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Andrew Kocherga stands in the parking lot of his apartment complex in Irpin, Ukraine, a suburb of Kyiv. The building where he and his wife live was damaged but not destroyed, and the couple intend to stay in the country. “We want to be Ukrainian in Ukraine,” he said
Tatyana Marchenko and Olga Shevchenko fled to Poland after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The longtime friends returned to the city of Irpin, Ukraine, after Russian forces withdrew from the area in the spring.
Anna Bakumenko stands outside her destroyed home in a village near Chernihiv in northern Ukraine. She and her husband fled to western Ukraine when the war began. They returned after Russian forces withdrew in the spring.
A gutted apartment building looms beyond a playground in Borodyanka, Ukraine, a town outside Kyiv that was hit hard early in the Russian invasion. Residents have been returning since Russian forces withdrew from the region in the spring.
Lyubov Lury stands near a destroyed apartment building in Borodyanka, Ukraine, a town outside Kyiv that was hit hard early in the Russian invasion. Lury, who fled to the Czech Republic, moved back into her damaged apartment in June, after Russian forces had retreated from the region.
A destroyed apartment building in Borodyanka, Ukraine, a town outside Kyiv that was hit hard early in the Russian invasion. Residents have been returning since Russian forces withdrew from the region in the spring
BORODYANKA, Ukraine — Lyubov Lury entered her apartment to find it as battered as her homeland.
Shards of dishes, lamps and photo frames littered the mud-caked floor. A flattened coffee table lay beneath a toppled bookshelf. In place of shattered glass, a mattress filled the kitchen windows, and through a hole in the ceiling the size of a bicycle tire, raindrops fell from an ashen sky.
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Soon after invading Ukraine in February, the Russian army laid waste to Borodyanka, a town of 13,000 people west of Kyiv where Lury had lived for 40 years. Artillery and rockets thundered down without pause. Russian tanks and troops targeted Ukrainian soldiers and civilians alike. Within days, Lury, 63, abandoned her home, carrying only a suitcase and purse as she fled west to Poland and then the Czech Republic.
Lyubov Lury stands near a destroyed apartment building in Borodyanka, Ukraine, a town outside Kyiv that was hit hard early in the Russian invasion. Lury, who fled to the Czech Republic, moved back into her damaged apartment in June, after Russian forces had retreated from the region.
A relief agency in Prague provided her a studio apartment, clothing and groceries. Neighbors brought her homemade meals. An aid worker arranged job interviews for Lury, a registered nurse, and she enrolled in Czech language lessons.
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Martin Kuz is an independent journalist who has reported for the Christian Science Monitor, the San Antonio Express-News, Stars and Stripes, the Los Angeles Daily News and other publications. He was in Ukraine when Russia invaded in February, and he returned this summer. He wrote this dispatch for the Express-News.
Yet as her mind grasped the possibilities of a new future, her heart longed for the country she had left behind. She missed her two sons and three grandchildren, her friends and neighbors, the clinic where she worked and the church where she prayed.
Ukrainian troops reclaimed Borodyanka in late March, and the Russian military withdrew from the Kyiv region to focus its assault on the country’s east and south. In June, Lury returned to the place she feared she might never see again.
The Russian invasion has displaced an estimated 14 million people, 7 million of whom have fled the country, the largest exodus of refugees in Europe since World War II. In recent months, an estimated 6 million Ukrainians have returned to their homes from abroad or from places of refuge within the country.
Reports of dramatic Ukrainian battlefield successes in the country’s northeast in the last few days could embolden more to come back.
The reverse migration attests to national pride, the bonds of family and the refugees’ desire to regain a measure of control over their lives after struggling to start over elsewhere.
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Stepping into her apartment for the first time, Lury wept from both sorrow and relief.
“Everything was broken, smashed - a disaster,” she said. The scorched husks of bombed-out apartment towers loomed across the street. “But I knew it was where I should be.”
Russian forces killed as many as 400 residents in Borodyanka before retreating. By the time Lury returned, the town’s population had plunged to 3,000. Her sons remained but their wives and children had evacuated, along with most of her friends and neighbors. Four people she knew had died.
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The invading troops had occupied Lury’s apartment building, and the thought that they could reappear fractures her sleep. But she draws strength from once again standing on Ukrainian soil.
“I don’t want to be in Prague,” she said. Her eyes clouded with tears. “This is home. My home.”
Viktor and Svitlana Swirsky amid the ruins of their home in Irpin, Ukraine, a suburb of Kyiv. The couple and their two sons fled the city when the Russian invasion began in February. They returned after enemy troops withdrew in the spring, and they plan to rebuild.
Russian troops began streaming into Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what Russian President Vladimir Putin called “a special military operation,” which to date has killed 5,600 civilians and damaged or destroyed 130,000 residential dwellings.
The day after the invasion began, Viktor Swirsky and his wife, Svitlana, gathered their two teenage sons, her mother and as many belongings as they could squeeze into the family’s Toyota Corolla. They fled their quiet neighborhood in Irpin, a Kyiv suburb, driving 200 miles to stay with relatives in western Ukraine.
Irpin endured intense fighting as Ukrainian forces sought to prevent the Russian army from advancing into the capital. Two weeks after leaving, the Swirskys saw a photo on social media of a Ukrainian soldier standing in their front yard. A squad of troops had converted the two-bedroom home into a fighting position.
A few days later, a friend sent the couple another photo. An artillery strike had reduced their house to a jumble of cinder blocks. None of the soldiers died, according to the friend, and the squad continued to occupy the basement until Russian forces pulled out of the Kyiv region a month into the invasion.
The Russian military destroyed 1,500 homes in Irpin and damaged another 2,000. The Swirsky family returned in May and moved into the house of Svitlana’s mother next door after repairing a collapsed wall.
Viktor Swirsky stands amid the ruins of his home in Irpin, Ukraine, a suburb of Kyiv. Swirsky and his family fled the city when the Russian invasion began in February. They returned after enemy troops withdrew in the spring, and they plan to rebuild.
The couple reacted to the razing of their house with a lack of self-pity that has typified the Ukrainian response to war, and they consider staying in the country an act of patriotism.
“We are proud that our home saved the lives of soldiers,” said Viktor, 44, as he stood in the charred rubble of his living room. He vowed to rebuild. “We are here because we want a strong Ukraine, and to be strong, Ukraine needs its people."
Svitlana, 36, lost her job at a canning factory when the war erupted, and the family now subsists on what Viktor earns as a ride-share driver. The couple has given little thought to resettling abroad, despite rampant inflation and a ruined economy.
“Why should we be the ones to go? This is our home,” Svitlana said. “We want our sons to live in the country where they were born.”
A destroyed apartment building in Irpin, Ukraine, a suburb of Kyiv.
The invasion hollowed out Irpin. The prewar population of 65,000 dropped to 4,000, and more than 300 civilians were killed. An estimated 35,000 residents have returned since early spring, inured to the air-raid sirens that remind them of the war’s proximity.
Toma Korostiu, who escaped to Moldova in early March, made her way back this summer to rejoin her husband, Andrew Kocherga. He had stayed behind to comply with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s declaration of martial law, which requires men ages 18 to 60 to remain in Ukraine.
Korostiu, a dental hygienist, looked into resuming her career in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, and found that it could take a year or more to be certified. She headed home in June after learning her clinic in Irpin had reopened.
Her hours and salary have dropped by almost two-thirds, and with Kocherga unemployed - Russian shelling destroyed the restaurant where he worked - the couple has relied on their savings. Both in their early 30s, they approach the future with a blend of obstinance and optimism.
“I don’t have a plan B to live somewhere else,” Korostiu said. “We’re not going to let Putin decide our fate.” She and Kocherga sat beside a window with a bullet hole in the kitchen of their fifth-floor apartment. The cracked glass framed a gutted high-rise adjacent to their own damaged building.
“We want to be Ukrainian in Ukraine,” Kocherga said. “And this is why I believe Ukraine will win - we are fighting for our identity, our existence.”
Tatyana Marchenko fled to Poland after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. She returned to her damaged apartment in Irpin, Ukraine, after Russian forces withdrew from the area in the spring. “Putin is such a small, little man,” she said.
A sentiment of solidarity unifies the country’s generations. Tatyana Marchenko and Olga Shevchenko, now in their 70s, met four decades ago when they and their families moved into a new apartment complex in Irpin. Their friendship has lasted through the birth of children and grandchildren, the loss of husbands and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the year Ukraine gained its independence.
The two retirees evacuated after Russia invaded, riding a bus bound for Poland with other members of their Catholic church. They rolled past cities turned to rubble as the familiar contours of life receded behind them. “I had heart pain,” Shevchenko said. “We were in a nightmare.”
Residents in the Polish city of Lublin treated Ukrainian refugees with the kindness of kin. But the pull of home intensified for Marchenko and Shevchenko after Ukrainian troops liberated Irpin. The grandmothers carried burdens practical and emotional. They needed their monthly pensions; they yearned for the embrace of family.
The women returned in June to apartments that were small disaster zones, and they waited weeks for their buildings to restore utilities. As colder weather approaches, power outages remain common, and with a spike in food costs and shortages of household goods, they depend on charities to survive.
The privations deepen their resolve - and their disdain for Russia’s president. “Putin is such a small, little man,” Marchenko said, standing on the balcony of her sixth-floor apartment. She pointed out a neighbor’s garden, where a mother and child were buried in a temporary grave early in the war. “We will never surrender to the fascists.”
The butcher shop that Gar Mkhitaryan operates with his brother in Chernihiv, Ukraine, was damaged by a Russian artillery strike in February. They reopened in June, determined to show the community that Ukraine remains unbowed.
The low whoosh of incoming artillery silenced conversation inside the butcher shop as customers and workers dove to the floor. The shell slammed into the ground. Windows exploded and walls shook, showering those inside with bits of glass, plaster and concrete. In his office in the rear, Gar Mkhitaryan, the shop’s co-owner, wondered if the high-rise above his shop would collapse.
“We all held our breath,” he said, recalling the attack in Chernihiv on the war’s second day. Russian forces intended to seize the northern city of 285,000 people on the march south toward Kyiv. “You thought the world was ending.”
Mkhitaryan, 29, runs the shop with his younger brother, Vasgen, and with Chernihiv under siege, they shepherded their wives and children to safety in western Ukraine. The two men returned home with their families in May, a month after Russian troops withdrew from the region, and set about repairing their damaged shop.
The brothers reopened in June, as much to help their 15 employees as to show the community that Ukraine remains unbowed. They have persisted through supply chain delays and the loss of more than half their prewar business.
“This is not about money,” Mkhitaryan said. “This is about relationships with our workers, our customers, our city. They need us.” He smiled as he stood before a display case laden with cuts of beef, pork and goat. “And we need them. We all need each other.”
The cost of rebuilding Ukraine could reach $1 trillion. In the Chernihiv region, the Russian army damaged or destroyed 3,500 buildings, including 2,800 homes and apartments. Yet the city’s population has rebounded to around 200,000 after plummeting by two-thirds in the spring, and here as across the country, reconstruction efforts abound - houses and apartments, shops and schools, roads and bridges.
Six weeks before the war, Anna and Oleh Bakumenko finished building a house in a village outside Chernihiv, and they moved in with their adult son and his wife and two children. Less than two months later, Russian artillery erased a decade of work.
The Bakumenkos returned to their village from Poland after Russian troops retreated. The middle-aged couple now lives with Anna’s sister, whose nearby house survived the artillery onslaught, and they plan to rebuild even as the threat of war shadows Chernihiv.
“My family has been here for 150 years,” Anna said. She held a handful of singed wedding photos that she plucked from the ashes of her home. “All my relatives, all my memories - they are here. This is our land, and it belongs to us.”