‘All I Can Do Is Pray’: Elderly and Disabled Women Left Behind in Eastern Ukraine

When I first met Nadia — a 69-year old “babushka” (“elderly woman or “grandmother” in Russian), who uses a wheelchair — in her tiny, destroyed house in the Luhansk oblast in eastern Ukraine, the front line separating the government-controlled area from the Russian-backed separatist regions was calm. It was August 2021 — a few months before the intensification of the Russian military buildup — when I was reporting on vulnerable inhabitants who’d been living in settlements near separatist regions since the Donbas war broke out in 2014.

In her small house, already ill-equipped to accommodate the needs of a wheelchair user, Nadia cannot move beyond her bedroom to look out the window and see outside. For years, she has been unable to leave her house.

The events following the February 24, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine brought despair for thousands of elderly and disabled civilians like Nadia who were unable to flee. Russia has been claiming strikes on cities all around the country — and recently launched an eastern offensive — and the fighting has left countless civilians like Nadia injured, helpless, and desperate in a war zone, while many countless others are feared dead.

“Unlike other people, I cannot even close my front door that keeps opening during heavy shelling,” she told me. “So I attached a rope to it and pull on it to close the door when it opens during fighting,” she said.

Nadia has been praying intensely every day for years to find some comfort and soothing, which, she said, is all she can do now. “I just pray all the prayers I know, one by one.”

“I pray for the souls of those soldiers because they don’t know what they do,” she said. “I am not angry at anyone. I pray to God to forgive them.”

In a telephone interview for Women Under Siege conducted on April 18, as heavy fighting unfolded less than 10 kilometers away from her house (according to Ukraine’s Live Universal Awareness Map), Nadia said she could not sleep the whole night.

“My house trembles due to explosions,” she said. “But where should I go? I’m in a wheelchair and I want to be at home.”

As a journalist, I’ve been documenting stories of women like Nadia in eastern Ukraine for the past eight months, traveling to the Donbas every month since August 2021. It is hardly imaginable for a wheelchair user to flee eastern Ukraine at this point — and one of the most difficult assignments for a journalist to document such suffering.

While Russia continues to pour in soldiers, artillery units and military hardware as it launches a renewed assault aimed at capturing all of the Donbas region, I can only look at live maps and hope that all the subjects I’ve interviewed over the past months are still alive. There is no way to verify what has happened to them. Some of the settlements I’ve visited are now fully under Russian control; other subjects tell me that they are now hiding in their basements and praying for their survival.

I witnessed the horror that people faced in eastern Ukraine while I was reporting from Kharkiv — including joining dozens of desperate families in hiding in basements — in late February 2022. But many of the elderly people with mobility issues or those who live in rural settlements without access to shelters cannot even run to the nearest basement to hide.

Around the contact line, the population from 2014 has mostly consisted of women. Prior to the Russian invasion on February 24, 1.6 million of the 2.9 million people in need in eastern Ukraine were women, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Ukraine. “In the government-controlled areas of Ukraine, 71 percent of heads of households are female,” Lizaveta Zhuk, a public information officer for OCHA Ukraine, told me in an interview. “This share is even higher for those who are more than 60 years old, and reaches 88 percent.”

While current numbers of elderly women in need are difficult to estimate, social workers in the region told me many times that the cities and villages of the Donbas were filled with single mothers or elderly babushkas, who lost their husbands to war, old age, or years of work in coal mines.

Ala, a 73-year old blind woman living in Chasiv Yar, a city close to Kramatorsk where a deadly missile strike attack recently killed at least 50 people, told me in early February that she was now the only woman left in her family after her husband died of a heart attack, and her only son Oleg disappeared after he joined a paramilitary group in 2014.

She strived to keep her sense of humor even though she had lost her sight due to diabetes, and lived in a house without regular access to heating and water — in a war zone.

When I interviewed her in her home, she asked me to sit next to her so that she could touch my arm to know where I sit. “Do not forget to write in your story that we will never give up on Ukraine,” she said with a smile.

The only time I would see her cry was when she remembered her Oleg. “Will he ever hug me again?” she asked.

When I promised Ala that I would return to Ukraine again to interview her, there was no way we could’ve known that our meeting would likely never happen.

I have lost touch with Ala, but I keep thinking about what she must be going through: as a blind woman living alone, is there anyone to accompany her to her basement when the sirens sound? And if her city is occupied, what will happen to her?

Alyona Budagovska, a spokeswoman for People in Need, an international NGO present in Ukraine, told me that in the situation of active fighting, despite the request of the local authorities to evacuate civilian populations, there are still many people who remain in settlements in both the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. “And most of them are older people who have limited or no means for evacuation, no transport, and — mainly — they don’t want to leave their homes,” she said.

Babushka Lidia, another 85-year-old woman who lives in the embattled city of Marinka, is one of the women who told me that she would never leave her house on the front line, where she has lived since she was 20 years old. After her husband passed away years ago, she remained in the house alone. “I want to die in my bed,” she told me, and has continuously rejected offers from NGOs to find her a home further away from the contact line.

“When I hear heavy shelling, I just hug my kittens,” she told me in August 2021.

In late January 2022, I visited Lidia again and brought her some food, as people in the village told me she was sick. She wasn’t opening the door to her house to anyone at that point, as it had been surrounded by landmines and snipers; she was too afraid to let anyone in. Like so many elderly civilians in eastern Ukraine, she said she would never leave.

I haven’t managed to get ahold of her since February.

As reporting from the regions marked by heavy fighting becomes increasingly more difficult for journalists, documenting stories like Lidia’s has become one of the rare ways I’ve found to remember and honor the memory of civilians affected by this brutal war.