Lisnyky may lie only a few miles south of Kyiv, but the air here is so still you can hear a nightingale sing. “Listen,” said Nikolai, head of the village’s territorial defence forces, putting an arm out to halt his visitors as Ukraine’s national bird chirruped in a nearby pine tree.
Later even the rumble of shelling sounded as if it were coming from a long way off, rather than from villages northwest and northeast of the capital, where Russia promised a day earlier it would halt its offensive but which were still active battlefields yesterday.
In an unfinished house in Lisnyky refugees from those war-torn villages scrolled anxiously through the news. Marina, Iryna, Anna, their children and menfolk, sought sanctuary here in the first days of the invasion from Bucha and Hostomel, villages north of Kyiv that have become bywords for the worst carnage in the capital; places the Ukrainian army is battling to retake.
All still have family there, most of whom they have been unable to contact since the Russians occupied their villages. Many are elderly and refused to leave. Anastasia burst into tears when her mother, Iryna, revealed for the first time that her grandmother had been injured in the bombardment.
Marina wept quietly over her parents, in their mid-fifties, who refused to leave Hostomel so they could look after her immobile grandmother, aged 80. All the cats and dogs left behind by neighbours thinking they might be gone for only days were also under their care.
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Russia’s invasion has brought death, destruction and exile to millions of people in Ukraine, who now pray for the war to end. It has also brought separation for millions of families; the men forbidden from leaving the country under martial law even as their women and children cross borders in search of sanctuary; and for families like the new refugee population of Lisnyky, separated from their loved ones by an invisible border of Russian occupation.
“It is so painful not to know what is happening to them,” Marina said through her tears. “Every now and again there is a signal and we get a call, but so many people have had their phones taken and destroyed. We live for these precious moments.”
Her pleas to her parents to leave Hostomel, the site of Russia’s first attempted airborne assault into Ukraine, fell on deaf ears in the early days of the invasion. Since the Russians took charge there has been no way out for them, no safe corridor and virtually no contact.
“That is why we are checking the news all the time,” she explained. “We have no other way of knowing what is happening to our families. Whether we still have homes. Who knows if we do?”
Marina’s brother, a construction worker, had almost finished building a house for a client in Lisnyky when the invasion began. He offered it to the families fleeing Kyiv. Four families, totalling 17 people, moved in and have remained, supported by the Lisnyky community.
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This village knows much of war, occupation and resistance: it served as the front line for the defence of Kyiv against the Nazis in the Second World War. The foyer of the village school is plastered with mementoes of its military history, including the old fortifications built there. In its forecourt stands a statue of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Ukraine’s first president during the country’s initial brief spasm of independence before the Soviet takeover in 1920, who was born in the village.
“Kyiv is the capital but Lisnyky is like the beating heart of Ukraine,” Nikolai, the territorial defence commander, said. Unlike the relentlessly flat country in which it sits, Lisnyky has hills and vales, and a lovely lake where fishermen were dawdling yesterday as if war were the last thing on their mind.
At the village checkpoint, along a critical road linking the highways from Kyiv to Odesa and Dnipro, armed volunteers poured glasses of birch juice, the refreshing sap of the paper-white forest. Later, glasses were filled with a local moonshine.
Lisnyky is an affluent outpost of Kyiv, where the champion boxers Vitaly and Wladimir Klitschko live when not at their day jobs as the mayor of the capital and his most trusted adviser. Yet the war effort here is as intense as in any other place in Ukraine spared from direct violence.
In the village hall, women gather to tie strips of cloth to fishing nets, creating camouflage blankets used by troops and volunteers. In her workshop Lillya Kosiy, a seamstress more accustomed to filling orders for high-end boutiques, has turned her skills to crafting flak jackets to carry armoured plates donated from other countries.
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Dima, one of the village’s defenders, stripped off a Royal Navy camouflage jacket to reveal a khaki sweater emblazoned with the German flag. “Never did I think that here in Lisnyky I would sit down at a table with all these people from all over the world,” he marvelled as he dished up lunch to his British, American and Swiss visitors.
Far more important, however, is the job Lisnyky is doing of looking after its own refugees, Ukrainians who still wonder if and when they can ever return to their homes so tantalisingly close. Russia’s declaration that it will drastically cut operations against Kyiv have come as little comfort here.
Iryna shook her head. “I don’t believe Putin, of course,” she said. “I know we have to defeat them for our homes to be free. And we will. It is just a matter of time, I know, then we will see our families again. All of them stayed for a reason and they are our heroes.”
