Nadiia Vorobei is giving a tour of her ruined, green-walled home on a rainy afternoon in the village of Andriivka, 30 miles west of Kyiv.
The 66-year-old says that in March she was “literally carried out of the house” by Russian soldiers so they could forcibly billet themselves within it. Two weeks later, on 18 March, the property was devastated in the fighting.
She says it burned out in 20 minutes after an explosion while she looked on from her neighbours’ house next door. The destruction of the home her parents had built was painful to watch, she says.
Since then, Vorobei says, she has had no help from Ukraine’s authorities. A couple of friends are trying to rebuild her garage in time for winter, but she has no money to pay for further help. Her pension is 2,500 hryvnia (about £57) a month, enough to cover basic living costs and no more.
Volunteers donated a small shipping container in April, where Vorobei lives at the rear of the property. It is tiny, the length of a single bed, with chipboard walls and electricity but no water or gas. Possessions are piled high in the little space available. “I call it a doghouse,” she says.
Five months after the Russians were forced out of the towns and villages north-west of Kyiv, it is clear that reconstruction and recovery is at best slow and at worst nonexistent.
A few miles away near Bucha, a digger from the local mayor’s office is clearing the site of Tetiana’s lakeside dacha. It has been a long wait for the 55-year-old but she is finally able to see progress.
“At least I’ll get a new house,” she says as her husband, Valery, shovels some of the last of the rubble of their flattened property into the loader. Soon their property of 20 years will be cleared down to its foundations so it can be rebuilt.
The couple had thought they would be safe outside the capital, but the Russians arrived shortly after the war began. Their garage was destroyed in early March, and after that the couple left with Tetiana’s mother and a family dog, meaning they avoided the missile strike on their home on 25 March.
“Rubble was everywhere, on the road, in the garden around here,” she says, describing the scene they discovered when they dared to return in early April after the Russian retreat. A fire had raged through the property. “We had escaped with only our tracksuits; when we returned we found we had no plates, no utensils, nothing.”
Before the war, Tetiana ran a business. Reconstruction of the home is likely to be her next full-time job, about which she is remarkably positive. “We got 20 years younger, because we have another 20 years to rebuild everything,” she says.
Tetiana and Valery have a shed with electricity where they can live for now and supervise the work. But for others, remaining at home is not an option – although there is only a small amount of new emergency housing available.
In Bucha, a few clusters of prefabricated homes house some of the dispossessed from the nearby area and elsewhere in the country. Paid for by the Polish government, they are built in flatpack-style blocks of 21 properties, with shared toilets and bathrooms and four bunks in each small family room.
Olga Ishenko, 49, from the frontline town of Sloviansk, lives in one of the newbuilds and acts as administrator to the block. She moved west because it was not safe to live that close to the daily shelling. Updates on the course of the war come from her husband and son, who are in the army.
“It’s small but it is clean. There’s a roof over your head,” Ishenko says, standing in her bunk bedroom and holding on to a small, loudly barking dog. “Home is better, of course” she adds, and “whenever there is a possibility I will go back home”. With Russian forces so close to Sloviansk, that may be some while yet.
Ishenko is relatively fortunate because she has landed a job, while she says friends have chosen to return because they have run out of cash or been unable to find suitable accommodation. The handful of prefabricated blocks in Bucha are clearly nowhere near enough to deal with the millions of people displaced since the war began.
Tetiana thinks more diggers could come “after the war or after the winter”, because there is so much to do while the fighting is ongoing.
But it is Vorobei’s response, in her ruined back yard, that is perhaps the most surprising. After all she has gone though, does she think it is right that Ukraine fights so hard against Russia?
Immediately her demeanour changes from sorrowful to passionate. “Of course, out of the question,” she says. “We will win, we are on our land. We are strong, they came here. We don’t need their land. We didn’t invite them.”
