The war is not far now from Vyshhorod, a weekend retreat in the forest north of Kyiv. From their fourth-floor apartment Nadia and Mykola Kachkan can hear artillery firing off rounds on the city’s most active front.
On the town’s outskirts, the volunteer territorial defence forces have dug in, their trenches running through the woods along the west side of the highway.
However, like so many of Kyiv’s elderly, they are refusing all entreaties to leave, even to join their son in the relative safety of a southeastern suburb. “I have lived here more than 80 years. I don’t want to be anywhere else,” said Nadia, 86, as she greeted us at the foot of her staircase, marched us upstairs, and demanded we eat a large bowl of her homemade borscht.
She was keen for us to rank it against the versions served by soup-making rivals across Ukraine, and was unconcerned by the risk of shellfire. “This is, after all, the second war I have spent here,” she said. A woman who remembers occupation by the Germans is not easily put off her stride.
Some of the most striking images of this new war have been of elderly men and women like the Kachkans being carried out of burning buildings. The bombardment of Kyiv is not yet on the scale of those in Kharkiv and Mariupol but it is starting.
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Early in the war, hundreds of thousands of civilians fled west, more than 1.5 million crossing the border into Poland alone. But as the fighting has progressed the number of older residents of the capital who did not join their daughters and grandchildren has become ever more clear.
In another part of the city, Mostyska Street in the Podil district, we went back to see a large housing complex that had been hit by shellfire on Tuesday morning. There we found Vasily Kondratenko, 70, a retired foundryman, and his 64-year-old wife Tatiana busy dusting down their flat on the sixth floor immediately above the impact point.
The fact that the homes of their neighbours below had been destroyed — thankfully no-one was killed — seemed to make them even more determined not to be dislodged.
They were, of course, aware of the dangers. Tatiana broke down in tears and hugged us as she described how the windows of her bedroom shattered when the shell exploded at 4.30 in the morning, her curtains catching the glass and saving her as she was violently awoken. The room’s door had been torn in two, as if with an axe. The smell of soot wafted in from outside.
But, she said, she would not leave while her son was still in Kyiv, and he was now dug in with the volunteers. Besides, “if everyone evacuated, to whom would we leave the city?” she said.
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For 25 years Tatiana has been the editor of a children’s magazine. The last edition came out the day before the invasion — it carried a picture of her own grandson on the cover. She thought it all the more important to bring out the magazine now that children were being affected by war.
The Kachkans and Kondratenkos are representative of a clear generational divide in Ukraine, between those who have little memory of life in Soviet times and those who lived through them. The middle-class young, in particular, see their lives as European and western, with their high-tech jobs and their freedom to travel to Poland, Germany and beyond unquestioned.
For the older generation, the idea of being drawn back into a Russian orbit sounds less far-fetched. Their feelings towards Russia are more ambiguous, but that does not make them any less hostile to President Putin’s version of the “brotherhood” of their nations.
The Kachkans are old enough to remember the full gamut of Soviet life. They were born into the Holodomor — the murderous famine imposed by Stalin. They lived through the Second World War, reconstruction, poverty, the Chernobyl explosion just 60 miles away, the collapse of communism.
It was a mixed bag, but it was their bag for most of their lives. Mykola spent his entire career working for the Soviet state hydroelectric power company. It built and paid for the family apartment, and it sent him and his family to live as far afield as Mongolia. His two sons went to Soviet universities and one even now is an engineer in Belarus.
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It was Russian wood and concrete that rebuilt his parents’ home east of Kyiv after the Second World War, he said. His earliest memory is of returning as the Germans retreated, to find they had burned the village to the ground.
“All that was left of my house was the oven,” he recalled. “There was still a potato in it, so my mother gave it to me to eat.” He was five.
But for him, in contrast to Putin, this historic solidarity makes Russia’s ambition to take over again all the more puzzling. “They rebuilt everything,” he said. “So why do they want to knock it down again?”
His wife summed up her memories more simply. “We have only just started to enjoy life,” she said. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, life had become free and prosperous for the first time.
Her block might seem to the westerner grim, Soviet and concrete but inside it contained a lifetime of mementoes and photographs. Rugs hung on the wall, in traditional style. The kitchen was as it was built.
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As her two sons grew up and left, the estate itself became her family. She means by this not just her friends and neighbours, most of them equally determined to stay, but the actual buildings, to which she has given pet names. Opposite is “Celestial”, the tallest block in the neighbourhood, and across the way “Ski Slope”, named for its curved side. Her own and the identical one next door are “the Twins”.
These were also her children, and her country. And she would not leave them behind.
