Taisiia Heorhiivna Tarasova, 82

‘I am not afraid.’

Taisiia Heorhiivna Tarasova, 82 years old, decided to remain as the Russian invasion rages and lives alone now in her apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine on March 23, 2022. She receives food and medicine from a group of residents that formed a humanitarian network to deliver supplies to the elderly and infirm left behind.  ‘I am not afraid,’ she stated, but didn’t evacuate because she has health issues related to stomach cancer and felt it would be too difficult to travel.

After three surgeries she has lost almost half her body weight and is frail like a tiny bird, but her spirit remains intact. There are no more relatives to care for her. Once eight lived in the apartment but now portraits of her children and loved ones line the walls where she sits alone with her memories.

Oleksandra Yemelianovna Kulahyna, 93

‘I don't disturb anyone, I take care of myself.’

Oleksandra Yemelianovna Kulahyna, 93 years old, has lived in Kyiv since 1944.  Building manager Oleksandra tenderly helps fix her hair for her portrait to be made, still wanting to look pretty amid disheveled surroundings at her apartment in Kyiv Ukraine on March 25, 2022.  She is disabled and has great difficulty walking since a hip injury.

She worked as an infectious disease nurse for 43 years.  Although she shares memories of WWII, she didn’t comprehend that the Russian invasion had begun at first and is unable to evacuate in her condition.

She receives food and medicine from a group of local residents who formed a humanitarian network called Angels of Kyiv that deliver supplies to the elderly and infirm left behind. The founders are neighbors and now service over 1000 people.

‘I have daughters who live on the other side of Kyiv. They have their own families, their own lives. I don't disturb anyone, I take care of myself,’ she declares, not wanting to be a burden. However, since the war began there have been issues providing social services to the elderly in desperate need.  The building manager found her daughter and plans to move her soon into her care. But the daughter is in her 70’s and is also dealing with the harsh realities of aging. 

In times of war there are no easy answers, especially for senior citizens hoping for comfort in their twilight years, as Oleksandra sits alone making the sign of the cross over and over again.

 Liubov Oleksandrivna Kurdymova, 84

‘Where should I go? I have nothing but Kyiv.’

‘Where should I go? I have nothing but Kyiv,’ said Liubov Oleksandrivna Kurdymova, 84 years old at her apartment in Kyiv, Ukraine on March 25, 2022.  She chooses not to evacuate.

‘I was born on Trukhanov Island. There was a settlement of fishermen with a church, clinic, school. Everything burned down in 1943,’ she said.  Most of the elderly compare the invasion to WWII. 

She pours through albums of memories and proudly shows photos of her father in the Red Army and herself as a child in a Ukrainian costume, as a young girl in a military hat.  A consummate hostess, she insists visitors try a scrumptious cabbage dish in her kitchen filled with well used cooking pans and mementoes.  Airstrikes in the suburbs of Kyiv and air raid sirens are a constant reminder of the raging war.  They talk about the rocket that landed near their neighborhood. 

Her children and grandchildren live in a neighboring district and had visited each other often. Before the war, her granddaughter lived with her, but she now lives alone. 

With a sweet smile and indomitable spirit, she almost dances as she waves farewell from the doorway of her new normal.

 Liudmyla Kirichenko, 75

‘‘It’s very scary, but I won’t leave my land.’

‘It’s very scary, but I won’t leave my land,’ defiantly states Liudmyla Kirichenko, 75 years old, who has lived in a basement bunker at her apartment building since the beginning of the Russian invasion in the heavily shelled neighborhood of Saltivka in Kharkiv, Ukraine on May 13, 2022. 

The bunker is dark, damp and cold, lit only by candles or flashlights. There is no water or electricity.  But she always has a bucket filled with exquisite flowers adorning the entrance of her hovel. Neighborhood children bring her lilacs and tulips.

She has difficulty walking up to her damaged apartment on the eighth floor since the elevators don't work.  And she is scared.  She never goes farther than 20 meters from the basement.  They use the pigeons as a barometer – when they fly away it’s incoming and time to go underground, though not far enough to be a real bomb shelter, it at least provides some degree of psychological safety.

Her little corner of compassion has become a waystation for humanitarian aid that she distributes to others.  ‘Someone must keep order and help others.  Volunteers bring me food and I distribute it to the rest of those who stayed here.  I have to think not only about today, but also for a few days ahead.  Volunteers' cars may break down, they may not be able to get there due to shelling, and we will all be left without food.’  Folks stop at her door for a carton of potatoes and a kiss.

An unlikely alliance of necessity has blossomed into a friendship with Sasha Zolotov who lives in another part of the basement with her.  Before the war they would simply bid each other an occasional hello in the hallway.  Sasha tenderly cares for a litter of newborn kittens, feeding them milk before himself.

And in his destroyed apartment keeps a rescued German Shepard he named Crocodile.  He couldn’t find the dog’s family, so for now he is serving with the army 128th brigade.

Their collection of cats is growing and Liudmyla especially loves the elegant gray one with piercing green eyes that she calls Meow-Meow.  She cuddles with them under many blankets, showing visitors how she will soon tuck herself in for the night.  She has trouble sleeping and prays much of the night, taking holistic sleeping aids.  Sweet dreams do not come easy as shelling rages.  The worst was during her birthday on May 1.   

‘I was born in Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan) and when they tested nuclear bombs there it was not as scary as it is now,’ she says. ‘I thought the most terrifying thing was the radiation. No!  The most terrifying thing is war. The radiation happened - it banged, but we didn’t understand. The food was available, the supply was amazing, everything was good.’ 

‘And now look how they have thought everything out.  They turned off the electricity which means the fridge doesn’t work anymore, no food, no water, no light, no gas.’  She keeps busy, making dried breadcrumbs for war ‘hunger times’ and cleans her friend’s refrigerator, the smell of decayed food as bad as the stench of death that lingers over parts of the city.  Neighbors collect pieces of shrapnel and use a broken missile to hold their cooking pot.

She has two sons, 49 and 51 years old, but had not seen them since the war began until recently when a volunteer found one with his pregnant wife who has been living in the metro station after his own apartment was destroyed.  They came to visit and Liudmyla was overjoyed.  ‘What helps to hold on with all this misery and terror is the expectation and joy of becoming a grandmother. I’m very worried about the future for my grandchild, but I will do anything to save her,’ she says.  

Although Russian forces were pushed to the outskirts of Kharkiv and there is now relative quiet she stays in her bunker, still frightened since missiles can reach her city.  In fact lately almost daily bombardment has begun again, destroying a school and other buildings, taking more lives and opening wounds, both physical and emotional.

‘What about the war’s consequences - it will take so much time to rebuild everything as it was. It will take at least 50 years, but I do believe everything will be good,’ she declares. ‘This is our city and I don’t want to go anywhere, we’ll clean everything. I’ve been to many USSR’s cities, but Ukraine is the best.’

‘What I would say to Putin? Just saying his name and my body turned into stone. No word in any language has been created to describe him. He’s a creature. He’s a nuclear bomb. And the way he brainwashed all the Russians, the way he managed to set them against Ukrainians… My sister and I have given up our relatives there. We have turned off the phones, there’s no connection with them – they don’t get it. 

There are only two nationalities – human and nonhuman.’ 

Vanda Kaleniuk

‘Let him (Putin) die already, and people will not suffer.’

‘You sit in the basement, it shoots, something explodes. You want to lie down, just quiet down. You go to the house and they start again,’ wept Vanda Kaleniuk, 81 years old at her home as she talks about living through the Russian occupation in Bucha, Ukraine on June 16, 2022. ‘And before dawn they always fired the most.’

She stayed in a bunker at her daughter’s home next door with other babushkas from the neighborhood.  After the liberation of the town in the suburbs of Kyiv, residents found many areas of their town in ruins, bodies littering the streets and reports of atrocities.  War crimes investigators pulled bodies from a mass grave and makeshift burials in backyards. Residents navigate the rubble-strewn streets to receive humanitarian aid.

Vanda lights a candle and says a prayer to her husband that she lost decades ago but still deeply misses and mourns. ‘I had a very good husband, a golden man.  He could find me in the city without knowing where I had gone.  He always felt me.  And now when I forget or lose something I go to pray and ask him for help and in a couple of hours I find what I need.’   

For now there is peace in Bucha.  Vanda tends to her garden that is bursting with life again.  Her daughter makes borscht and homegrown blueberry tea.  ‘I plan to live more, I have 5 great-grandchildren, a son and a daughter. A big family to live with.’  Her great-grandchild plays with a camera, mimicking her photographer mom who shows photos she made of smoke billowing over Bucha from airstrikes as they all hid in that bunker. 

If she had the opportunity to speak with Putin? ‘What Should I tell him?  What is he doing?  Does he have no family?  Does he think in his head at all?’ she says wearily.  ‘Let him die already, and people will not suffer.’

 Tamara Semenivna Komadovakie, 88

&

Pablo Sergiyovych, 88

But they have each other.

Tamara Semenivna Komadovskie and her husband Pavlo Sergiyovych, both 88 years old at their apartment in Kiev, Ukraine on March 26, 2022. They met when they were 12 and married at 24. Tamara was an English teacher and Pavlo a former military pilot flying a Yak-26.

‘Oh, there was a war once. I was 9 years old and the Germans were called fascists,’ said Tamara. ‘No, they were human. And these fascists are killing children… We had a new house and during the German occupation we had officers living there, they always took the accordion in the evening and played Katyusha, and my sisters and I sang. They bring us a jar of stew, bread and make sandwiches for everyone - this is how children were treated, and now they are being killed.’

They receive food and medicine from a group of local residents who formed a humanitarian network called Angels of Kyiv that deliver supplies to the elderly and infirm left behind. The founders are neighbors and now service over 1000 people.

Like a typical married couple together for so many years, they at first sit on opposite ends of the couch, with Tamara reaching over to touch his arm any time she made a spirited point. Tamara exclaims like a teenager as she looks at an old hand tinted photo of herself. Former lives now memories as artillery strikes occur in the suburbs of their city. But they have each other.

 Nadia Panasivna Yerukhymovych, 89

‘The main thing is that the soul is filled with light, goodness and love.’

Nadia Panasivna Yerukhymovych, 89 years old, in Kyiv, Ukraine on March 26, 2022. Sounds of airstrikes on the outskirts of the city echo on her walls and a shelling recently hit the neighborhood. All her life she worked on a vegetable farm and from the hard work she now has osteochondrosis and a fall broke her thigh. Her son Misha, 54. has not evacuated in order to care for his mother who is unable to travel.  He is concerned about a lack of medicine, especially painkillers.

She is grateful for his devotion but says ‘He's tired of it already, because it's hard to serve something, clean, feed, wash. And run to buy everything we need. I try to bother him less, because I understand, but I have a good son because there are those who leave their parents and go.’

She receives food and medicine from a group of local residents that formed a humanitarian network called Angels of Kyiv to deliver supplies to the elderly and infirm left behind. The founders are her neighbors and now service more than 1000 people.

Most of the elderly compare the invasion to WWII.  She feels blessed for the moment as it is not yet as bad in Kyiv as some ares or the memories of the past. ‘As a child we ate nettles, then there was famine,’ she stated. ‘Now there is sugar, there is bread. Everything is as it is, you need to survive. I am worried about the youth, I don't have much time left.’

She buried her husband fifty years ago and all her sisters and brothers died.  They sang all their lives in amateur clubs. She shyly sings a moving folk song called Mother's Braid, like a whisper of peace.

Her secret to longevity? ‘The main thing is that the soul is filled with light, goodness and love,’ she declares.

As an artist Misha is still making paintings but he complains a bit about a loss of creativity saying, ‘When guns speak, muses are silent.’