Inside Ukraine’s villages of the damned: The torment, the horror, the fear
They’re the worst places on earth at present; once happy villages, now subject to terror on an unimaginable scale. SEE VIDEO.
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In the villages of the damned, no one sleeps.
The small rural communities north west of Kyiv are pleasant enough but a sense of foreboding hangs heavier than the shroud of snow now blowing in from the north.
You can’t sleep because you are listening hard, waiting, there is a distant thud but there is no way of knowing if the next thud will be next to you.
They have little here, but missiles shot from 500km away from a Russian battleship in the Black Sea have already taken some of what they’ve got and no-one can really understand why.
A house and a school were hit in the latest firing on Zhytymyr district with minor injuries reported, there were civilians killed in nearby Vinnytsia. Activity has increased in the past 48 hours.
A fighter jet screaming overhead can be heard but not seen flying above the snow laden cloudy grey sky.
There are some 50 villages or hamlets in the region and they all suffer the same fate.
Damned if they leave and damned if they don’t now with Belarusian forces set to invade from one side of them, a Russian column of armoured vehicles moving slowly on the other, missiles overhead and all around a constant stream of people fleeing the conflict, bumper to bumper on the back routes in the direction of Poland.
Once you join this throng – more than 40km long – there is no turning back and you either run out of fuel or have nowhere to stay before curfew.
Outside people scurry with youths and older men scrounging for water bottles not retrieved for the 10 cents for recycling as some would in Australia but to collect precious fuel now in critical short supply.
Most fuel stations here are empty, numerous cars abandoned by the side of the road everywhere testament to the lack of supply.
We’ve got bottles of the precious liquid in the car boot, 1.5lt former water bottles are good but the four litre ones better.
You don’t want to get caught out here.
It’s cold, bone chillingly cold. I’m wearing two thermal tops, a fleece and a jacket – bought for a Tasmanian hike in what seems a lifetime ago – but I’m still shivering.
The ballistic vest helps but people look at you with curious glares or perhaps jealously as no-one else, not even half the soldiers in the bunkers with you, have body armour.
Outside the snow makes less of a picture perfect scene for a postcard and more a Games of Thrones landscape.
Winter is not coming, it has arrived here and everyone is gearing for the climatic clash.
In the hotel come boarding house we’re forced to stay to avoid being caught out in the martial law curfews, the women at the front counter argue. One wants to talk about the war and how it has changed all their lives.
“Putin has done this to us,” she spits with tears welling in her eyes, before she is admonished and told not to speak such things by the other women, possibly her older sisters.
There is a certain humbling stoicism, a “you get what you get and you don’t get upset” attitude that prevails – not just here – and you get a sense that war or no war, its always been like that in this hardy farming corner of Ukraine.
Staying at the lodge there are many women and children and pets, rules if there were any waived, who stay each night, just the one night mostly as they make the pilgrimage west. Strangers go up to the kids with Ukrainian equivalents of Chupa Chups and while they don’t erase their thoughts for daddy or big brother that have stayed behind in their towns to fight the invading enemy, for a moment it brings a smile to their faces. For some.
For other children, they just stare vacant and clasp in the delight in their hand and do nothing more. Mothers here in Ukraine have heartbreakingly reported children simply just no longer speaking. It’s a phenomena that can only get worse.
You want to cry for them. You know it’s as bad as it gets, then it gets worse.
Aleksandr works the rail line or to be more accurate, walks the line. It is his job to ensure there are no Russian bombs on the track and the line remains open to take refugees from the east across contested lands to the west.
There are only four people left in his village, the others have already fled so his job is to check on their homes as well.
“My wife and I, no we do not sleep, we listen, but what to do, nothing but stay in here,” he says in his bunker in his backyard which doubles as a winter crop storage hole.
There’s a certain routine here in the villages.
Locals swap stories with the pilgrims passing through and you get the sense it’s less gossip and more early warning system.
People are glued to their mobile phones for news but there is distrust in their accuracy and people prefer to rely on word of mouth, to look in the eye and know it’s true.
Then sirens go off and you are back in the bunker and it’s unusually warm. Slight respite. No-one wants to speak here, all lost in their own thoughts with misery at the centre.
Everyone knows someone who has lost someone either to death or fleeing to a foreign country, in these parts some say they are the same.
Families have been torn apart either way and everyone knows things will never be the same again.
It’s 4am and I get an automated SMS service message from Telstra about electromagnetic energy and 5G inviting me to read more. I’m not interested but I flick through to the page, why not.
Overheard an aircraft, lower this time rumbles, then another and another and in the half glow of my phone I wait.
In the village of the damned, no-one sleeps.
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