Three times in seven years Valentyna Dzyuba’s roof has been destroyed, leaving the 71-year-old and her daughter to live for a while in the tiny cellar in their eastern Ukraine house that serves as a food store and bomb shelter.
On one occasion something struck but didn’t explode. Dzyuba reached into the attic to find a small-gauge mortar shell (“it looked a bit like a bicycle pump”), which she scooped into her apron and carried outside. Another time, her 41-year-old daughter, Halyna Nevynna, extracted a piece of shrapnel from her own stomach, having been hit by a shell in front of the house.
A head-high dent in the hallway closet shows where a bullet came through the window and skipped across to hit the refrigerator. They’ve bricked up that window and others that looked over the garden. Beyond it lie the abandoned mine shafts and slag heaps that since 2014 have marked the Russia-backed separatist territory of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, or DNR.
