a shelter and served us a beautiful meal. Made more amazing by the fact that they had no running water, no kitchen and no freezer and had only recently gotten power back on. Their fridge was full of shapnel holes that they had to mend with foam a fill and tape. It was one of the nicest meals I’ve had in Ukraine. They’d made fresh potato and cabbage pierogis, bread and salo ( which Oleg had brought with him), beet salad, fresh tomatoes, and stuffed zucchini’s. Tania apologised for having no meat due to their situation! Most of it was grown on a small plot at the back of their farm. But not as much as they were used to growing as they have very little land left that hasn’t been bombed or mined. And the land they do have to grow on can’t be watered regularly as the piped water from the khahkovka dam is gone. Firstly the Russians blew up the dam so the reservoir that supplies the pipes and canals is gone. Secondly most of the pipes and water tanks have been bombed or shot up. So many of the villages have no water. And you see people pushing carts around with giant plastic water bottles on them. Thankfully for this small area they have a small artesian basin that they have been able to sink wells into. Tania’s eyes welled up with tears as she said ( through the translator) how grateful she was to have visitors. We had a good chat and they asked lots of questions about Australia.
As we sat at lunch we heard some explosions. I was assured it was likely going in the direction we wanted ( Ukrainian v Russia) but I noticed that Tania jumped and was shaking and teary when there was an explosion. Given that later another guy told me they hear this every day I thought how long will this poor lady be able to take it?They told me how they had grown lots of watermelons before the war. This area is famous for watermelons and as if to prove it he produced a newspaper clipping of him and his son showcasing their famous ‘Bilahirka ’ ( name of the village) watermelons that they used to export. But now they can’t grow anything but a few vegetables for themselves. In addition to his land being wrecked and mined, every piece of farm equipment he owned had been destroyed by bombs and rockets. Equipment, that he now has absolutely no hope of being able to afford to replace. Sergei was keen to show us around even though you could see it was hard for him. He tried to not show it but it was clearly very upsetting for him. Their whole life had been destroyed. He showed us where buildings had been, where rockets had landed, bullet holes. He showed us the dugout shelter that the Russians had built and lived in. As he showed us through the debris of one of his buildings he picked up some bits and pieces he said he’d only just noticed now and they were marked as Russian army food packets and paraphernalia. He threw them out in disgust. I can only imagine that it must have felt as if his place had been defiled – to think of the Russian invaders who had come to kill and destroy, being camped out in his house.
He then took us around his farm and showed us fields covered in shrapnel, grenade pieces, rockets, shells, cluster munitions, and a house full of rockets collected from the village.
Also saw a parachute from a 500kg bomb called a fab. They do an enormous amount of damage- why on earth would you drop that on a civilian village??
There were also blobs of phosphorus all through the fields- remnants of illegal phosphorus bombs that clearly constitute a war crime when used in civilian areas. They are hideous weapons that set everything on fire with a heat that goes up to 1000degrees Celsius and can’t be extinguished with water. Contact with flesh burns down to bones. Burns of just 10% with phosphorus can be fatal.
We were told that mines and UXO were everywhere and pretty much only the roads and under the power lines that got repaired has been de-mined.
The village was full of landmine warning signs and we weren’t really supposed to wander off the road. But it was like the more we looked the further afield Sergei wanted to go and he just kept walking and walking, stopping to look at and pick up shells, pieces of rockets, fragments of Russian soldiers clothes. I sensed that many of these he had seen for the first time and wondered if this was the first time he’d had the emotional strength to look – when he had someone to share it with? Christian and I were carefully stepping in his footsteps but it did occur to me that I really didn’t want to watch him get blown up on my video either so I asked Christian to suggest he be careful and we turn around. But it was like he didn’t hear and he just needed to keep going … poor guy just looked so broken as he looked at his whole life wrecked before his eyes but seemed driven by a need to show us. We passed a body length sized area of dug up dirt and he suggested that there were probably Russians buried there but he hadn’t looked. This was likely as nearby was the remains of a Russian soldiers helmet and uniform. We saw several of these.
We saw grenades sitting in the dirt that were possibly still unexploded and posing a risk as well.
He insisted on giving me the heavy casing of a rocket even though I explained I probably wouldn’t fit it in my suitcase. The Pastor later popped it in the trunk and explained that it was against Ukrainian law to take it out anyway.
We saw charred fields that still had burnt grain in them, fields that are now full of mines and fuel and chemicals from the rockets meaning no farming for years to come. Not to mention that all of his farm machinery and every single tractor was completely destroyed.
When we came back to the house the pastor and Tania looked down at my pants and feet and I was covered in black stripes of ash from the burnt out grass and fields that had been shelled. They were horrified that we’d been walking through those fields and rushed to help me wash it off with the little water they had and made me promise not to tell anyone what we had done. I was the only one responsible though. It might seem foolish but it just felt like I had to do it for them- if that makes sense?
We hugged and cried and Tania spoke some last words for me on the camera through her tears “I love my country. I love Ukraine. We don’t want the Russians here.”
Next visit was to Sasha and Irina and their young son ( their oldest son lived elsewhere). Pastor Oleg had brought a little train set for their 9 year old son. He smiled briefly when he got it and went to play with it but he seemed rather flat and reluctant to have a photo taken or even to look at anyone. It wasn’t a normal reaction. I could only imagine what this child had witnessed and gone through. His house was mostly destroyed. His father showed us the underground bunker where they stayed for over a month to avoid the shelling. It was small, dug into the dirt and very musty. It still had the blankets on the ground. He had put drums filled with concrete at the doorway to stop rockets hitting the entrance too hard.
He found ten cluster munitions rockets just on his property alone. He showed us where most of his house had been and now it was a pile of rubble. He talked about his beautiful garden, his outdoor area and his house. It is a very simple village lifestyle but for him he said it was “perfect”. He had everything he wanted and could grow his food and enjoy his family. He doesn’t understand why the Russians want to “destroy us all.” The cluster munitions inflict maximum human killing impact. His only answer as to why they were dropped on his house- “They want to kill us all.” These cluster munition killing machines were dropped on innocent civilian villages long before Western media was debating the ethics of supplying these to Ukraine amid claims Russia had never used them.
Again this couple shared the little they had with us- giving us a delicious Turkish coffee cooked on the fire and a taste of the famous Bilihirka watermelon- one of a handful they’d been able to grow as his gardens were all mostly mined too. We sat in the bombed out remains of part of their house which they were trying to restore and had even hung up some pictures they’d found in the ruins. Of course the pressure is on for all of these people as when the icy cold of winter sets in it won’t be possible to get by with these open air spaces and outdoor kitchens…
We stopped to go down the track to the river. We could only go as far as the sapper marks so as to not risk stepping on a landmine. But again we were walking through fields of shrapnel. Sharp pieces of metal designed to kill. It was hard to imagine what kind of hell it would be, fighting with all this stuff flying around.
We could see where the river level had dropped right down due to the bombing of the dam. Desperate farmers had already planted some crops on the exposed river banks, risking the possibility that mines had been washed down into the river. We also heard how the fishing was very difficult now as there had been massive fish kills, as well as cows killed by land mines or starvation – all resulting in a foul stench that filled the air. Possibly added to by the stench of Russian soldiers. The Russians often left their dead behind and mining now made it impossible for Ukrainians to bury them too. Many times we stepped over remnants of soldiers uniforms. John had even heard from one of the Ukrainian army soldiers that Russians often left their wounded too but not before taking their watches.
We then went on to the next house where the ‘patriarch and matriarch’ of the village live. Grigory and Valentina- ‘Grisha and Valya’. Another lady Nadia was also there as well as their two older grandsons who were helping in the garden.
Their house had also been damaged badly although a little less than some of the others. The rooves of their buildings were still UNHCR white tarps. Their kitchen was also out under a tree now- and would have to be sorted before the winter. This family also farmed and he talked about the beautiful watermelons he used to export and now they could only grow some vegetables to eat and sell at a local market. They had managed to clear a small area that they could farm but most of their land was covered in mines. There has been very little sapper activity here but he knew of two sappers who had started de-mining here who had been killed by mines. Later Oleg showed me photos of a mine nearby that had exploded. We were told they had cleared the roads though and we could walk down the roads . We saw many more blown up buildings, rockets in fields, burnt forests, dugout Russian positions and farm machinery blown up or full of bullet holes. One tractor had been hit by a bomb that was so hot some of its metal components melted! Probably a thermobaric phosphorus bomb.
We came to a grain storehouse that we were told belonged to Sergei and Tania and it was also destroyed and there was piles of burnt grain on the floor. Ukraine’s grain feeds a large proportion of the world and this war threatens to exacerbate hunger in the poorest parts of the world.
Water pipes and water tanks were blown apart. Burnt out cars sat in the blown up remains of the garages they were parked in.
Despite all this these lovely people served us again with delicious rabbit liver pierogis ( I think it was rabbit anyway- there was certainly a cage full of them there) and some fresh melon they’d grown in the small garden they’d managed to get going again.
We heard several explosions whilst we were there and Grisha said they heard this most mornings and nights and he just shrugged his shoulders resignedly.
While I was waiting for the pastor to go to the toilet the old man told me in Ukrainian to ‘sit down’ under the tree. He started talking and I got some of it translated. He also looked so downcast. He told how much had been destroyed. He told me that so many journalists have come and done interviews from so many countries- and then they just go again. Of course I didn’t have the heart to interview him when he said that, so I just sat with him, and shed some tears with him, and held his hand. I think he appreciated that.
As I left, Nadia came up to me and touched my face and hugged me and said through the translator that she could see I was “sympathetic, a kind person with a kind heart and soul who cares”, “not like other foreigners”… ?l
Grisha ( who is not a Christian himself) then made the point that the only people who have really helped and have kept coming have been the ‘church people’.
His wife Valya asked Oleg to pray with her. Then there were lots of hugs again all around and I left there with a heavy heart and a new understanding. That liberation is not the end of it- and that every place touched by the Russians will have years if not decades of damage to undo and that lives have been destroyed in multiple ways. And that no one wanted them here… they were happy before the Russians came.
On the way back to camp we stopped at an overgrown helicopter field and Oleg told me this had been used by the Russians. I noticed in conversation that he was referring to the Russians as ‘orcs’ ( and it was being translated to me as Russians). I asked about this and yes indeed it is a widespread term with reference to the hideous, evil murderous creatures in the movie ‘Lord of the Rings’.
I also noticed that all of the bridges had soldiers around or under them and I was warned not to take any photos as all important infrastructure was guarded and was not to have photos taken of it.
It was a sober journey back to the camp. They had set up a base in an abandoned cottage in the village of Bila Krynitsa that had also been bombed and occupied. This is where the cooking would be for the team. We would be sleeping at the school where the program was going to run for the kids.
As we arrived at the school it was clear the school had been under shelling too at some point. The walls had pockmarks in it- the grounds and road in front had explosion holes in it and the school bus sitting in the car park had blown out windows and a hole where a shell had it.
We were all sleeping on the floor and I went to make my mat up but Irina took over and despite my very strong protests insisted on making it for me and giving me two sleeping bags and the thicker mat. That’s even though she’d been working non- stop all day. She’s an amazing lady.
