Kyiv, Ukraine – Olha, a 52-year-old nurse from the southern Ukrainian town of Voznesensk, feels as though the fear of war will never leave her, three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of her country.
“When [shells] fly over your head, you fall and curl up and run and hide like an animal,” she told Al Jazeera.
In early March 2022, days after the war ordered by President Vladimir Putin began, her town “was like a bone in the throat” of the Russian army as it advanced northwards from annexed Crimea.
They were on the left bank of the Southern Bug River, 1.5km (1 mile) away from her tiny house that stood next to a military base.
Huddled together and horrified, her paralysed mother, 79, disabled husband and teenage son saw, heard and hid from one of the Russian-Ukrainian war’s key battles.
Ukrainian forces blew up bridges, shot at Russian tanks and infantry, downed a helicopter – and thwarted Russia’s advance towards the nearby southern Ukrainian nuclear power station, the cities of Odesa and Mykolaiv.
More importantly, the Russians could not reach the Moscow-backed separatist province of Transnistria in neighbouring Moldova, 135km (85 miles) southwest of Voznesensk.
Looking back, Olha remembered with pride how the town’s residents “grouped together” to fill sandbags, build barricades, man checkpoints and help each other.
Russians retreated, but not far – and kept pummelling Voznesensk with such frequency that her husband was forced to change the roof and windowpanes three times.
When hiding in the basement, they had shovels at hand in case they needed to dig themselves out – and checked on neighbours after each shelling.
But Olha’s elder son was in a worse situation.
He lived in Bucha, a northern Kyiv suburb where Russians killed hundreds of civilians, with his in-laws.
“Had I been closer [to Bucha], I would have run to him,” she said.
They “miraculously” left Bucha on March 13.
“We still haven’t talked about what happened,” Olha said.
On August 20, 2022, a Russian missile destroyed a five-storey apartment building in Voznesensk, wounding 14, including three children.
A quarter of the town’s population fled and was replaced by refugees from Russia-occupied areas.
But Olha’s family stayed on, finding solace in tending to their garden.
“There are missiles flying, and we’re planting and watering,” she said. “We didn’t know whether we’d be alive, but we built a second greenhouse.”
Then there were blackouts and shortages of food and incontinence pads for her mother, who was born during World War II – and died in June 2022 of natural causes.
“Poor thing, she was born during a war and died during a war,” Olha said.
Russian forces retreated further south in November 2022, and the shelling subsided.
These days, all Olha wants is a “just peace” – something United States President Donald Trump is not ready for, she said.
“It’s scary that a person of such status can afford such cynicism. It’s such a spit in the face,” she said.
No direction home
While Olha has survived in her hometown, almost four million Ukrainians have been internally displaced since the war began.
Mykola, a police officer, left his village near the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on February 25, 2022, a day after the invasion began.
He did not want to cooperate with advancing Russian forces and Moscow-installed authorities – although many of his colleagues did.
He has also severed ties with his pro-Kremlin relatives and settled in the city of Pokrovsk, a strategic stronghold in the Kyiv-controlled part of the Donetsk region.
Mykola continued working with the police while “getting used to the sound of shooting and shelling”, he told Al Jazeera.
In Pokrovsk, which has been under attack for months, he helped elderly residents pack up and leave, often risking his life.
Then he packed up and left – and feels no nostalgia.
“I’m much sadder about not being able to go to the places of my childhood,” Mykola told Al Jazeera.
He constantly thinks about whether he can ever return or visit – and live next to the people who chose occupation.
What scares him the most, though, are fears that Russia will yet again absorb Ukraine.
The West “often disappoints when they can’t understand that Ukraine is not just a fragment of Russia but a really separate state and nation”, he said.
‘A monster state’
For Maria Komissarenko, a 47-year-old postal worker, Russia’s aggressions have robbed her of two homes and a final farewell to her father.
She lived in Horlivka, a southeastern town of plants and coal mines that Moscow-backed separatists seized in 2014.
Remembering the surreal atmosphere of the conflict back then, she said locals wandered around, looking at armed men and pro-Russian rallies and “thinking they were on reality TV”.
In April 2014, a municipal lawmaker who protested against the Russian flag that hung over the city hall was found dead in a river with traces of torture.
Things rolled downhill, and in early 2015, Komissarenko, her partner and two children left for central Ukraine.
Having left the occupied southeast, she was unable to return and attend her father’s funeral in 2021.
Later, the family fled for Bakhmut, 40km (25 miles) north of Horlivka.
She realised with bitterness that most Ukrainians preferred to ignore the separatists. Some “didn’t know what war was” until the full-scale invasion, she said.
Her family nestled into a rented apartment she renovated. While her six-year-old daughter adapted to the move, her son,14, missed his friends.
He lost newfound friends again after the invasion uprooted the family again when advancing Russian troops razed Bakhmut to the ground.
They ended up in Kyiv, “and here, he never got new friends”, Komissarenko said.
She keeps in touch with her 76-year-old mother, who remained in Horlivka. But she has stopped talking to her vehemently pro-Russian elder brother.
As she works at a company that produces military equipment, she feels pessimistic about the return of occupied territories “during my lifetime”.
These days, she treasures little things – Nordic walking and Kyiv’s cultural scene.
“Every weekend, my husband and I go to a theatre or to an art exhibition,” she said.
‘My war is 11 years old’
On the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many also remember the events of 2014.
Time stopped for Maria Kucherenko on February 20, 2014, when Russian soldiers landed in Crimea to seize government buildings and military bases and guard an internationally condemned referendum on the peninsula’s “return to Russia”.
Kucherenko, a linguistics student in the port city of Sevastopol, was 19, at the time.
She was scared, but criticised herself as “young and pathetic”.
“I swore to myself to never be like that any more,” said Kucherenko, now 30 and working as an analyst with the Kyiv-based think tank, Come Back Alive, which supports members of Ukraine’s army.
Sevastopol was centred around a giant naval base that was rented to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and became, according to observers, a Trojan horse that influenced Crimeans with pro-Kremlin sentiments and corrupted their elites.
Just days earlier, a popular uprising in Kyiv ousted Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president. Kucherenko had hoped that the new government would take Crimea back and save her from all the madness and mayhem.
Instead, Crimean police and soldiers were reportedly instructed to just walk away, while pro-Moscow onlookers cheered.
Kucherenko hoped that the men around her would volunteer to fight the Russians.
But they did not, and she spent hours crying in a park, on the beach, in her dorm.
On the night of the March 16 “referendum”, she saw Sevastopol’s main square.
“It seemed there would be no tomorrow, there would only be that day with songs, dances, dead-drunk people and their chatter to Russian folk songs,” she recalled.
Kucherenko decided that she would rather “die than admit defeat”, saying, “The latter is way more horrible to me.”
When the full-scale invasion began, Russian forces landed in the Kyiv suburb of Hostomel, where she rented an apartment.
But Kucherenko was not scared any more.
“The most horrible things happened to me in 2014,” she said. “My war is 11 years old. I will repeat it until I die. After all, I said it in the [US] Congress.”
On November 24, the 1,000th day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she spoke at special hearings of the US Congress by the Helsinki Commission, a human rights monitor.
Then, she told US representatives and senators, “Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and military aggression in eastern Ukraine. Yet it wasn’t until 2022 that the global community started calling it what it truly is: Russia’s war against Ukraine, rather than framing it as a “Ukrainian crisis,” as had been the norm for the preceding eight years. This mischaracterisation laid the groundwork for the war’s current scale.”
