Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands; an African delegation that visited here is now in Moscow.
Our main character today is Svetlana Goi, who risks her life to take care of left-behind animals in an area that is now a focal point of the counteroffensive.
The 76 year old proudly says she was once the best typist for a company that manufactured machines which helped feed animals.
“I was always the fastest; they were always bringing me the most important pieces of work to type at the plant,” she recalls.
But that life – and her town of Orikhiv, about 65 km southeast of Zaporizhzhia – is long gone.
“The Russians, they destroyed it fully,” she said.
It is estimated that 80 percent of the buildings and homes have been destroyed.
The shelling was constant. The military urged her to evacuate. But she held out. Like so many Ukrainians, she had been working for her home for a lifetime – and she wouldn’t leave it unless she had no other choice.
But the war slowly made a painful split inevitable.
She had no choice but to leave her town for the major hub of Zaporizhzhia, where we met her at a hub for internally displaced people.
As we neared, I saw that it was near a spot I had marked as a no-go area in the spring of 2022. Now it was safe enough for refugees to gather.
Still, it all nags at the septuagenarian. Home is home. And she still voluntarily travels back to the ruins of her town – a dangerous journey only done to her love of animals.
“I have animals left there,” she told me.
Before the war, she had loved feeding the neighborhood cats and dogs. Despite the shelling, she had continued to do this during the period of war.
And now, even after her evacuation from her destroyed house, she still slips back into Orikhiv, making the 65 kilometer journey...
Tim Mak