On a recent Saturday, a group of beginner dancers gathered to practice the heel flicks, twists, and sashays of the tango in Irpin, just outside Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Together with neighboring Bucha, the satellite town became a byword for the brutality of Russian occupation after Vladimir Putin’s troops retreated in April, leaving behind mass graves along with evidence of torture and civilian executions. But for two hours, twice a week, the dancers leave those horrors behind.
They’re mostly women, recently returned with their children from elsewhere in Europe. Some came back to reunite with their husbands or parents, others for jobs or the start of the school year. And some came back because of the gnawing sense of guilt they felt as refugees for not taking part in Ukraine’s life-and-death struggle against its larger neighbor. All of those interviewed said that as soon as Irpin’s Nuestro Tango studio reopened, they signed up to help cope with the war, which is taking its toll also on those who’d managed to escape the fighting.
“You just want to live, more so than in normal times,” says Olena Romanova, a 44-year-old pharmacist, who’s had to flee twice—once in 2014 from her home in the eastern Donbas region and again from Irpin in February. “You don’t know if you’ll be here tomorrow.”
Romanova still keeps her family’s bags packed in case, yet again, they need to run away. Russian troops are reportedly regathering to the north of Kyiv in Belarus, from where they attacked in February.
Just over 6 million people who fled their homes because of the invasion have since come back, with most returning from elsewhere in Ukraine and around one in five of those returning from sanctuaries in other countries, according to estimates drawn from a Sept. 26 population survey by the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations body. Those returnees from abroad are some of the almost 7.65 million Ukrainians that have registered as refugees across Europe, according to data from the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.
The Kyiv region alone has drawn more than 1.5 million people back to their homes. It had come to feel safe, at least until earlier this month, when Russia struck civilian targets across the country in the largest series of missile attacks since the opening days of the war.
But refugees have been returning to cities all over the country. In Odesa, a southern port of 1 million that’s under constant threat of attack by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the mayor says about half of the 200,000 people who fled at the start of the war have since returned. In nearby Mykolaiv, just 30 kilometers from the front lines and still the target of nightly missile, drone, and rocket strikes, some have come back to rebuild their homes ahead of the winter, regional Governor Vitaliy Kim said in September.
“We’re all returning refugees here,” says Mykhailyna Skoryk-Shkarivska, Bucha’s deputy mayor. Once the forested playground of Kyiv’s cultural elite, the town suffered, because it lay between the capital and the Russian invasion’s bridgehead at Hostomel Airport. When Russian forces were stopped in Bucha, taking severe losses, they extracted a bloody revenge. The bodies of 419 civilians with signs of violent trauma were recovered after their retreat. A war crimes investigation is under way.
Figuring out how many people now live in Bucha isn’t easy, but it’s vital for making calculations for budgets and donors, according to Skoryk-Shkarivska. The city uses mobile phone and school attendance records, as well as counts of the number of windows lit at night, to figure that out. September’s estimate was 53,200—still down from 75,282 before the war, but a huge increase from the tiny numbers that stayed through the occupation.
“My biggest fear after the liberation was that people wouldn’t come back,” says Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk. Right now there are social and budgetary strains, but he says he wants the 20,000 who still haven’t returned to come back as soon as possible, too. “Businesses and investors will solve all these problems, they’ll provide work,” he says, whipping out plans for construction of a technology park that he’d shelved at the start of the war.
Before Putin’s invasion, Bucha and Irpin were relatively upmarket suburbs. Their unwanted fame has gained the attention of donors worldwide, so they look set for a relatively quick rebuild. But elsewhere in Ukraine, many of those returning will find little work, scant health services, and meager financial support, while the winter could also prove particularly cold as Russia shifts to striking the nation’s power infrastructure.
The IOM has been conducting monthly surveys since March to provide data for aid organizations, and the most recent, published on Oct. 17, was shaped to help understand returnees. “The biggest reason people are returning is not because it is safe, but because their economic situation outside Ukraine was untenable,’’ says Karolina Krelinova, the organization’s data and analytics manager for Ukraine. Many have run through their savings, and while there may be no money at home either, they don’t have to pay rent.
In Bucha, salaries are lower than before the war, and jobs are scarce. About half of local prewar businesses remain closed, according to Skoryk-Shkarivska. Others have had to adjust. Natalia Levchenko repurposed the arts and education center she built before the war in central Bucha, first into a distribution hub for international aid and now as a facility that provides kindergarten-like services as part of a six-month project with Italian donors. “We have to adapt or die,” she says, as a small group of children takes art lessons at one of the space’s long tables.
Coming back was a tough decision for Anna Strakhovska, the 37-year-old executive director of Bucha’s Diia Business Center, part of a national program to promote the creation of small and medium-size businesses in Ukraine. As the fighting started she set up a call center in western Ukraine to get food, medicine, and other aid to people stranded in Bucha. While the town was under occupation, that proved hard to do, but her center took 20,000 calls from people looking for help or information on exit corridors, or from those reporting what they were seeing. “Car was shot, two children killed. Vorzel, the hospital,” said one of the telegrammatic call logs for March 4. “Cannot find out what happened to son, where bodies of grandchildren are, how to find them.”
“We were the first to know what went on in Bucha,” says Strakhovska, whose organization even fielded calls from within a now infamous makeshift Russian prison. She kept the logs and recordings, moving from western Ukraine to France, Switzerland, and Poland, before returning to Bucha with her children.
Then she had to relive it all for a second time as Bucha’s torment became news worldwide. “Emotionally it was very difficult,” she says, briefly losing her composure as she waits to receive an award from the city for her call center initiative. “It took me a couple of months to regain some kind of stability.”
Strakhovska was about to reopen her business center, a modern glass and concrete building that was heavily damaged during the fighting and occupation that followed. Reconstruction of destroyed apartments in the complex has begun, too, so that about 1,500 people can return. “It’s better to spend the money rebuilding than paying for people to live abroad,” says Strakhovska.
Back at the tango studio in Irpin, Svitlana Yarmoshuk says she and her two children were among 12 people living in her brother’s two-bedroom flat in Wroclaw, Poland. She returned home because school was about to start, and she realized that if she stayed in Poland it would be for another year. Everything in Irpin has changed, she says: “Broken families, ruined buildings. You go to the playground and for a while things seem normal, until you notice the bullet holes.”
As a life coach, Yarmoshuk worked by phone with her clients in Ukraine while abroad. Their problems became partly hers, with profound uncertainty among the biggest. “Before the war, they had a path, they knew what they were going to do with their lives, but now they don’t,” says Yarmoshuk, 34, who describes tango as therapy, because she’s so focused on directing her body that she has no capacity to think of other things. “People behave the way wounded or traumatized people do, even if they aren’t.”
Oxana Slupska, an art teacher who’s been studying tango for several years, moves elegantly among the couples and helps show them how to improve. She and her partner, Valeriy, never left Bucha. They tried dancing at home, but with Russian tanks tearing through their village just outside town, they found they couldn’t. “Valeriy,” says Slupska, “he said to me: ‘The bastards took our tango.’”
On the day the occupation ended, though, Slupska bumped into one of her dance teachers at Bucha’s hospital, where she’d gone to find medicine for her ailing mother. He was in uniform and had been in the thick of fighting in an area nicknamed Giraffe, which joins Bucha and Irpin. To the bewilderment of the patients and soldiers in a building occupied by Russian troops just hours before, the pair began to tango.Read more: Putin’s War Escalation Is Hastening Demographic Crash for Russia
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