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The Ukrainians in the east begin the frightening reconstruction

#Ukrainians #east #frightening #reconstruction

Galyna Kios had survived in her gloomy basement with her family and neighbors, cooking on a makeshift wood stove when the Russians came.

The troops had bided their time outside of Mala Rogan, 32 kilometers (20 miles) from Ukraine’s northeastern border with Russia, but decided to take the village two weeks into the war.

“You have to go because we need the whole street,” Kios recalls the soldier who told her just before the invasion force took her two-story house.

The occupation was short-lived – the invaders were driven out by the Ukrainian army after a fortnight of fierce fighting – but there was enough time for the road from Kios to be reduced to rubble.

“I saw what they did to my house, what’s left of it. What emotions could I afford? Material possessions are not worth your life,” the widowed mother of four, 67, told AFP.

“So I thought, ‘I’m lucky to be alive by God’s will.’ Anything lost is material, we can rebuild or renew it.”

Since then she has been shoveling, sweeping, scrubbing and scrubbing – sometimes with her family, often alone – like thousands of Ukrainians returning to liberated but destroyed homes in the east of the country.

– Battle Scars –

In the Kharkiv region of 2.7 million people, which includes Mala Rogan, 90 percent of homes in Russian-taken areas were destroyed, local media reported in May, citing the governor.

There are fewer than a dozen properties in the dusty street of Kios, and each bears the scars of battle—roofs gone, facades riddled with shrapnel or gunfire, chunks bitten off.

At the top of the hill, a house is scorched so badly it looks like a volcano, obsidian walls rising above mountains of personal belongings and Russian soldiers’ boots.

Two houses have burned-out armored vehicles in their driveways, one is spray-painted “Death to the Enemy” in Ukrainian.

Nearby, a Soviet-era T-72 tank with its turret down lies crumbling on the road, the carcass of a once-mighty beast greedily plucked clean and abandoned to the elements.

Six blasts of varying intensity – almost certainly shell fire several kilometers away – resounded as Kios worked through the lunch hour.

A few houses down, Nadia Ilchenko brought her daughter and nine-year-old granddaughter to Mala Rogan at the beginning of the war.

She argued that it would be safer than staying at their home in the city of Kharkiv a short drive away, but soon realized she had misjudged the situation.

– ‘Burned Down’ –

Under heavy fire in the village, the 69-year-old woman sent her away again and fled with her husband on March 19.

During her exile, she saw video of her house smoldering, the garage destroyed along with a motorcycle and two children’s bikes.

“I came back on May 19 and my blood pressure is still high. We spent almost two months, me and my husband cleaning it,” she said.

Humanitarian volunteers helped clear the debris, but the front of the property is still a mess and much work remains.

“The Russians were in our house and so much was shot through and burned down that we can no longer use it,” she said.

“The only thing I like now, the only thing that warms me, are the flowers in the garden – although they even parked a Russian tank on it.”

Ilchenko described her granddaughter’s traumatized reaction when they returned home.

“Why did they do this to you?” asked the young girl, surveying the confusion in front of them.

“I told her I didn’t know, and my granddaughter went into hysterics,” Ilchenko said.

“It was difficult to stop her from crying, to stop her from crying.”

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#Ukrainians #east #frightening #reconstruction

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