Now that the Russians have withdrawn from the western bank of the Dnieper River, Ukrainians have been liberating village after village on the way to Kherson. One of them is Stanislav, about 24 miles from Kherson itself, where my aunt and uncle live. They’ve been under Russian occupation since March.
“We survived, we survived!” Those are the words that my aunt Antonina, 67, a Ukrainian language and literature teacher, kept saying to me, over and over, when I called her. Thursday morning she woke up to find the Russian troops had abandoned her village. The soldiers left many of their belongings behind, as if their departure was completely unplanned.
Most of the Russian soldiers who were in the village came from Buryatia, a remote region on the border with Mongolia. One unit had parked its tank in the garden of one of my aunt’s neighbors. The soldiers smilingly told people they had come to “liberate them”.
“From whom? From what?” the villagers asked. In response, the Buryats just smiled.
The occupation was like a daily balancing act between life and death.
In the spring, when it was still possible to get a stable phone connection with my relatives, I could hear explosions in the background. When the blasts got closer, my aunt and uncle moved down to the cellar of their neighbors’ house. I don’t know whether the cellar would have actually protected them from a direct hit by a Russian shell.
Sometimes the Russians did stupid things. Once, they drove down to the part of the village overlooking the estuary and just started shooting into the water. I remember my aunt Antonina trying to understand why they were doing that. But she was afraid to ask the Russians themselves.
Over time, the occupiers began to cut off public services. First the internet disappeared, then the lights and then the water. By the time we talked late Thursday, they had nothing left, not even gas for heating. It had been that way for a week.
For a few months after the occupation begin, a local man named Ivan helped everyone by repairing their broken electrical appliances. At some point in the summer, the Russians detained him and gave him a brutal beating, so he left.
“Without him we were left to fend for ourselves”, my aunt told me, almost crying. “Nobody needs us here now”.
The Russians settled in the houses of the Ukrainians who had fled. “We’re going to stay here for a long time”, the Buryats told my aunt. “It’s a good city. We like it here”.
My aunt laughed at that one. Ukrainians know the difference between a village and a city.
In her career as a teacher, she has taught many generations of students. She lost one of them, a woman, when a fragment from a missile went through her kitchen window. The victim never even knew what happened.
My aunt and her husband, Roman, could not leave Stanislav because of his advanced age and poor health. He wouldn’t have been able to endure all the challenges of escaping, under Russian shelling, to the non-occupied territory of Ukraine. There was no guarantee they would have survived.
For months, we comforted each other by making plans for me to return to Stanislav, the village with its beautiful rock formations along the estuary, after liberation. But the long months of war made that seem like an impossible dream. And when the Russians left, we were worried they would leave nothing but destruction in their wake, just as they had done after retreating in Donbas.
But now, Ukrainian troops have moved into the village. They raised the blue and yellow flag above Stanislav, and several dozen villagers joined them in singing the Ukrainian national anthem. In one of many videos emerging over the past few days, I recognized my aunt hugging a Ukrainian soldier, crying and thanking him. She does not know that hundreds of thousands of people saw her online, because she still doesn’t have an internet connection. But she called again several times to tell me how Stanislav has been celebrating reunification with Ukraine.
“I’ve come such a long way”, my aunt said, crying. “This is a historic day for us. This is the best day of our lives”.
Iuliia Mendel is a journalist, the author of “The Fight of Our Lives”, and a former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.