Her yard is pocked by craters from wayward bombs, the vegetable garden lies in ruins and her bees have abandoned their hives.
But Vira Chernukha, 76 and now the sole resident of a northeastern Ukrainian village bombed and depopulated by Russian invaders, has no intention of ever leaving Dementiivka again.
Nowadays, she keeps busy fixing the damage to her yard and tending to a monument to Ukrainian soldiers who died defending the village.All she remembers from Feb. 24, 2022, the day the Russians invaded, was waking up a neighbour at 4.20 a.m. to news of war."My kitchen door was open, I was standing next to the stove.
"I said 'I will not go anywhere, I will sit here in Belgorod on a bench near the train station,'" she said. "But then my daughter-in-law found me and with the help of volunteers they took me away.""We travelled via Latvia, Lithuania and Poland to Lviv and then Vinnitsya," she said, referring to two western Ukrainian cities.
Ukrainian forces retook much of the country's northeast last year in a lightning counteroffensive that caught Russian troops off guard.
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