The village of Partyzanske, like so many others, has been devastated by war. Tasha Black meets the women determined to rebuild it.

All photography by Tasha Black.

A middle-aged woman is waving in the distance, standing at the end of a dirt road. A steel grey dreariness hangs in the late afternoon air, soon we will be cloaked in darkness. I pull my coat in tight and kick my boots into the ground, hoping to wake up my numb toes. Ukraine in winter is biting cold. 

I walk on, past the rubble, past the bullet holes in fences.

“Добрий день!” Good afternoon! The woman at the end of the road says cheerily as we walk up to her. She wears a pink woollen hat and black jacket, and holds a puppy against her chest. She introduces herself as Valentyna and ushers us into her sister Liubov’s home. It’s a relief to be out of the cold.

Liubov’s home is cosy, quaint even. There are rugs on the floor, blankets on the chairs, and a warm fire going. But clues of a recent darker past remain. The refrigerator is riddled with bullet holes. There are piles of rubble in the garden. And Liubov’s crutches rest against a wall. 

Liubov, 64, sits on a single bed, wearing a dress with “love” written on it. One day, in April 2022, Liubov was in her yard milking her cow when artillery began raining down. Terrified and praying for her life, Liubov raced for cover but slipped on a patch of late season ice and badly injured her leg. She was transferred to a hospital, and later a shelter. There would be no returning home. Not yet anyway – it was too dangerous.  

Liubov’s village, Partyzanske, is in southern Ukraine, about 30 minutes’ drive east of Mykolaiv, a strategic port city. Mykolaiv saw fierce fighting in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It was an impressive defence, and despite predictions otherwise, the city held – just. But Partyzanske and neighbouring villages were caught on the frontline of the Russo-Ukrainian war for months. Residents were forced to flee for their lives. 

Some of the most evocative images of the war have been of people fleeing. Families clutching suitcases, children wrapped in winter coats, crowds standing on railway platforms, waiting, hoping to board a train. Their faces carried a look of dazed disbelief – could this really be happening? Not since the second world war has Europe seen such displacement. An estimated 14 million people – about one third of Ukraine’s population – have fled their homes at some point in the last three years due to war. 

Many have not been able to return home, their land now under Russian occupation. But in some cases, such as in Partyzanske, Ukrainian forces managed to push Russian invaders back, and areas that were previously occupied are now being reclaimed by residents, defiant and determined. Bullet holes be damned.

After months living in a shelter, Liubov returned to Partyzanske in December 2023. It was a devastating site. The village was near-obliterated. House after house destroyed, the local school gone. Liubov’s home was badly damaged. “It was horrible,” she says. “But it’s my home. I’ve lived here for 40 years and my three children grew up here. Even with all this damage, it’s still my home with sweet memories.”

And so, she temporarily moved in with her sister Valentyna nearby, and together with Valentyna’s husband, they set about repairing and rebuilding Liubov’s house, including with materials donated by ReliefAid. 

In the neighbouring village is a humanitarian distribution centre where ReliefAid hands out sacks filled with plaster, putty, floor screed and thermal adhesive. All materials for fixing broken homes. Kseniya Zboryk, a young, highly educated Ukrainian woman, is overseeing the distribution. From early in the morning people arrive one by one, pulling up in old Russian-made Lada cars, towing rusted trailers. Loading the sacks onto the trailers is repetitive work. Men wait, smoking cigarettes under the grey sky, while inside the distribution centre, a woman with a dyed blonde bob checks documents and keeps a record of who turns up. 

Sacks are given out for free. Some people lost work due to the war and salaries are low in the village, approximately 8000 hryvnia per month ($335 NZD). The building was once a restaurant and wedding venue, now the windows are boarded up and a United Nations tarpaulin hangs from one wall. 

Kseniya takes me on a whistle-stop tour of destruction through the villages. Large mounds of rubble are piled high next to a children’s playground. Twisted steel rebar juts out of concrete blocks like alien limbs. There are no cars, no people, just silence. A Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow – representing the sky and Ukraine’s ubiquitous sunflowers – flutters in the breeze. The sky is grey. It feels apocalyptic. Why return at all?

The mayor of Partyzanske, Raisa Adamivna, was among the first to return home. There was “a little bit of crying”, Raisa tells me, from her office in a new portacom building. But Raisa is a woman with steely resolve. She shows me a photo on her phone of her two storey home, built just a few years earlier. The garden is vibrant, in full bloom with cherry trees and roses. And then another photo. Thousands of tiny shards of glass on the ground. Rubble, brick, plaster, furniture, broken and scattered. It’s hard to see what I am looking at. “It is the dining room,” she says. Everything is in ruin, except for three white dinner plates on the floor. Raisa must see my face drop because she quickly says, “Don’t worry, we’re rebuilding everything. We won’t give up.” Besides, buildings are not the most important thing, she insists. And then, matter-of-factly, “It’s not only this village, it’s all over Ukraine. It is war.” 

The cost to rebuild Ukraine is enormous. A study by the World Bank put the figure at USD $524 billion. Each day the cost increases as Ukraine continues to come under attack from Russia. Ten percent of the housing stock has been damaged or destroyed. The need is so great, it has been described as the largest rebuilding effort since the second world war, and Ukraine has been dubbed the world’s largest construction site.  

“Would you like some food?” Raisa, the mayor, asks, pulling a long stick of salami and a slab of cheese out of her handbag. Soon, there is chocolate, coffee, bread and jam on the table. “We hope that people will come back to the village,” she says. Before the invasion, Partyzanske had around 1,000 residents. Now there are 220. Many people grew up here, have parents who passed away here, they have roots here and want to stay, she says. “We want to rebuild the school. When we have a school, families with children will come back. And if a village has children, it has a future.” 

There are 6.9 million Ukrainian refugees living abroad, mostly in Europe, according to UNHCR. Ukraine needs people to return. Even before the war, Ukraine’s population demographics were out of kilter. Since independence in 1991, the population dropped dramatically, declining by 10 million in 30 years. 

Whether people return home or not depends on a range of push and pull factors, including having family and a home to return to, as well as job opportunities. Being displaced is costly. The further west you travel, the higher the cost of living. For some internally displaced people from eastern Ukraine, renting an apartment in cities like Lviv in the west is simply too high, pushing them to return east, where life is cheaper but closer to the frontline. And, of course, there are safety concerns. But what does it mean to feel safe when all of Ukraine is still at risk of drone attacks, when air raid sirens blast every night? One person’s measure of safety is another’s risk. 

For some, the call home is deeply personal. Before the war, Natasha Zhuravel, a villager from Partyzanske, lived on a farm with her husband. Together they had cows, pigs, chickens, and a rich, bountiful garden. She fled the village in March 2022 with the help of her husband who was due to join her just a few days later. But before her husband left, he was killed by shelling in their backyard. “He was very kind. He loved children,” Natasha tells me softly, her grief raw, palpable. Every night while Natasha was displaced, she would dream of her husband. “When I came home, I stopped dreaming of him. Maybe he called me back home.” 

She stands on her empty street, wrapped in her red winter coat, wiping away tears. Natasha returned to Partyzanske to find her car and garage burned to the ground, her home badly damaged.

I ask Mike Seawright, the New Zealander who established ReliefAid in 2014, why they donate construction materials. There’s the practical answer: when missile strikes leave a home damaged, a leaking roof in freezing temperatures can be the difference between life and death, he says. And then there’s the psychological answer. “What we consistently see in warzones is that people want to return home. The simple act of being able to make a cup of tea in your own kitchen or start planting vegetables in the garden signals a return to normality.”  

It’s taken a year, but Liubov’s house is starting to feel like a home again. Liubov, the woman who injured her leg slipping on ice while artillery rained down around her, is happy to be home. She laughs as her little puppy darts playfully around the room. “Lady! Lady!” she says, talking to her puppy. She scoops Lady up and nestles her face against the dog’s warm fur. Balls of wool sit on the bed. Liubov knits thick woolly socks for soldiers on the front. 

Night is falling and as I sit with Liubov I wonder if she feels safe. “Sometimes I hear attacks,” she says, referring to the nearby city Kherson, about 45 kilometres away as the crow flies, which comes under frequent drone and missile bombardments. “But I can’t run. I’m at home and I’m in the safest place.” I look at her crutches against the wall. 

How do you stay so positive? I ask. Liubov looks down, folding and unfolding her hands in her lap. Her eyes are glistening, holding back tears. I wish I hadn’t asked the question. But then she says: “Life is not for crying. It is for happiness. It doesn’t make any sense to cry.” She looks ahead, breathes out, and smiles. Chin up, resolute. 

We often describe people as being happy or sad. But it struck me that Liubov holds both joy and sorrow in her heart, simultaneously. Her story, like that of so many Ukrainians right now, is one of hardship and pain. But also hope and perseverance. Two things can be true at the same time.

Earlier in the day, I watched old cars line up at the humanitarian distribution centre. I watched men patiently waiting to receive sacks of plaster that they couldn’t afford to buy themselves. To fix homes for their families, to cover bullet holes in the walls, caused by a war they never asked for. I wondered why anyone would return. What were they returning to? Winter in Ukraine is hard. Winter in Ukraine in a bombed-out village is harder still. 

But there are patches of life in the villages. Ducks and chickens in a yard. A solitary man on his roof, making repairs. There is Liubov’’s laugh, Natasha’s tenacity, Raisa’s steely grit. All older women, piecing their lives, and their village back together. Brick by brick, day by day.  

Of course, not everyone can return home. Their land and homes are now occupied by Russia. And as Russian forces push further into Ukraine, new areas are put under pressure, new evacuation orders are issued, forcing people to flee. 

As I go to leave, Liubov insists on giving me a pair of woolly socks she knitted. I will be returning to a New Zealand summer, so instead I pass them on to a Kiwi friend fighting on the front. I wave goodbye to the two sisters and head outside into the cold night.