Voices from the pain of war in Ukraine: ‘I saw my father pull my mother out of the rubble’

War leaves behind huge black holes. Some, like pain, are unfathomable. Others are terrifyingly concrete, visible and lingering in the retina. That was the case with the Russian missile that opened a crater and blew up part of the Mariupol theater, being used as a refuge in eastern Ukraine, on 16 March 2022, when the war had only been going on for three weeks. A handful of photographs from that date suggested that something terrible had happened. Moscow’s propaganda sowed doubt. Little was known about the victims for several days. But Yulia Moroz, 48, was inside the theater and lived to tell the story of how her life was changed forever. “I will never forget the sound of missiles and planes,” she says.

Moroz, an accountant for the Donetsk provincial police department, had arrived at that theater, packed with residents sheltering from the bombs, along with her parents, Vasil and Valentina, escaping from the “hell” of days without water, food, and light. They hoped to be evacuated, but it was not safe and they decided to seek protection and wait. Barbarism followed them. It swept away the few belongings they had left behind. It separated their paths in an agony that she still recounts with her gaze lost in suffering. The suffering she shares with more than 10 million Ukrainians who, after three years of the Russian offensive, had to leave everything, their homes, to save their lives.

Start from scratch

Pain, at times, has a fine memory. Moroz, who is sipping a cup of coffee outside the town hall in the city of Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, remembers that it was 9.30 a.m. when a loud explosion rang out. People were screaming. The air strike caught her on a floor below her parents. The dust made it impossible to see. “When I found them,” she says, her eyes watering, “I saw that my father was trying to pull my mother out of the rubble; there was a lot of blood.” Her mother, 70, had an open wound on her head. They ran to the Philharmonic building, where many residents had taken shelter. She managed to get some bandages and medicine, but there was no time. They needed to find a hospital. With only the clothes on their backs, Moroz and her mother set off westwards, towards Zaporizhzhia. Her father, 79, had to stay behind. When they met again more than a month later, in Vinnytsia, he had lost around 90 pounds.

Three years of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine have produced many statistics: like Yulia’s mother, at least 29,392 civilians have been wounded, according to the United Nations. Around 12,654, including 673 children, have lost their lives since 24 February 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light for the attack. And it is not letting up. Last year, the number of casualties, including those killed and wounded, increased by 30%. There is more: although those aged over 60 represent only 25% of the population, in 2024, almost half of the civilian deaths in areas on the front lines of battle were in that age group. Beneath the statistics, amidst the destruction, lies an acute and unfathomable pain that runs through the nation from end to end.

The accountant from Mariupol is embarrassed to show her current home in Vinnytsia. It is a humble apartment on the eighth floor, which she rents and shares with her parents — she had the help of a UN programme for housing displaced persons. She has furniture that dates from Soviet times. “I only work to pay for it,” she complains. She has a job at the Civil Registry. “Prices have gone up and we had to buy everything, because we lost everything.” Her story is that of a woman on the edge, who fears losing her job because neither she nor her parents would be able to survive. “I cry at night,” she confesses.

The rage

The black hole of Volodymyr Borisenko, 33, is somewhere almost frozen in what they call the gray zone, a no-man’s land between the front lines. The lifeless body of his 50-year-old mother, Inna, was found there on January 27, 2023. He says he is better, or at least not so bad; that his wife has helped him to carry on, although he felt like throwing in the towel. He is a physically strong man. He speaks quietly, with a half-frown on his brow, perhaps also because of the light hitting the snow at five degrees below zero. A nutritionist, Borisenko lives in the municipality of Bilohorodka, about 20 miles west of Kyiv. When the invasion began, his mother lived in the family’s hometown of Mykhailivka, in Zaporizhzhia province. It was soon occupied. “I tried to get my mother to leave, but she was very brave,” he says. “She had spent a lot of money on her house and did not want to leave it.” It was widely known that the Russians were on the lookout to destroy any abandoned houses. According to the UN, in three years, the offensive has damaged more than 236,000 homes.

Time has helped Borisenko understand what happened, although he still feels the desire for “revenge.” “We were very close and my mother did not want to tell me things that worried me, just as I did not tell her either,” he says. That is why she told him that she did not attend protests against the Russian occupation, but she did, to the point of being one of those who put up posters with the phrase “Mykhailivka is Ukraine.” Nor did she want to worry him when she was arrested for the first time, betrayed by some neighbors. “‘They treated me well,’” she told me; “‘they always gave me food,’” he recalls with astonishing seriousness. But that was not the case. To those close to her, she described it as “hell.” It was December 2022. After 14 days, she was released, but shortly afterwards there was another knock on her door. This time, according to the account of some of her neighbors, there was an order to deport her. It was almost a relief for Borisenko. Sometimes the Russians use these deportees for a few days to dig ditches or clean up, and then let them go. It could be the same with his mother, he thought. But the day after her arrest, on January 27, 2023, the police called him to travel to identify Inna’s body. “It was the worst moment of my life,” he says, “I had nothing inside me, I was empty, I couldn’t even speak.”

What he was able to find out was that a reconnaissance drone found his mother’s body in the gray area. Everything happened so quickly, in just over 24 hours, that his only explanation is that she was taken there and killed in an attacked involving cluster munitions. Other bodies were found not far away. “She always told me that I was what gave meaning to her life,” he recalls, emotionally. “I wasn’t religious, but now I have enough information to believe that life does not end with death, that I will be able to meet my mother again.” He grabs a chain around his neck from which hangs an earring that she always wore.

The harassment

There are psychologists in Ukraine who believe that, after three years of Russian bombing, there are no citizens who do not need therapy. Stanislava Tsimbal, 14, needs it and attends sessions. She is funny; she has a great sense of humor. She cracks up when she tries to remember the name of her current therapist and fails. She is fine with her, she likes her, not like the last one. The invasion shook up the life of this teenager, which was not easy in the first place. She is from Mariupol and when she was still a child, during the Donbas conflict in 2014, the Tsimbal family had to leave the city. Ukraine resisted the Kremlin-backed insurgency and they returned. When the current invasion began in 2022, her mother packed a couple of suitcases and took her and her brother to the west of the country. But Russian troops were still attacking the outskirts of Kyiv, where the girl’s father lived, so until the capital was saved weeks later, the three of them, along with their grandmother and an uncle, were staying in shelters in the province of Zakarpattia, near the Slovakia border.

“Many of my friends,” says Tsimbal, “have also left, but I don’t know anything about others because there is no connection to Mariupol.” With Kyiv and the surrounding area cleared, they finally reached the city. “At first I had no friends because no one wanted to talk to someone like me, a girl from the countryside, who they thought didn’t know how to do anything and had travelled halfway across Ukraine to get there.” It was the second time the girl had to flee violence and, as if her young back hadn’t already borne enough weight, she was bullied. While war forces one to mature, in this girl’s case her maturity is related to her extraordinary intelligence. She is able to open doors to understanding that many adults do not have. “I can’t blame children for not understanding [what she has experienced],” she explains, “they have their own problems.” She isn’t throwing in the towel, but if people don’t even want to listen, she argues, they are even less likely to be able to understand.

Things have changed now. She is fine, comfortable with herself, much more so than when the invasion began when she was 11. She has friends, enjoys acting classes and playing the guitar. And she recounts all this with a ready smile. Even when she talks about her father, who died a few months ago of natural causes while serving in the army, she does so naturally. “It’s fine, thank you,” she responds to condolences. She didn’t have a great connection with him before the war, but she misses him.

After the battle

Oleksandr Charmosov, 62, knows a lot about the lack of understanding and empathy in the face of the relentless trail of destruction left by war. His life has been turned upside down in just a decade. When the Donbas conflict erupted in 2014 and Putin ordered the invasion of Crimea, Charmosov, tall and bearded, was an illustrator. But the invasion made him jump to the defense of his country and he travelled to the Eastern Front, where he served for two years and was wounded three times. “It was harder to leave the army,” he says from a bunker in Kyiv that has now been converted into a business, “than to join it.” That first experience left him shaken. He had found an enemy to fight against, but outside the trenches he was no longer there. “I thought I would go mad, I didn’t want to hear anyone talk about the war because they didn’t care.” He started drinking and learned his lesson. “Alcohol only works for a short period,” he says.

He realised that he needed psychological help, like so many people in Ukraine. According to a study published by The Lancet, 54% of Ukrainians suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Around half a million people sought primary care for mental health problems in 2024, almost four times more than the previous year. These are modest numbers in a country that once reserved psychology and psychiatry for repressing dissidents. Chamorsov, born in the Urals but Ukrainian since childhood, has made a new journey: from being a patient in an organization for the rehabilitation of veterans, he went on to train, study, and become an expert in the field.

And then came the full-scale invasion. This veteran went back to fight on the front lines, but suffered a serious injury in March 2022 in a bombing. Today, he is a point of reference in therapies for soldiers, who seek him out with particular enthusiasm because he knows what they are going through. “It is not my job,” he explains, “it is my mission, this is how I defend Ukraine; my military experience has changed my life.”

The war has also twisted and gripped the life of Tania Zheltova, a lawyer by profession, born in Dnipro 61 years ago. Firstly, because it took away from her the man she loved, her travelling companion; secondly, because until very recently, her son was also holding a rifle. She is a woman with a simple, pure look. She speaks with a tenderness that awakens the senses. She is nervous, she keeps turning her cellphone in her hands while talking about her men. Zheltova is one of the participants in the project Vivas. Stories of true love, inspired by Olena Sokalska. The idea, says the creator of this initiative from an art gallery in Kyiv, is to circulate the pain of those women who were widowed because of weapons into painting. She explains it like this: “If you think about problems everything is black, like a black hole, but if you think about love and happy moments…”

It worked for Zheltova. Standing at her easel, in labored English, she explains what she is painting with her brush: there are two birds on a branch. One is her, the other is her husband. Both he and their son, now 33, set out to defend the country more than a decade ago. After the first bombs fell on February 24, 2022, they returned to the trenches. In August of that year, Zheltova’s husband was wounded and, while waiting for a possible evacuation, a missile ended his life in the Donetsk sector. “I worked hard,” she recalls, “but I always knew that he would do anything for me.” They had built a house together, planted trees, and given birth to a son. “My husband has already done everything.” But his death hit her hard; she cried a lot, she confesses, and painting helped her with her grief. “I feel closer to him,” she admits. But it is not all pain. Her son has finally returned from battle and that makes her happy. She can also tell her five-year-old granddaughter what the love of her life was like. “She already knows,” she stresses, “her grandfather was a hero.”

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