ODESA, KHERSON, ZAPORIZHZHIA AND KHARKIV REGIONS, Ukraine — On a bitterly cold morning in early February, tears roll down Stanislava Lisovska's cheeks as she rests her head on the edge of her husband's casket, cherishing one last moment with him. Lisovska and a small group of friends, family and military comrades watch as her husband Andrii Ruban is lowered into a grave on the outskirts of Odesa. A few graves away, people are burying another soldier, and in the distance, another funeral is just beginning. In this seaside city, the steady churn of bodies coming from the frontlines of the war end their journey here.
Ruban's commander, Oleh, who requested only to use his first name for security reasons because he's on active military duty, says that he hopes for Ukraine's freedom and an end to this war. Young men, he says, "should have been raising the kids here. They should have been the ones who build and rebuild this country. And now we're just multiplying the graves with them."
As the war grinds into its fourth year, people across Ukraine are taking stock of their losses. An NPR team traveled this winter through the regions closest to the fighting, where people spoke of hope and loss.
"We will rebuild everything. We just can't get back the human lives"
Calling out remembered lines of poetry from her twin bed for her daughter to write down is one way that Neonila Prytsyk, 73, tries to recover some of what she has lost in the war.
She and her daughter, Larisa Prytsyk, 49, are staying in a tiny temporary housing unit in Posad-Pokrovske, a village in the Kherson region where she's lived since 1984. Her home was severely damaged along with nearly every other in the village because it was in the path of the Russian troops who advanced toward Mykolaiv city in March 2022. "The hole you've seen there, this was our house. 120 square meters [about 1,300 square feet]. Really beautiful house. Really warm," says Neonila.
"Marriage, christenings, funerals," she continues. Her loved ones are buried in the town cemetery. "I've buried my mother. And I buried my husband here," she says. "We had happiness here, and sadness. We had tears here. I was singing here … I was writing my poetry here."
She lost everything — hand-embroidered heirlooms from her mother, the family of cats she was taking care of, and a life's worth of poetry she had written down in notebooks.
Now as an occasional line of lost poetry surfaces in her memory, she is in a rush to not let it slip away. She has her daughter jot them down in a new notebook and then post them to her social media.
Larisa Sokolova, 52, the deputy mayor of the village, says not everyone is ready to come back. "There are many people who are still afraid and who are still not sure about at that stage that we are in this war. Like some people want to see the definitive victory probably to come back. A lot of them, having families and they hear those explosions, they're terrified to return."
But for Neonila, living on the edge of an empty patch of dirt where the ruins of her home were recently cleared in preparation for a new house to be built, it's enough for now: "The only thing that I wish for now at this stage is that I can get my house back on my land and I can peacefully die on my land."
Other construction projects can be seen in different stages. Some buildings are patched with blue tarps and fresh mortar, new foundations are emerging from the ground and a slew of temporary units speckle the village grounds.
Across the front line regions, the destruction of buildings, homes, schools and commercial spaces is one of the major costs of the war. Over 2 million homes have been destroyed, according to the United Nations, and it has transformed the landscape of Ukraine.
In Posad-Pokrovske, a long and difficult process of rebuilding has only started, Sokolova explains, with a patchwork of nonprofits and government projects tackling everything from new water and gas lines to rebuilding the community kindergarten. Some projects have had more immediate success than others. People in the village are concerned about the future of foreign aid and the possibility of corruption causing problems for their funding. But despite the challenges, there is hope.
A nearby village, Zelenyi Hai, was also in the path of the Russian advances, but much of it has been restored. Oksana Hnedko, 50, the village head, says she has to remind people not to brag about their successes, "When our people go to the market to trade, I tell them, 'stop showing off there. Be quiet. Don't show off,' " she says, laughing.
She says that Zelenyi Hai has 920 residents, almost as many as before the war. Many of the town's 200 children have restarted school in a new building. The old school was destroyed by an airstrike, with Hnedko's husband, the school principal, buried in rubble inside.
"We pushed so strong to get this educational space here … And the kids only started to study on January 24 this year. Visiting school physically. Now they study in two shifts." Many have come back. "We will rebuild everything. We just can't get back the human lives."
"Potentially I won't be able to go back ever"
Rebuilding is only possible in areas that are now free from Russian occupation. Elsewhere, Ukrainians can't return. Russia now occupies around 20% of Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula, which it seized in 2014. Hopes of regaining those territories are dwindling.
Anastasia, 21, lives in Zaporizhzhia and talks to her mother regularly on the phone. She is only using her first name because her family is still in occupied territory and she fears Russian authorities might punish them for her work helping displaced people escape such territory. Her brother was three years old when she left her home in Kherson city to visit her boyfriend in Zaporizhzhia in February 2022. The war started while she was away, and now she can't go back. Most of her family members are living in Kherson city.
"There is hope. As we say, hope dies last," she says. "But if I think that potentially I won't be able to go back ever. Obviously it really hurts. Hurts badly. Realizing that you won't see your mother …"
Anastasia can't keep the tears out of her eyes as she speaks. She's missed half of her brother's life.
The Zaporizhzhia region now houses more than a quarter-million internally displaced people, more than any other region in Ukraine, according to the city council. Though some could move abroad or to other, potentially safer, regions of Ukraine, many say they just want to be close to home. Even if they can't return now, or ever.
Halyna Zayceva wanted to stay in Novohrodivka, her home, in the Donetsk region, as long as possible. Other residents of her apartment building had left their keys with her, knowing her intention to stay, and she still has them all. But six months ago, her apartment was struck by a missile while she was out caring for a friend. Now, her home is occupied and she says there's nothing to go back to anyway.
"I would gladly come back, but I doubt that anyone will be able to rebuild it. I always have this hope. But the city is destroyed, destroyed," Zayceva says.
She's been at a shelter in Zaporizhzhia run by ARTAK, a nonprofit that assists evacuees, since then, and says no one else from her family remains in Ukraine. They've gone to the U.S., the Netherlands and Canada. She'd rather stay. When she was younger, she worked in cinema, moving and traveling a lot, making films.
"I adapted to life [abroad] fast. But the sadness in the soul was unthinkable."
In Zaporizhzhia, she says she feels more at home. "I know every brick here. I walked everywhere, I read everything, I looked at everything. I adore those ancient houses, I love walking these streets," says Zayceva.
Zayceva says she used to keep a garden outside her apartment building in Novohrodivka, filled with flowers. She proudly claims it was the most beautiful in the city. Now she tends to a small windowsill of plants at the ARTAK shelter, unsure of what will happen next.
"It's not going to be the same peaceful walk in the forest"
All over the front line regions, the sense of uncertainty is apparent. In the Kharkiv region, where people have always been neighbors with Russia, some farmers say they can never return to how things were in the past, no matter what kind of agreement is reached to end the war.
Viktor Hordienko, 72, and his son Konstyantyn Hordienko, 50, stand on a snow-covered dirt road in Staryi Saltiv, just under two miles from their family land and farm. But they can no longer work on this land — it's where the war is still playing out.
Konstyantyn says this used to be their small slice of Switzerland, with pine forests on one side, oak on the other, and a small pond in the valley. He would go there sometimes just to relax and have a moment of peace.
"You can't imagine the views there. We have a pond in the valley. Fields everywhere. Almost no people. Silence. Even when we were working too much in the city. We were coming there. Just to relax," remembers Konstyantyn.
The wheat and sunflowers that Viktor grew would coat the fields in color, green wheat in one season, golden flowers in another. Now they can only visit it occasionally, at their own risk since it's on the edge of the frontlines.
Ukraine's agricultural sector has lost more than $80 billion since Russia's full-scale invasion began, according to the Kiyv School of Economics.
Lubov Zlobina, 64, could never leave her farm in Mala Rohan, in Kharkiv Region. Zlobina stayed even when it was under occupation in 2022. To leave would have meant her hundreds of animals — cows, pigs, goats, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats — would all have likely died.
She still was unable to save them all. Her farm suffered heavy damage. She remembers the worst day, March 26, 2022, her own birthday.
Shelling was loud. She and her husband and staff hid in an underground shelter. After they thought the worst was over, they ran out to check on the animals. The swine barn was burning. The animals were screaming as they burned to death.
"We couldn't do anything. The fire took immediately. It was so scary. It was the worst [day], when these calves were screaming here, cows screaming here. And I screamed with them."
Now she squeezes her surviving cows into two remaining barns. The animals are cold in winter, she says, because the roof is filled with holes from artillery, their water freezes in the trough.
"This is the 21st year that I own this farm. I have never seen [the cows] in a state this bad. Look at them, they are cold. They look miserable," Zlobina points out. Her field, where she used to grow grain to feed them, is filled with landmines. She says she's applied for government assistance for their food but it hasn't come through.
The Hordienkos' land, they say, is damaged — it's polluted, not to mention the mines.
"It's not going to be the same peaceful walk in the forest. It's not going to be the same free walk in the fields. Knowing that something might lie there, unexploded. Years have to pass. But this pain, and those wounds that were inflicted, they probably will stay with us forever," says Konstyantyn.
Their last hope is that someday a future generation can find some peace.
"Thank God," Konstyantyn says, "if next generations would be able to live here in peace on our land."
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