BORODYANKA, Ukraine — The soccer mom parks her car just past the charred ruins of the town cultural center, a hollow, bombed-out remnant of better times. Her son bounds out toward the green fields freshly daubed with white boundary lines.
“He and I lived through it all together,” says Valentyna Shleyuk, 32, gesturing toward her son, Artemi, 9, now scampering to join other youths on the spruced-up playing field. “The bombings, the occupation, the destruction. We were hiding all the time in the basement. He understood what was happening. But he always wanted to come out to play.”
In the mostly abandoned town of Borodyanka, where Russian bombs, shelling and battles hammered rows of Soviet-era apartment blocks, the seemingly mundane sight of kids kicking balls on a neatly groomed pitch counts as a jarring moment. The hard-hit towns outside Kyiv are having a difficult time returning to any sense of normality.
