As Russia’s war reaches milestone, Ukrainians count their personal losses

Kyiv, Ukraine – Olha, a 52-year-old nurse from the southern Ukrainian town of Voznesensk, feels as though the fear of war will never leave her, three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of her country.

“When]shells] fly over your head, you fall and curl up and run and hide like an animal”, she told Al Jazeera.

Her town “was like a bone in the throat” of the Russian army as it advanced northward from annexed Crimea in the early months of March 2022, days after the start of the war,” according to President Vladimir Putin.

They were located 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) away from her tiny home, which was next to a military base, on the left bank of the Southern Bug River.

Huddled together and horrified, her paralysed mother, 79, disabled husband and teenage son saw, heard and hid from one of the Russian-Ukrainian war’s key battles.

Ukrainian forces blew up bridges, shot at Russian tanks and infantry, downed a helicopter – and thwarted Russia’s advance towards the nearby southern Ukrainian nuclear power station, the cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv.

More importantly, the Russians could not reach the Moscow-backed separatist province of Transnistria in neighbouring Moldova, 135km (85 miles) southwest of Voznesensk.

Looking back, Olha remembered with pride how the town’s residents “grouped together” to fill sandbags, build barricades, man checkpoints and help each other.

Russians continued to bombard Voznesensk with such frequency that her husband was forced to remove the roof and windowpanes three times.

They kept shovels nearby in case they needed to dig themselves out while hiding in the basement, and they periodically checked on their neighbors.

But Olha’s elder son was in a worse situation.

He lived in Bucha, a northern Kyiv suburb where Russians killed hundreds of civilians, with his in-laws.

“Had I been closer]to Bucha], I would have run to him”, she said.

They “miraculously” left Bucha on March 13.

“We still haven’t talked about what happened”, Olha said.

On August 20, 2022, a Russian missile destroyed a five-storey apartment building in Voznesensk, wounding 14, including three children.

Refugees from Russia-occupied regions took up the majority of the town’s population after a quarter of them fled.

But Olha’s family stayed on, finding solace in tending to their garden.

“There are missiles flying, and we’re planting and watering”, she said. “We didn’t know whether we’d be alive, but we built a second greenhouse”.

Her mother, who was born during World War II and passed away in June 2022 of natural causes, was also experiencing blackouts and food and incontinence shortages.

“Poor thing, she was born during a war and died during a war”, Olha said.

In November 2022, Russian forces retreated further south, and shelling stopped.

These days, all Olha wants is a “just peace” – something United States President Donald Trump is not ready for, she said.

“It’s scary that a person of such status can afford such cynicism. It’s such a spit in the face”, she said.

No direction home

Nearly four million Ukrainians have been internally displaced since the start of the war, despite Olha’s survival in her hometown.

Mykola, a police officer, left his village near the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on February 25, 2022, a day after the invasion began.

Although many of his colleagues did, he did not want to cooperate with the advancing Russian forces and the Moscow-installed authorities.

Additionally, he reconnected with his pro-Kremlin kin and made a permanent residence in the Donetsk-controlled city of Pokrovsk.

Mykola continued to work with the police after becoming “accustomed to the sound of shooting and shelling,” he told Al Jazeera.

In Pokrovsk, which has been under attack for months, he helped elderly residents pack up and leave, often risking his life.

Then he packed up and left – and feels no nostalgia.

“I’m much sadder about not being able to go to the places of my childhood”, Mykola told Al Jazeera.

He is constantly considering whether or not he can ever go back to or visit and live alongside those who chose their occupation.

What scares him the most, though, are fears that Russia will yet again absorb Ukraine.

The West “often disappoints when they realize that Ukraine is more than just a piece of Russia,” he said.

A “monster state”

For Maria Komissarenko, a 47-year-old postal worker, Russia’s aggressions have robbed her of two homes and a final farewell to her father.

She resided in Horlivka, a town of plants and coal mines in the region that separatists supported by Moscow seized in 2014.

She claimed that locals “thought they were on reality TV” because of the surreal atmosphere of the conflict back then as they wandered around and watched pro-Russian rallies and armed men.

A municipal lawmaker who protested the Russian flag that hanged over the city hall in April 2014 was discovered dead in a river with traces of torture.

Things rolled downhill, and in early 2015, Komissarenko, her partner and two children left for central Ukraine.

Having left the occupied southeast, she was unable to return and attend her father’s funeral in 2021.

Later, the family fled for Bakhmut, 40km (25 miles) north of Horlivka.

She became aware that the majority of Ukrainians preferred to ignore the separatists. Some “didn’t know what war was” until the full-scale invasion, she said.

Her family lived in a newly renovated, rented apartment. While her six-year-old daughter adapted to the move, her son, 14, missed his friends.

After the invasion, when Russian forces advanced further, Bakhmut was razed to the ground, he lost his newfound friends.

They ended up in Kyiv, “and here, he never got new friends”, Komissarenko said.

She keeps in touch with her 76-year-old mother, who remained in Horlivka. But she has stopped talking to her elder brother, who is vehemently pro-Russian.

She worries about the return of occupied territories “during my lifetime” because she works for a company that produces military equipment.

These days, she treasures little things – Nordic walking and Kyiv’s cultural scene.

“Every weekend, my husband and I go to a theatre or to an art exhibition”, she said.

‘ My war is 11 years old ‘

On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many also remember the events of 2014.

Maria Kucherenko was forced to flee on February 20, 2014 when Russian soldiers descended from Crimea to seize government buildings and military installations and guard a referendum on the peninsula’s “return to Russia” that was widely denounced.

Kucherenko, a linguistics student in the port city of Sevastopol, was 19, at the time.

She was scared, but criticised herself as “young and pathetic”.

“I swore to myself to never be like that any more”, said Kucherenko, now 30 and working as an analyst with the Kyiv-based think tank, Come Back Alive, which supports members of Ukraine’s army.

Sevastopol’s center was centered on a massive naval base that was leased to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, turning it into a Trojan horse, in the eyes of observers, who influenced Crimeans with pro-Kremlin sentiments and corrupted their elites.

Just days earlier, a popular uprising in Kyiv ousted Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president. Kucherenko hoped that the new administration would retake Crimea and save her from all the chaos and mayhem.

Instead, Crimean police and soldiers were reportedly instructed to just walk away, while pro-Moscow onlookers cheered.

Kucherenko hoped that those who lived close to her would offer to fight alongside her.

But they did not, and she spent hours crying in a park, on the beach, in her dorm.

On the night of the March 16 “referendum”, she saw Sevastopol’s main square.

“It seemed there would be no tomorrow, there would only be that day with songs, dances, dead-drunk people and their chatter to Russian folk songs”, she recalled.

Kucherenko decided that she would rather “die than admit defeat”, saying, “The latter is way more horrible to me”.

When the full-scale invasion began, Russian forces landed in the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel, where she rented an apartment.

Kucherenko, however, had no fear.

“The most horrible things happened to me in 2014”, she said. “My war is 11 years old. I’ll keep doing it until I pass away. After all, I said it in the]US] Congress”.

On November 24, the 1, 000th day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she spoke at special hearings of the US Congress by the Helsinki Commission, a human rights monitor.

Then, she told US representatives and senators, “Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and military aggression in eastern Ukraine. Yet it wasn’t until 2022 that the global community started calling it what it truly is: Russia’s war against Ukraine, rather than framing it as a” Ukrainian crisis, “as had been the norm for the preceding eight years. The current scale of the war was laid the groundwork for this mischaracterization.

Source: Aljazeera