Nadezhda Sereda feels she is being punished for staying during the Russian occupation of her village in eastern Ukraine, which has since been retaken by Kiev forces.
The retired worker and her dozen or so neighbors have had no electricity or running water in their houses with facades cracked by artillery fire since Russian soldiers smashed their way through Ukrainian defenses in May last year and seized Stariy Karavan in the Donetsk region.
The reconquest, three months later, of this small town and several others in the region created even more problems for Nadezhda Sereda.
“Our leaders started to divide us between those who remained under the occupation, whom they did not consider human beings, and those who left and who, supposedly, really love Ukraine,” she says, exasperated.
The 66-year-old woman came out into the street to greet the volunteer doctors who had to cross a pontoon and a bumpy road before reaching her house on the edge of the village.
“They are angels,” she enthuses to this privately funded team. “They’re the only ones coming here.”
Residents of Stariy Karavan continue to lack gas for cooking and rely on radio and very limited mobile phone service for information.
Resentments are strong.
“When the Russians arrived, it’s not as if we committed treason or talked to them about anything,” said Valentyna Tchoumakova, Sereda’s neighbor. “We just stayed quietly at home.”
Sereda’s concerns reflect wider social divisions in impoverished areas where danger reigns such as Stariy Karavan and the village of Brusivka, a little further.
These localities lost in the middle of wooded areas are cut off from the rest of Ukrainian territory under government control by a winding river over which the bridges have been destroyed by war.
At the other end of the forest, the Russian forces have regrouped and are trying to break through.
Other Russian brigades are advancing further north, towards Koupiansk, in the Kharkiv region.
The resurgence of the Russian threat is one of the reasons why Mykhaïlo Dobrichman, a volunteer doctor, takes his mobile clinic to these isolated lands.
His volunteer group, Base UA, has organized evacuations from some of the hottest spots in Ukraine.
“But today we meet very few people who want to leave,” said the 33-year-old.
“On the contrary, more and more people are coming back.”
Stariy Karavan’s isolation and the growing threat from Russia may explain why so few of Ukraine’s limited resources are reaching Sereda and its neighbors.
Dr. Dobrichman strives to be understanding and no longer objects to the refusal of older villagers to abandon their homes and vegetable gardens.
But he is not so patient with young families with children. “These are the most critical cases,” he says.
“When we see children, we come back several times to convince the families to leave. We try to get help from the police,” he continues.
“These children are our future.”
Nadezhda Sereda fumes that someone might think she’s spying for the Russians.
“Our administration despises us,” she says. “Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to stay,” she adds. “I just want to be treated like a human being. Is that too much to ask?”
In Brussivka, Mykola Brus, who lives in similar conditions, literally worships Ukraine and its soldiers.
Her village bears the name of her family and her roots are just as strong as those of Nadezhda.
“Guys, the soldiers here, they help us all the time,” said the 69-year-old of the small groups of soldiers deployed out of sight in the fields.
“The soldiers take turns taking care of me. They check that I’m still alive,” he says without the slightest irony.
But even he struggles to remember the last visit of a member of the civil administration to these regions.
“We have the soldiers,” he exclaims, shrugging his shoulders.
“They come at any time of the day. They bring me food, borscht (Ukrainian soup), they help me in everything.”
22/07/2023 13:42:49 — Stariy Caravan (Ukraine) (AFP) © 2023 AFP