SALTIVKA, Ukraine – On a recent Saturday morning, Yevhenia Botiyeva weeded the flower bed outside her apartment building, a routine she has adopted since returning home in late spring.
She worked methodically, seemingly unfazed by the apocalyptic landscape of burnt buildings, shattered windows, and the occasional thump of artillery surrounding her.
Her husband, Nikolai Kucher, who had survived Covid-19, a heart attack and now had cancer, would soon emerge from their first-floor apartment to build a wood fire to heat water in a blackened kettle for coffee. But for now, it was only Mrs. Botiyeva, 82, who took care of the overgrown lilies.
It was a strangely cozy scene for a war zone – a testament to how even the menacing and surreal begins to feel normal when given enough time.
“Tea or coffee?” Mrs. Botiyeva offered, pouring hot water from a plastic thermos while sitting at a folding kitchen table placed outside the building. A vase filled with orange lilies and deep yellow heliopsis paid tribute to an image of the Virgin Mary mounted on a nearby wall at the entrance to the building.
“The Mother of God protects us,” she said serenely, urging her guests to try their “war sweets”—salty crackers topped with creamy honey scooped from a jar.
Saltivka was planned in the 1960s as a bedroom community on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and was once a district of half a million people. Now in largely abandoned apartment buildings that once housed thousands of people, there are only dozens.
Ms Botiyeva, a retired ophthalmologist, and her husband, a retired engineer, said they would rather endure the hardship than join the millions of displaced Ukrainians who relied on the kindness of strangers as they awaited war. In the meantime, they have created a community with the others who have been left behind.
Every visible building has scorched walls and shattered windows. The shops that are still there have been boarded up. Nearby, an apron and other items of clothing hang from the top branches of a tree that was engulfed by an explosion, residents said.
The playgrounds are deserted – families with children have fled.
There is no running water, no heating and no security against continued Russian attacks.
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Few residents leave the apartment complex because most of the suburb is so badly damaged and there are no buses – and the nearest supermarket is now an hour’s walk away.
A message scribbled on an abandoned van blocking part of the road to the apartment complexes warns that there is no civilian access to the area. That security ban, imposed during the worst shelling, has now been lifted. Usually, however, only security forces and volunteers who deliver food come here.
“We survived another night,” said Halyna Zakusova, a neighbor, as she hugged Ms. Botiyeva after she emerged from the sixth-floor apartment she shares with her son.
Mrs. Zakusova, 65, sat at the outdoor table and stroked a black and white cat, Musa, who had jumped into her arms.
The two women, casual acquaintances before the war, have become friends. Ms. Zakusova, a retired city worker, moved into the building 31 years ago during the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union.
Because their apartment building – number 25 – is on the edge of the complex, police and volunteers drop donated food nearby and residents distribute it to neighboring buildings.
“We take what we need and give the rest to other people. If we don’t have something, we can go to them,’ said Mrs Botiyeva. “Life is like a boomerang: how you want to be treated, you have to treat other people, including people you don’t know.”
The two women meet every day for coffee, Ms. Botiyeva said, and when they make something tasty, they share it. A few days ago, Mrs. Botiyeva made cherry vareniki: dumplings filled with sour cherries collected from a nearby tree, cooked on a hot plate.
Outside the next block of flats, another woman, Larysa, sat at a battered wooden table pitting cherries for sugar and freezing them for the winter. “They have vitamin C,” Larysa said. Suspicious of foreign visitors, she refused to give her last name.
“Some of our neighbors went abroad, some went to western Ukraine and some went to other regions,” says Lyudmyla, 67, a retired accountant sitting next to her. “Whoever had no money stayed here.”
Lyudmyla showed off the fruit trees she planted when she first moved into the building in 1991. She also declined to give her last name for privacy reasons, but handed out handful after handful of sour cherries.
Near the cherry trees are apricot, walnut and apple trees.
There are also flowers “for the soul,” said Mr. Kucher, Mrs. Botiyeva’s husband.
In addition to packaged food, the police also provide donated dog and cat food for abandoned pets. Outside Building 25, a few minutes after a stray tabby finished eating from a bowl of dried food, two doves came forward to finish off the rest.
Every other day, Mrs. Zakusova’s son, Oleksandr Ihnatenko, 37, trudges to the edge of the complex with a bucket of grain to feed dozens of carrier pigeons in a two-story pigeon loft for an absent neighbor.
Ukrainian artillery targeting Russian troops thumps in the background. After Russia failed to take Kharkov in the February invasion, Ukrainian forces pushed them back — in some places back to the Russian border. But Ukraine’s second-largest city is of such strategic importance that Russia is expected to eventually launch another all-out attack on it.
After the horror of the early days when they huddled in the basement, the remaining residents have become experts at recognizing terrifying sounds, Ms Botiyeva said.
“At first you’re scared, you’re confused, you can’t accept the situation,” she said. “Now we understand what’s outgoing, what’s coming in. We are not afraid of any sound. Now we have experience. But it is better not to have this experience.”
Ms Botiyeva and her husband left the apartment for a few months after the war started, not because they were afraid, but because they were cold, she said. They stayed with friends and when spring came they returned.
Mr. Kucher said they were not welcome. His wife gave a more ethereal reason to come back.
“A house should feel that it is loved, that it is not abandoned, that it is not left behind,” said Ms Botiyeva, adding: “So that it can take us in later and we can live in peace here. “
Mrs. Zakusova and her son survived the winter despite freezing temperatures. She said they poured boiling water into hot water bottles and dug under piles of blankets to keep warm.
As the summer progresses, and with what may be a larger Russian offensive looming, peace seems elusive.
“We thought we would be a generation that would not know war,” said Ms. Zakusova. Her mother, 88, survived World War II but is now imprisoned in a village in the Russian-occupied Kherson region.
“We can’t reach her by phone, we can’t go there,” she said. “We have no idea what’s going on. Does she have food? Is she on medication?”
Ms. Zakusova said that if the war was still raging when winter came, she planned to go find her mother and stay with her. Her son would be left behind.
“He’ll survive, but my mother won’t,” she said.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, not only with conviction, but with a remarkable serenity, given all the hardships she’d endured and was likely to come. “We’ll be fine.”