The Times: Final resident of village in Ukraine’s forgotten war bombed out of her home

By The Times.

Published Oct. 8, 2018 at 9:37 am

An elderly woman, Sofiya Tolmacheva, cries among damaged houses in the front-line town of Pisky on May 15, 2017. Tolmacheva is one of the few residents remaining in the town, unable to flee because she has to care for her disabled son. Another of her sons, injured in shelling, has since gone missing. She also cares for a dog left in the town by her neighbor.

Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

It seemed that nothing could persuade Olga Rudenko to move; neither the collapse of communism, the outbreak of war, nor the shelling of her village.

She had lived in the Ukrainian hamlet since Leonid Brezhnev ruled from the Kremlin, riding out the collapse of the Soviet empire and the turmoil of its aftermath. Then, in 2014, after fighting erupted between government forces and Kremlin-backed separatists, she found herself just inside the separatist-held territory, and on the front line.