The trail of destruction on the road from
“They parked two armoured vehicles on my lawn,” she said, pointing to a flattened blue fence next to her neat vegetable patch. Nearby was a large crater. Her yellow-painted dacha was perforated with holes.
Shrapnel had wrecked the wooden summer house, too. It was a birthday gift from her late husband, Nikolai, Muzyra explained. “We don't understand why the Russians did this. We are a small, quiet country. If it wasn't for our president, I don't know what we would do," she added, throwing splintered branches and other rubbish on to a spring bonfire.
Muzyra and her son, Denis, live in Zalissya, a village on the highway between the capital Kyiv and the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. For 20 days, between 8 and 28 March, Russian troops took over her home, sleeping on top of her kitchen stove. The property survived better than many others. The house next door is a charred, roofless shell.
Across swathes of territory vacated by Russia's armed forces a great cleanup was underway. Homeowners were tidying up and counting the cost of a devastating month-long occupation. Ukrainian army sappers collected left-behind munitions and defused mines - a vast ongoing job.
This story is from the April 22, 2022 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the April 22, 2022 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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