The Land of the Unbreakable

[This article was written for the third issue of the printed Reporters magazine]

A university professor who enlisted in the army on the first day of the Russian invasion. Now he delivers online lectures to students right from the trenches: in a bulletproof vest and helmet, with a full set of ammunition and a notebook with notes.

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An elderly lady from a village in the Kyiv region who helped the Armed Forces locate enemy positions and numbers and reported this information to the Ukrainian military. After finding out that she was working with the Ukrainians, the invaders destroyed her house and killed her. But not before the woman helped her army destroy about a hundred enemy military vehicles.

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A soldier who blew up a road bridge and himself to stop a column of Russian tanks. He planted the explosives but did not have time to retreat. He took a decision that costed him his life but slowed down the advance of the enemy.

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A fifteen-year-old girl who took a car and drove thirty kilometers to take several adults with serious injuries out of Popasna. During the shelling, she herself was hit twice in her leg.

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The owner of a farm in a village in the Kyiv region, which had been occupied for over a month. To save fellow countrymen from starvation, he decided to slaughter his entire livestock and distributed the meat for free in the neighboring villages.

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A couple of photographers, who stayed in Mariupol until it was surrounded and almost completely destroyed, in order to record the crimes of the Russian army against the civilian population. Their pictures revealed the painful truth of what was happening in Mariupol and shocked the world.

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Two soldiers who broke through a street in Irpin where a battle was raging to evacuate an immobile old man. 

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A fisherman who evacuated 160 workers from the occupied Chornobyl NPP by single-handedly making 25 trips in a few days with a homemade wooden boat.

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A woman who, in the Azovstal bomb shelter, made a ‘cake’ from leftover flour and sugar on a pan and an open fire to celebrate the birthday of one of the children and distract them from the constant explosions heard above.

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A woman who has not hugged her two sons for 84 days, since the very beginning of the war. Her children are safe abroad, while she serves in the territorial defense unit of Mykolaiv, protecting the city she grew up in.

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The guard of a museum destroyed by a Russian rocket, who, under fire, rescued paintings of the outstanding Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko from the burning building. He later explained that he would have felt terrible if he had done nothing and everything had burned down.

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The owner of a Lviv football pub, who took his cat from his home at the beginning of the war and moved to his workplace with his girlfriend, turning the pub first into a place where displaced persons could warm up and get a free lunch and later into a center for the collection of aid for the military. Not helping was not an option as the beer-loving patrons of their pub are now at war.

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The girl who rescued more than twenty animals from the shelling in Irpin, including five cats, a chameleon, a spider, a turtle, a hamster and fifteen dogs, some of them disabled and in wheelchairs. A photo in which the girl is holding eight sick dogs on a leash was featured in dozens of publications around the world.

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A retired lady from Mariupol who evacuated to Poland with her rooster. For weeks, she hid from shelling in her basement and sometimes had nothing to eat, but she always found something she could give to her beloved bird. 

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An opera singer from the Poltava region who evacuated more than fifty civilians from Kharkiv and Okhtyrka. During one of these trips, his car was fired upon by a Russian sabotage group; the man was shot and was hospitalized. But he survived.

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A woman from Mariupol who helped to deliver a premature baby in the basement of the house. With no experience, she talked to a doctor through a smartphone chatbot who guided her through the process.

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A train attendant, who, together with her colleagues, lived in a carriage from the very beginning of the war. Her shift on the Kyiv-Rakhiv-Kyiv train lasted 43 days. This train evacuated more than three million people in total. Sometimes up to 5,000 passengers were transported in 16 carriages at the same time.

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A 16-year-old boy who, during the air raids in Chernihiv, helped medics to treat the wounded in the bomb shelter of his school. His experience only strengthened his resolve to become a doctor.

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A confectioner who, before the invasion, had a waiting list for her festive desserts. In the first 70 days of the war, she and her team baked almost 35,000 loaves of bread for the residents of Bucha, Hostomel and Borodianka.

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A border guard who became the most quoted person in Ukraine. On February 24, a Russian warship approached the small Ukrainian island of Zmiinyi (Snake Island), where only 13 border guards were stationed, and twice announced to the garrison, “I am a Russian warship. Lay down your weapons.” The brave Ukrainian man—on the first day of the war, when no one was yet sure that Ukraine would definitely win—answered: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”

Collage by Vadym Blonskyi