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Wives have become widows, parents long for captured sons, classrooms are empty and farmers can’t find the hands to work the land. Unlikely friendships have formed; old ones have fallen apart.
Even in the village of Lozuvatka, about 100 km (60 miles) from the frontlines, signs are everywhere of a two-year-old war that has irrevocably changed the face of Ukraine.
Alona Onyshchuk and her five-year-old daughter Anhelina visited Lozuvatka’s graveyard on a snowswept winter’s day. Husband and father Serhii Aloshkin lies there alongside 10 other soldiers in a new section called Heroes’ Alley.
“We did not expect that there would be so many of them,” Onyshchuk murmured. Her 38-year-old partner, a driver and mechanic before the war, was killed in late 2022 while fighting near the eastern city of Bakhmut.
Similar burial plots have appeared across the country, bearing bitter testament to a grinding war against Russia that’s now entering its third year, with no end in sight.
Mounds of freshly dug earth are often marked by simple wooden crosses, photos of the dead, brightly colored flowers and yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flags.
The fighting on Ukraine’s eastern and southern fronts is far away from this settlement of modest homes surrounded by walled gardens in the centre of the country, but its population of about 6,800 has been profoundly affected.
The scale of Ukrainian military casualties is a closely guarded state secret. Western officials estimate tens of thousands have been killed and tens of thousands more wounded. Russia, in the ascendancy on the cusp of the second anniversary of its Feb. 24, 2022 invasion, has also suffered heavy losses.
Beyond casualties, the war impacts almost every aspect of Ukrainian life. Onyshchuk quit her job in a grocery store when she got pregnant with Anhelina, and finding new work has been made tougher by the fact that the local kindergarten has closed.
Schools in Lozuvatka, located around 350 km southeast of Kyiv, are also shut. Their bomb shelters aren’t big enough to accommodate all of the students in the event of an air raid.
Although direct Russian missile and drone attacks on the village are rare, it lies close to the key steel-producing town of Kryvyi Rih which has been struck frequently, triggering sirens in surrounding areas.
In one of Lozuvatka’s three schools, teacher Svitlana Anisimova stands before her computer in an empty classroom as she delivers an online lesson about the solar system to a group of 10 and 11-year-olds.
