Martin Kuz: A Son, His Mother and Struggles in Ukraine.

Victims of war's 'cruel absurdity'

Editor's note: Martin Kuz, a former colleague at Hearst Newspapers, has been traveling in Ukraine covering people and their suffering from the invasion by Russia two years ago. You can follow his reporting and support his journalism at addresses below.

Story, Photos by

Martin Kuz

War turns everyday moments into everlasting trauma. On a Monday morning in April, Volodymyr Ulyanych walked outside his home to throw away a bag of trash. Seconds later, a Russian artillery shell fell from the sky.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” he said, standing in the courtyard of an evacuation shelter in Kharkiv in early June, a lit cigarette in his left hand. He had lost his right arm below the elbow to shrapnel wounds, another casualty of war’s cruel absurdity.

“You have to live with it.”

Volodymyr and his mother, Valentyna, fled to the city in mid-May from their village of Lukyantsi, 15 miles to the northeast and 2 miles from Russia. They escaped as Russian forces launched a renewed offensive in the northern Kharkiv region that ignited an exodus of more than 14,000 residents over the next month.

Most moved into one of dozens of university dormitories converted into shelters across the city, where 300,000 post-secondary students had attended classes before Russia’s full-scale invasion began two years ago. High-rises that once housed young people pursuing their future have since served as catch basins for evacuees struggling to survive the present.

The new arrivals joined thousands of others living in the dorms — including an untold number displaced since the war’s first weeks — and many face the prospect of never returning home. Russia has retaken several villages and cities near the border that its troops abandoned in fall 2022 during a Ukrainian counteroffensive that liberated almost the entire Kharkiv region.

Lukyantsi’s population of 1,000 plunged by half at the invasion’s onset; fewer than 300 residents remained when the Russians seized the settlement again this spring. Volunteer rescuers evacuated the Ulyanyches, who had time to grab a couple of bags of clothing, three or four jars of canned vegetables and little else.

The war has confined Valentyna, 60, and Volodymyr, 38, to a fifth-floor, one-window dorm room on a state university campus. Painted teal and white, the space holds two beds, two dining chairs and a folding table, and their “kitchen” consists of a hot plate and tea kettle. They share the communal bathrooms and showers down the hall with others forced to abandon their lives.

Mother and son learned from a rescue worker in late May that the fighting in Lukyantsi damaged their home. The news deepened the pair’s gratitude for their temporary refuge. Still, the relative safety of Kharkiv — where air raid sirens wail daily — has failed to alleviate Valentyna’s despair or her longing for home.

“I’m shaking inside,” she said, kneading her hands as she sat on her bed. “Things don’t feel normal. I have trouble sleeping.” She worries about her son whenever he leaves the building. “I don’t want a rocket to hit him again.”

She received nods of sympathy from Volodymyr Kruglov, a licensed psychologist who had stepped into the room a few minutes earlier. He belongs to a mobile support team with a nonprofit based in Kharkiv called East SOS that dispatches mental health providers across the city to aid evacuees.

Kruglov described the dormitories as “buildings of pain,” and he seeks to reassure people that they possess the strength to endure.

“You’re trying to give them a little hope, show them a point of light,” he told me when Valentyna excused herself to walk to the restroom. “You try to remind them that they can exert some control and there are resources to help. But more than anything, you listen. That’s what they need most.”

As he waited for Valentyna, Olha Aznaieva, a social worker with East SOS, offered some of those resources to Volodymyr, who worked as a phone technician before losing his hand. She gave him names and phone numbers of employment services, apartment landlords and medical clinics in Kharkiv.

He thanked her and explained that his father — Valentyna’s husband — had passed away in 1999, when Volodymyr was 13. His unexpected death imposed adulthood on the couple’s only child at an early age, and since the artillery blast in April, Volodymyr had noticed that his mother’s emotions appeared closer to the surface, her mood more fragile.

He felt a son’s duty to protect her. The room marked the borders of a personal purgatory, and he thought that finding an apartment for them might ease her sense of uncertainty. “She will keep looking to the past as long as we are living here,” he told Aznaieva and Kruglov. “But there is nothing for us in our village. The Russians are there. We have to move toward a new life.”

Valentyna reentered the room, and the conversation soon wound down. Kruglov and Aznaieva needed to continue their dorm rounds and promised to visit the Ulyanyches the following week. Their presence had boosted Valentyna’s spirits, at least in the moment. After they left, I asked about her exchange with Kruglov, and for the first time that afternoon, I saw her smile.

“It’s a small thing,” she said. “But it’s nice when someone from the outside checks to see if you’re still alive.”

Subscribe to Martin Kuz's Reporting on Ukraine at Substack. Support his reporting at https://www.gofundme.com/f/reporting-on-ukraine