The elderly Kovalyov brothers and their wives will stay in the isolated farming village of Posad-Pokrovske in southern Ukraine to live out their days, despite war tearing down everything around them.
"It was raining and parts of the roof were falling in."The clashes at that time coincided with a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the area that eventually pushed the Russians back across the Dnipro River in early November, the biggest setback of the war so far for Russian President Vladimir Putin.In the next street, Stepan and Tetyana had taken refuge in their cellar after their house was destroyed in fighting in May.
They left Posad-Pokrovske shortly after, visiting occasionally to check on their property and on Volodymyr and Tetiana.When the couple returned shortly after the counter-offensive was complete and the Russians had been routed, they found their livestock gone, four cows, along with dozens of chickens and pigs.Before the war, they grew barley and vegetables. Now the fields are treacherous with mines and unexploded ordnance.
Mouldy bread, mattresses and clothes litter a warehouse where Russian forces were based during their recent occupation nearby.Every day is a slog. Volodymyr cycles to nearby shops for food, sometimes supplemented by packages handed out by charities.The couples chop wood for their stoves and collect rain water from the roof in a bucket or from the village well if the generator is working.
Stepan and Volodymyr meet to enjoy the odd glass of horilka, a Ukrainian spirit, although the couples keep largely to themselves.When Stepan and Tetyana were showed a photograph taken of them sitting in their basement that featured on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Instagram account in early January, they were briefly taken aback.Volodymyr and Stepan ended their military service in Simferopol, Crimea, in 1967.
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