The story of Hanna Ryashchenko from Borodyanka, occupied by the Russians in March 2022
AUTHOR:
On the first day of the war, the town of Borodyanka in Kyiv Oblast was still quiet. Hanna had time to go to the market to buy sugar. She thought she would sit quietly at home and not go out anywhere. Hanna believed that the Russian military wouldn't touch civilians, especially old pensioner women like her.
But on the second day, the Russians arrived in the village. "As soon as they drove by, we hid in the basement. When they passed by, we went back out. And it was like that for two days," Hanna recalls.
Russian soldiers were passing right under the windows of Hanna's building. One day, she went to spend the night in her neighbor’s house. Hanna's house had been bombed the night before. When she ran in the morning to see what had happened, she and her loved ones were shot at from a Russian plane. The plane turned twice and fired again. Fortunately, Hanna and the people who were with her escaped alive.
After this horror, Hanna evacuated to Ternopil. And when she returned to Borodyanka two months later, she saw that absolutely everything had been stolen from her apartment. There were no appliances, no furniture, and no light fixtures. At the age of 76, Hanna ended up on the street and now lives in a modular house.
After her return to Borodyanka, Hanna heard many horrible stories from those who remained during the occupation. The daughter and son-in-law of Hanna's friend died in a basement. Russian soldiers did not allow their bodies to be removed. The woman waited 45 days to take her children from the rubble.
More than 50 people died in the building next to Hanna's. The residents of her building still haven't found their neighbor Lyuba and her grandson Artem. Many of Hanna's acquaintances were killed.
Hanna didn't believe that there would be a full-scale Russian invasion until the last moment. She has friends and relatives living in Russia, so Russia’s armed aggression came as a shock to her.
"Are they people? They have no heart. Why did they do this? What have we done wrong to them? What can you say to them? Nothing good!" Hanna says of Russians.
Hanna now lives in a modular home and hopes to get at least a room in an apartment building to spend her old age there. Before the war, she sang in the local ensemble Nadvechirya. After Borodyanka’s liberation, the ensemble resumed its activities, so Hanna is preparing for concerts and hopes for the best.
This material was created based on testimonies collected by the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
These pictures are created by artificial intelligence. They are NOT real. They are illustrations of the stories we tell. Most of these stories could not have been fixed by the camera. At the same time, there is documentary work by hundreds of Ukrainian and international photographers who produce real, and so much painful, documentation of this war. Check photographs by Oleksandr Glyadelov, Maksym Dondiuk, Mstyslav Chernov and Yevhen Malolietka, Andriy Dubchak, Yulia Kochetova, and many others.