Irpin’s cemetery has a separate section dedicated to the victims of Russia’s crimes. It is located deep inside the graveyard, but you can never miss it: almost every grave is marked with a Ukrainian flag.
Not far away another section is dedicated to the military who died defending the town and liberated it from Russian forces.
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Less than a kilometer (half a mile) away from the graveyard, is a site that is a complete opposite to the gloom one feels in the cemetery. It’s one of Irpin’s many parks. On the weekend, it is full of life: children play and yell on its playground, tea and street food stalls see brisk business from visitors, including those who have been to the nearby church to pray.
The air is full of the pine trees, most of them higher than the apartment blocks opposite the park, which were built in the five years before the war. The flats there were almost all bought by those Ukrainians who had left the Russian-occupied Donbas and Kyiv citizens who thought Irpin would be a better place to live rather than crowded districts of the capital.
While many of them left the flats in February 2022 as the Russians advanced quite a few remained because they could not believe it was the start of a real war, let alone that it would still be continuing after a thousand days.
The question I always ask myself is how much longer will it continue?
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Bruises and Freedom
My parents did not believe Irpin would become a battlefield. “We will quickly drive you west and then come back after a while,” they told me, as I sat in our car and drove west to a house I had rented from the parents of a colleague.
From western Ukraine my parents found out Irpin had been undergoing a three-day curfew and in March, mobile communications were lost. We could not call our neighbors.
All I heard was “it is currently impossible to contact your subscriber” – a phrase that often irritates me even now, after the horror is gone.
The horror of realizing that the city that has been your home for twenty years, which is how long I have lived in Irpin, could have been lost. Two artillery shells broke through the roof of its sports hall in my old school. Luckily the pine forest I passed on my daily to walk to school is still there.
The thought that was spinning in my head during the whole of that spring in 2022 was: “I can never return to my neighborhood.” Memories of a life that filled me with joy are in danger of being lost as the place where it all happened was brutally invaded and mutilated.
An artillery shell hit a supermarket in our district and killed three. A Russian soldier threw a grenade in the gym I had regularly visited. Administrative buildings in our district were damaged by artillery fire. Balconies became torn away by shells, leaving ash and black holes behind.
One of my neighbors who had stayed in the town decided to leave after the flat close to his was hit.
Irpin had been a small cottage town that became popular as newer apartment blocks were erected. Many cottages remained but they were more vulnerable to Russian weapons.
Today many cottages remain that are nothing but walls after an artillery shell or a missile hit the house.
The destruction was terrible, but worse was how Russian occupiers searched the town, looking for Ukrainians to torture, shoot and rape – as we were to later to find out from media reports.
Ukraine’s armed forces officially liberated the city on March 28, 2022, forcing the Russians to withdraw to their own territory. The north was free. No more strikes. No more arrests. No more Chechens searching for more victims – but that was only the 35th day of war.
Healing the Wounds
My parents returned to our house in May 2022, shortly after officials gave the green light that the city had been demined.
At first, they could not open the doors of their house, because nearby explosions had caused parts of the ceiling and plaster to fall down, blocking the way. Somehow, their two cats and the dog had miraculously survived.
We were lucky though. It could have been a lot worse. I joined my parents in the summer.
It was painful, but I felt relieved. Over the next 965 days, the focus was on rebuilding the basic infrastructure of the town.
“I tell you they started installing new Internet wires [just] days after the official liberation announcement,” a volunteer I know told me when I returned. He stayed in the city and delivered parcels from Kyiv to the elderly and military who stayed in Irpin.
I made friends with another volunteer whose team helped evacuate people from Irpin. If they hadn’t had to we would probably never have met.
Both of them now continue to gather donations and deliver aid to the military around the country.
Step by step, our family repaired the roof, which was damaged by fragments from the walls of our neighbor’s house after it was struck by a missile. The same neighbors had to rebuild their house from scratch.
The parks and woods were cleared of mines. Ukraine’s state officials were able to support us thanks to increasing support from Western donors, who funded reconstruction of Irpin’s apartment blocks.
Soon after that, flowers bloomed in the backyard of our house. The gym reopened. Citizens of a townhouse burnt to ashes near my home found the funding to restore their home.
A living organism does not easily forget trauma. The city now looks very fancy, but you will notice shrapnel holes in fences, circles caused by mines on the asphalt, remnants of shrapnel in the walls of houses.
Most of Kyiv’s streets look much less bruised than that and I hope they never will be.
In Irpin, there is visible healing, although things appear to have returned to normal. But many wounds remain invisible. The memories fade, but then return if you hear a sound related to those events, see something relevant or look at another photo of debris elsewhere.
And sometimes it is not the sadness that swallows you – it is anger for the injustice so many suffered.
This was your hometown that was invaded by foreigners you never asked for, who destroyed the place where you lived, killed innocent people, drove around in tanks stealing whatever they could even though they live so far from civilization that they couldn’t use them even if they knew how.
They understand nothing but a brute force. It is not the first time they have invaded a country. It is not the first time they have raped. It is not the first time they have ignored international law and common sense.
“We just pay for our mortgage, we won’t go,” a soldier once said to my university friend’s mother on a market in a Russian-occupied village in the Kherson region.
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