Lidiia Shlonska, a resident of the village of Vablia in Kyiv region, spent a month under occupation. Her house is right next to the road that was used by endless enemy columns – tanks, armoured personnel carriers, soldiers with machine guns – in the early days of the war. Her son, a military officer by profession, managed to call from Kyiv and ordered: immediately hide the uniform and photos of his deceased brother, because the russians were already shooting at military families.

Lidiia hid the things, uniform, and a photo with the shoulder straps of a major in the summer kitchen and ran to the forest. Planes whistled overhead, a drone hovered, and tanks with the letters “V” and “Z” stretched in an endless column. She managed to take a picture of the vehicles and send an angry message to her friends: “Whoever drove through Vablia shall wash themselves with their blood by sunset”.

And then came the shelling. The windows in her veranda were smashed, the gable was burnt, but the house did not catch fire. “When the “Chechens” started shooting at the house, my neighbour and I got down on our knees and started praying to God,” says Lidiia. Then russian soldiers came to her house: they broke the phones, asked about her sons. The occupiers were drinking and digging trenches right in the gardens. Lidiia, like most of her neighbours, hid in the cellar – especially when helicopters with incendiary shells flew over the village. Food was hard to come by – the shops were looted – but she stocked up on wheat, grinded it with a meat grinder and distributed it to others.