News from Ukraine: A dark fairy tale with a sad end – or a painful ending for the mother of a baby who is fighting against the Russian aggression
The associate lecturer in Ukrainian at School of Slavonic and East-European Studies, University College London, is a special projects curator. She obtained her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the University of London. She divides her time between the UK and Ukraine. Her work on Ukraine is supported by the IWM project Documenting Ukraine. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
December is the month of fairy tales, when we are reassured of the “happily ever after” when we peer into the darkness.
“We used to joke that our life was like a dark fairy tale inclined towards a happy ending. And now it’s over,” says Ievheniia, a displaced Ukrainian woman in Poland who this December is nursing her two-month-old son – and raw grief for the child’s father.
On November 18, Ievheniia’s husband Denys was killed in action while defending Ukraine against Russian aggression. The 47-year-old died at the site of some of the war’s heaviest fighting, near the city of Bakhmut in the east of the country. There were bomb craters, charred trees, and soldiers waist-deep in mud as Ukrainian forces held the line there for months.
In this dark Ukrainian fairy tale, pivotal moments – from marriage ceremony to funeral – take place via video link. In a time of war, love is disrupted and shifted to the digital space.
Ievheniia, a sports medicine physician and reserve officer, would like to join Ukraine’s army in the next eight years. She said she was not the kind of person who would flee.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html
Ievheniia, the Dark Side of the Universe, a Refugee Recruiter in the AdS/CFT Correspondence
As we hurry to bring gifts to our loved ones, enchanted by the flickering of Christmas lights, we should remember Europe was plunged into darkness by Russia’s barbaric imperialist war.
After driving westwards across the country under Russian bombardment, Ievheniia finally arrived at an enlistment office. She was interviewed on a Friday and told to return the following Monday to sign a contract with the Armed Forces.
On the weekend, she decided to take a pregnancy test, just in case. She chuckled at the thought that the ground was slipping under one’s feet. “On top of that, it turned out that I was pregnant.”
The pregnancies provided a twist, as the woman who planned to defend her homeland instead became a flow of refugees in Poland.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html
A Christmas Fairy Tale about a Ukrainian soldier’s death and the birth of a son: The story of Ievheniia and Denys
While Ievheniia and Denys were separated by war, they sought to improve their relationship with the state. The everyday ingenuity of the country at war was at work; now, Ukrainian servicemen are allowed to marry via a video call. We got married by the handsome man dressed in a uniform, instead of boring civil servants. Ievheniia had no reason to complain.
With the help of the internet, Denys kept the magic alive with professional photoshoots ordered from the trenches and flower deliveries.
When one morning she did not pick up the phone, Denys raised the alarm all over Warsaw and a rescue squad found Ievheniia unconscious in her rented flat. The death could have been prevented by a delay. A section of the Caesarean portion followed. The father was able to meet his new son because he was born two months early.
Ukrainian men of fighting age are not allowed to leave the country under martial law. Yet as is appropriate for a fairy tale, Denys got permission, crossed the border, and spent five days with his family.
It was a time of shopping, signing up for a doctor and having a good time. Then he left. Ievheniia remembered that they sent greetings to him on his birthday. He was dead the next day.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/opinions/ukraine-christmas-fairy-tales-death-dovzhyk/index.html
“Consolatory fables” for the Ukrainians and their use as a tool to fight evil: a story by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino, the celebrated Italian journalist and editor of folktales, among other works, called them “consolatory fables” because it is that a rare fairy tale ends badly. If it does, it means the time to be consoled has not yet come. Instead, it is time to act.
A fairy tale’s narrative logic must not be seen as deluded. The wily kid will not defeat the monster with the aid of magic. Like ten months ago, Ukrainians need military aid sufficient to bring a decisive victory over Russia, not just prolong the fight with enormous sacrifices. Ukrainian victory depends on our collective effort.
I was wondering how I would act in a fight against evil when I was a teenager. Would I be able to turn away and proceed with my daily life?” Ievheniia told me. All of us have a chance to find out.
As Ukraine commemorated the one year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, a man lay in bed in a small room with Russian TV playing in the background and smelling of cigarettes.
A Case Study in the Interaction of a 17-year-old Man with a Person with Disabilities and a Family in Ukraine
He’s 17 years old but unable to move or eat on his own because of a severe form of cerebral palsy. He has had a lot of convulsions and struggles to breathe.
Sasha requires round-the-clock care, but after his mother died three months ago no one was willing to take care of him. He continued to live with his disabled stepfather and step-grandmother Halyna Chernyshova, an 81-year-old woman who sometimes refers to him as “it” and who openly contemplated whether he “would be better off with his mom.”
The future seems to be less than happy for the man. With nobody able or willing to care for him, he was transferred to a facility near Kyiv in early March, days after CNN’s visit. The place is not designed for a long-term stay, but an exception was made in Sasha’s case because there’s no space for him elsewhere.
Lilia Seheda, his distant aunt, wasn’t able to take him in as a single mom. She would visit a couple times a day and help with food or change. She would look at his smile and read to him.
When the parents can’t cope with care load anymore, an institution is the only other option. Kravchenko said that while this has always been a problem in Ukraine, the pressures of the war mean many more families are struggling. Roughly 40,000 people were institutionalized before the invasion. According to the Ukrainian government, around 4,000 new people were sent into institutions in the first few months of the war.
Kravchenko’s own son, Oleksiy, has an intellectual disability and behavioral disorders that are possibly related to his traumatic birth. He was born in what was then Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1980s, at a time when the standard procedure was to put disabled children in institutions.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-disabilities-cnnphotos-intl-cmd/
The Klepets family in Kamchatka, Ukraine: How war affected Raisa and a woman who was killed by bandits outside her home
The place is a good place to escape the war. There is a forest and a river nearby. And because the property is so remote there are no air raid sirens and — thanks to recently installed solar panels — no blackouts.
On a recent Saturday, the common room became a disco hall. The otherwise dark room had a green tint because of a colorful party light.
Oleksiy Kravchenko, Raisa’s son, spent most of the evening with his friend Maryna Klepets. No matter what kind of music was on, the two were slow dancing, standing about two feet apart from each other, holding hands and shuffling from side to side.
Maryna likes to keep to herself. Sometimes she hides her face by pressing her chin into her shoulder.
At home, she likes to sit in her favorite spot, a comfy couch in the kitchen where she can leaf through magazines and books. She likes to have something on in the background, TV or radio. And she loves to draw. Sometimes, she draws the war, she told CNN. She uses the colors of war: grey and red.
The Klepets family was very troubled by the early days of the invasion. The constant sounds of war frightened Maryna and she didn’t like going into the shelter. There also wasn’t any signal in the basement, so she couldn’t listen to anything to distract herself. She had a quiet night, talking to herself.
She told CNN that a woman was killed by bandits outside, most likely referring to the strike that hit a building across the street from her home.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-disabilities-cnnphotos-intl-cmd/
Voice of the Dream: The need for family-based foster care of adults in Ukraine, and the need for support from the government to help families in foster care
The trips to Bohuslav are the only time Yuliia can get some respite, away from Maryna. And Maryna is fond of the trips. She is calmer when she comes back. It would be ideal to have this option more often.
The retreat program was partially funded before the war. Each 10-day stay costs about $580 per client and a foreign sponsor has stepped in for six months, but the money is running out. The cost of additional stays is prohibitive for most families.
The lack of support means that many families face a choice of placing their child in an institution or managing on their own.
CNN has made multiple attempts to reach out to several Ukrainian government departments and residential facilities, but has not been granted answers to specific questions about services and funding.
“The dream is to have more assisted-living facilities,” Kravchenko said. “And we need the government’s support for family-based foster care of adults because, right now, foster care in Ukraine is only legal for children. Youth with disabilities who have no parents can be in foster care until they are 23. Once a person is 23, he or she is placed into an institution.
Many Western countries have a common practice of not providing adult placement in families, which may be why many caregivers are not eligible for help from the state.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-disabilities-cnnphotos-intl-cmd/
Halyna and Oleksandr Pylypenko: Two pensioners with an internally displaced family in Mariupol, Ukraine
Halyna and Oleksandr Pylypenko know this. The couple, both in their sixties, recently fled Mariupol, the southeastern Ukrainian city that was flattened by Russian troops during a brutal campaign of bombardment last year.
He has been living on his own since his mother died in 2016 and was helped by his nephew, who lives in the United States. Halyna Pylypenko was one of them. She would come in the morning, help him get up, take him out for a walk or to a club for people with Down syndrome and spend the day with him. In the evening, she’d put him to bed, lock the door and leave.
“He has a heart of gold,” Oleksandr Pylypenko said, sitting next to Shevchenko on a sofa in their temporary home in Bohuslav, found through an NGO affiliated with the one run by Kravchenko. Every now and then, Shevchenko leans over to Pylypenko and plants a kiss on his face, smiling widely.
This was no longer an option when the war started. So, the Pylypenkos took Shevchenko in. They took him with them when they fled after spending almost a month inside a basement with 35 other people.
“If he stayed alone, he would not have survived. That’s not possible. It was not even a question for us. How could we leave a nice person like that? Halyna Pylypenko said something.
They do not have a legal guardian over Shevchenko who is competent to take care of his own affairs. The family — two pensioners with an ill son who are internally displaced — have lost everything in the war, including legal documents they needed to be able to ask for assistance. The amount of disability payments restored is small, but after four months of bureaucratic back and forth, they were able to reestablish them.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-disabilities-cnnphotos-intl-cmd/
When Russian invaders arrived in Ukraine, Yuri Kapustianskyi walked to the boarding school and walked into his room
The Maksym Kapustianskyi is always moving. At home, he paces constantly from one room to another. Sometimes he spins around or hops on the spot. On every trip to the living room, he walks to the corner and touches the wall as if he knows it is still there.
“He doesn’t really understand. Yuri Kapustianskyi said he acts like a two-year-old. “We were on a (evacuation) train with eight other people and he just lay there. We were already in western Ukraine, fast asleep, when two missiles whizzed by at 3 a.m. We heard something hitting the roof. He lay there smiling. As if he understood it was a stressful situation and he had to be helpful. He said that there wasn’t a peep out of him.
When the full-scale Russian invasion began, Kapustianskyi, a single dad who says his wife left him and Maksym eight years ago, walked five hours from his home to the boarding school where Maksym was staying Mondays to Fridays to pick him up and take him to safety.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-disabilities-cnnphotos-intl-cmd/
Yuliia Klepets in the care home of a disabled man: Why it’s hard to be around people with disabilities, and why it takes them seriously
There are people in care homes who are disabled. If the kids go to the zoo, make sure the normal kids are there also, as a class of neurological children goes along with a class of sensory children. Let the care homes play soccer together.
It is something Yuliia Klepets agrees with. I do not want people to feel bad for me. I just want them to understand us, not to be afraid of people like Maryna, have more information,” she told CNN.
Yaroslav was diagnosed with congenital hydrocephalus and Dandy-Walker syndrome, conditions doctors said were a direct consequence of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which happened 22 months before he was born.
He also requires round-the-clock care. He can tell if he needs to go to the toilet or not. He loves being around people and used to love watching the world go by from his balcony. That was before the war started.
Most days, Repich takes Yaroslav to BlahoDar, a local rehabilitation center for people with disabilities, where he receives physical therapy and spends time with other people. She said the closing of the center was tough on the family, and that Yaroslav’s state deteriorated because of it.
Now, back at the center, Yaroslav is thriving again — even though he and all the center’s other clients are often forced to spend hours sitting in a cold corridor wearing their winter coats, waiting for the air raid alarms to be lifted.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/03/world/ukraine-disabilities-cnnphotos-intl-cmd/
A new environment for the boy, Seheda, and how she will raise money for his education in the Republic of Moldavian Republic
Seheda hopes that she can find a better solution for the boy, a place where he will be able to live a full life. Until then, he will have to keep surviving.
“I told them, of course, this is a new environment for him, it’s stressful and he needs to adjust, but the nurse told me that they don’t have time and if he doesn’t want to eat normally, they’d force feed him with a tube,” she said.
Many other organizations are also providing humanitarian assistance. As of March 2023, CNN audiences have donated over $8 million to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Ukraine.