MARIUPOL, Ukraine — A group of pensioners meet in a former basement bar in a residential district of Mariupol, a coastal city 740 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. With grim faces, they place on a table dozens of papers, including state documents, official letters, and newspaper clippings.
They also put down lots and lots of photos. The photos depict their half-destroyed houses in the frontline village of Shyrokyne, located 20 kilometers from Mariupol.
Looking at the pictures is one of the only ways for them to see what’s going on in their village now. “The military, journalists, and volunteers take these photos and post them on social media. I have thousands of them,” said Oleksandr Pylypenko, 65, a former resident of Shyrokyne and now an internally displaced person (IDP) in Mariupol.
“How can all these people get there, but we can’t?” he asks.
Ghost village
Once a picturesque fishing village on the coast of the Azov Sea, Shyrokyne became the site of intense fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine in September 2014, February 2015 and May 2015.
The village of 1,500 people lost 12 of its residents killed and more than 20 wounded. Residents fled the village in panic as the fighting raged, sometimes even forgetting essential documents or valuable jewelry. Some had to get to Mariupol by foot, even walking there over the ice on the frozen sea.
The last civilians left Shyrokyne in June 2015. Control of the village passed from one side to the other several times until February 2016, when Russian-led troops withdrew from the village — but not before they laid mines all over its territory.
The Ukrainian military banned residents from returning due to the lurking danger of the mines. However, in October 2015 some residents were allowed to visit Shyrokyne for several days via the Russian-controlled village of Sakhanka under an agreement mediated by the Joint Center for Control and Coordination (JCCC), which liaises between Ukrainian and Russia-led forces in the Donbas.
But after a person was wounded by a mine, the military totally banned all access of civilians to Shyrokyne in order to prevent casualties. Since then, the army has taken photos of the IDPs’ houses in Shyrokyne so the residents can assess their condition.
The soldiers also take flowers from the IDPs to lay on the graves of their relatives on the Orthodox Christian remembrance day.
Lost property
Up to 800 former residents of Shyrokyne have settled in Mariupol. Most have to rent apartments in the city, where a one-room flat rents for Hr 1,000 (about $37) a month — exactly the amount of monthly financial aid paid by the state to the IDPs.
But some struggle to get even this meagre sum of aid: Those who left ownership documents in Shyrokyne when they fled sometimes struggle to prove they were residents of the village, which means it’s difficult for them to claim government assistance.
While the government also offered to construct new houses for the IDPs, paying 50 percent of the cost, most don’t have the money to rebuild. “This is still too expensive for us,” said Pylypenko.
A former plant worker in Mariupol, Pylypenko decided to settle in Shyrokyne, the village in which he was born, to live out his retirement in a quiet place by the sea.
But the war ruined his plans. Now Pylypenko uses his home computer to see how his house in the village is falling into ruins too, by combing social media for pictures of his property.
Sometimes he also finds signs of looting, he said. Residents say the police arrested a group of soldiers in Mariupol with a car loaded with metal goods in May 2016. The IDPs from Shyrokyne recognized some of their belongings in the car.
In May 2015, the police also detained a truck in the town of Mangush near Mariupol loaded with furniture, dishes, and kitchen appliances — all goods that had been looted from Shyrokyne, said Pylypenko, showing media reports of the incidents.
The police, however, have failed to charge anyone, he said. Remembering killings Daryna Uskova, 74, shows the pictures of her kitchen in Shyrokyne, where her son Serhiy was killed by an artillery shell in May 2015.
“He was thrown to the wall by the blast wave. The neighbors who found him said his body was full of pieces of shrapnel,” she said. Uskova said her son couldn’t leave Shyrokyne because soldiers from the Azov volunteer battalion, which was fighting in the village at that time, detained him on suspicion that he was spying for Russian-led forces — a claim his mother denies. After interrogation, they released her son but kept his passport, without which he couldn’t pass through checkpoints to escape the area.
Uskova stayed with her son, hiding in a basement in the village, until she was taken to hospital in Russian-occupied Novoazovsk in a diabetic coma. Several days after that, her son was killed. Now Uskova, who used to work in a sanatorium by Shyrokyne, lives with her other son in Mariupol.
Another woman from Shyrokyne, who refused to give her name, fearing for her safety, said she had to bury her husband in their front garden after he was killed by a shell in February 2015.
She then fled from the village with the bloodstains on her clothes. It took a year and eight months to get permission for her husband’s body to be exhumed and given a proper burial in Mariupol, the woman said.
Community spirit
The IDPs look at a list with the names of all those killed in Shyrokyne, recalling how each of them died. Some become emotional, bursting into tears.
Galyna Mizina, a psychologist from aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières, who works with the IDPs from Shyrokyne, says all are suffering from deep psychological trauma. “They all need to learn how to live again,” she said.
For now, their community spirit helps them to survive. At first, the IDPs from Shyrokyne helped each other with food or clothes. This year they collected money to pay for heart surgery for a man in their community, Mizina said.
In October 2015 the IDPs created their own non-government organization called “Saving Shyrokyne,” and started writing the letters to government bodies and international organizations to attract attention to their needs. But they have so far failed to achieve their main goal — to be allowed to visit Shyrokyne again.
Fiona Frazer, the Head of the United Nations Human Rights Mission to Ukraine, who has met with the Shyrokyne IDPs several times, said the government should develop a plan for how to make this happen.
“Maybe (this could be done) just in small groups — one or two representatives, who could go in the company of Ukraine’s armed forces,” she said. Otherwise “they’ll just feel that they’ve been left out in a vacuum,” she added.
