On the night of Feb. 23, 2022, Mila Leonova went to bed still believing, like thousands of other Ukrainians, that “normal people” in the Russian Federation would not allow Vladimir Putin’s invasion of her country to actually happen. She was awakened by the sound of missile strikes early the next morning, Feb. 24.
Her sister called from Spain, imploring her to leave Ukraine to join her there. Other friends and family likewise urged her to flee.
Ms. Leonova is a partnership coordinator for Caritas Ukraine, representing the nation’s embattled southeast. As Caritas evacuated staff from communities overrun by Russian forces, she remained in Dnipro in Eastern Ukraine. The city at the time was a primary target of the advancing Russians.
“So many people told me, ‘Mila, you have a son, 5 years old; you have family; you have to go to safe territory.… But I had a strong thought in my soul that I have to be in Dnipro and I have to help these people that evacuated to us.”
On the war’s first anniversary, there is little enthusiasm on either side for negotiations that might produce peace, just a grim acknowledgement that the conflict could extend for years to come.
The team that stayed behind with her in Dnipro in the first days of the war “prepared this space for the big work in the future,” she says. Soon hundreds of displaced families were coming to Caritas, knowing they would find help. Many of those fleeing the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine spent their first night sleeping wherever they could find a space in the Caritas office in Dnipro.
“It was good that we stayed,” she says.
A year later her hometown has become “the biggest humanitarian hub in Ukraine,” the first destination “between the war area and a safe area,” Ms. Leonova says. Officially the region is hosting 400,000 displaced people, but she thinks the actual number is closer to twice that figure.
In Dnipro, Caritas Ukraine continues to embrace those fleeing the fighting in Zaporizhzhya, the Donbas region and around the devastated city of Bakhmut. Her region of responsibility represents Ukraine’s frontline, she says.
Though Russian troops were repulsed long before they could reach Dnipro, Russian rocket and missile attacks still menace the city. On Jan. 14, a powerful missile obliterated an apartment building there, claiming the lives of 46 people and wounding 80. Eleven are missing and presumed dead, incinerated by the blast.
“The Russians like to attack in the morning, around 3 a.m.,” Ms. Leonova says, matter-of-factly. She regrets a little that her small family has become so used to the sound of explosions in the night. But so many terrible things have come to seem “normal” in Ukraine.
European war, global impact
The numbers after a year of war are staggering. According to an estimate from the Norwegian military, 180,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded. The United Nations reports that 21,000 Ukrainian noncombatants have been killed, though other estimates of the civilian toll range much higher.
The staff and volunteers of Caritas Ukraine accept a double duty—agents of humanitarian aid but also, with their families, victims and targets of conflict themselves.
The war has produced the world’s largest refugee crisis—eight million people. Perhaps seven million more are “internally displaced people,” driven out of their home communities but remaining within Ukraine borders.
The war has triggered economic instability in the West, contributed to an expanding hunger crisis in the developing world and provoked vast new spending on defense among NATO member states in the face of a renewed Russian threat.
Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin and his subordinates have raised the specter of the use of tactical nuclear weapons as battlefield losses for Russian forces have accumulated. And geopolitical tensions raised by the war have moved the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock the closest it has ever been to midnight—or nuclear annihilation.
On the war’s first anniversary, there is little enthusiasm on either side for negotiations that might produce peace, just a grim acknowledgement that the conflict could extend for years to come. There is talk of a new Russian offensive this spring and a likely Ukrainian counter-offensive, this one beefed up with modern tank capacity supplied by the United States, Germany and other Western European states.
The staff and volunteers of Caritas Ukraine accept a double duty in this second year of war—agents of humanitarian aid but also, with their families, victims and targets of conflict themselves. The peaceful campaign waged by Caritas comes with its own risks. In the doomed city of Mariupol, two Caritas workers along with five of their family were killed in March when the Caritas office was struck by tank fire. Other team members were wounded in January when they came under Russian artillery fire in Kharkiv.
Dnipro has become “the biggest humanitarian hub in Ukraine,” the first destination “between the war area and a safe area.”
The Rev. Vyacheslav Grynevych, the secretary general of Caritas-Spes, tries to remain mindful of the spiritual and psychological burden carried by Caritas team members and volunteers, offering them opportunities for recuperation when he can and sufficient time off for grieving when a family member is lost on the battlefield.
Caritas Ukraine reports that 40 percent of its volunteers are themselves people dislocated by the conflict. Many find the humanitarian work a blessed distraction, Father Grynevych says. Some have children fighting at the front. “They tell me, ‘Father, this is our battlefield,’” their chance to contribute to the war effort.
Caritas-Spes, representing Ukraine’s tiny Roman Catholic community (just 1 percent of the population in this Orthodox nation), has a reach that belies the church’s small numbers. Working jointly with Caritas Ukraine, administered through the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the combined office and parish network reaches across the country to create more than 40 safe havens and aid distribution points.
Much of its effort is focused on the nation’s displaced people, but Caritas is also active with other agencies, Catholic Relief Services and Jesuit Refugee Service among them, in assisting hundreds of thousands who have fled into Poland, Moldova, Romania and other bordering states.
Seeking safety
In those first weeks of the war in February and March 2022, Ukrainian refugees started arriving in Poland and Moldova. And almost two million would eventually cross the border into Romania, where Jesuit Refugee Service has assisted them.
Caritas Ukraine reports that 40 percent of its volunteers are themselves people dislocated by the conflict.
Many at that time believed that the war would be over quickly. Diana Haidemak, a legal counselor for JRS Romania, remembers, “They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’’ll be out of here in about one or two weeks; we will go back to Ukraine.’’’
But the fighting kept on and more people kept arriving, and JRS kept expanding its capacity to accommodate them. Like many thousands crossing into other neighboring states, most of the refugees were women with children. The men, 18 to 60, were required to remain on the Ukrainian side of the border. Many of them turned back to join the Ukraine army or territorial defense.
For many refugees, Romania represented a transit point before moving on to other European cities or even further abroad to Canada and the United States, but after 12 months a resident population has stabilized at about 110,000.
There is little hope of finding work in Ukraine, where the economy in tatters because of the war, and with their children far from potential harm, some of the refugees are thinking about staying permanently in Romania, according to Olena Zinkevych, Ukrainian Team Coordinator for JRS in Romania.
“People start to understand that this is not so simple a situation, and they may need to integrate in the countries where they stay,” she says. If they decide to remain, they will need proper schooling for their children, a chance at a job for themselves and help moving out of emergency shelter into something more permanent.
Ms. Zinkevych says facilitating that process of assimilation into host countries will be part of JRS’s focus once the immediate humanitarian needs of refugees are sorted out.
The war has produced the world’s largest refugee crisis—eight million people. Perhaps seven million more are “internally displaced people.”
Of course, assimilation itself proposes new hazards. Ukainians fear the loss of culture and connection to their homeland, and within host nations tolerance for large refugee populations can begin to wear thin.
At the beginning of the crisis most Romanian people were eager to help Ukrainian refugees, Ms. Zinkevych recalls. “A lot of [Romanian] people were thinking,‘This could be us tomorrow,’ so people were really, really helpful and tried to do their best.”
Though its economy has been expanding rapidly in recent years, Romania is among Europe’s less affluent nations. Ms. Zinkevych perceives a degree of host fatigue setting in as average Romanians begin to ask why their poor and vulnerable people are not just as deserving of help as these dislocated Ukrainians.
Of course, most refugees still wish to find a way back to Ukraine.
Ukrainians are not well-traveled people, Odarka Bordun, the communication manager at Caritas Ukraine in Kyiv, says. Many have never even left their home regions before and may only speak Ukrainian or Russian. “It’s a huge problem for these people to stay [in a host nation] and to find a job, to get their kids into school,” she says.
“They want to come home if they can.” And now that the shock of the invasion has dissipated and the war has become normalized, she thinks the numbers of the returning will only grow higher. During the summer, many thousands came back to villages reclaimed by Ukrainian forces during counter-offensives that dislodged Russian occupying forces.
Father Grynevych does not have an easy way out of this dilemma, balancing love of country with the Christian demands of mercy and forgiveness.
The conditions former refugees will face will be very difficult, Ms. Bordun reports. According to the World Bank, the Ukraine economy plummeted 35 percent in 2022. Farmers will find fields littered with landmines, unexploded ordinance and other dangerous detritus of combat. And because of continuing drone and missile strikes on infrastructure, many households in Ukrainian cities have electricity for only a few hours a day.
Life under fire
Ms. Bordun has no problem rattling off all that Caritas Ukraine, the largest humanitarian network in Ukraine, has accomplished this year: more than 3 million people assisted; almost 2 million food boxes or hot meals delivered, along with more than 710,000 hygiene kits. Caritas has created more than 147,000 temporary shelters, she reports, provided more than 96,000 cash grants to displaced people, and offered almost 300,000 psychosocial support services to people traumatized by dislocation and violence.
What she finds more difficult to describe is the disquiet provoked by a visit to “de-occupied” and desolate villages like Bucha and Irpin, where Ukrainian officials allege that Russian troops tortured and murdered civilians. Photographs of bodies lying in the street and burned-out homes and schools from inside these recovered villages have been seen around the world. But even those stark images do not prepare visitors for the silence, Ms. Bordun says, describing a visit to a liberated community north of Kyiv.
“You know in a village you have the dogs, you have the roosters and the sounds of kids playing, but when you come to these villages, the ruins, the houses without windows and fire after fire...” Her voice trails off. “It’s so quiet everywhere. Just silence.”
Caritas teams performed some small-scale restoration work on salvageable homes as winter closed in during this first year of the war, Father Grynevych reports. He hopes to do more significant restoration work in cities around the country as soon as it becomes safe and practical to do so. But at this time, new attacks threaten to obliterate any reconstruction.
For now humanitarian aid remains of primary importance, Ms. Bordun says—delivering food kits, hot meals and shelter. “When I talk to someone who came from Mariupol or Kostyantynivka or Kharkiv,” and she hears of the misery they have escaped and accepted their heartfelt thanks after a hot meal and a shower, “then you understand that Caritas work, it’s not in vain.”
She understands that as a Christian she is supposed to be a peacemaker and to turn the other cheek, but with Mr. Putin, “after the cheek, it will be your head” that he comes for.
“These people need us.”
Her husband is away with the army. In addition to her work, she is caring for two young children on her own in Kyiv. Is she determined to remain to face another year of war in Ukraine?
The question provokes a soft laugh. “Someone has to stay,” she says after a moment, “to prepare these hot meals and to repair these windows.”
Someone has to stay because if everyone flees, she says, “it will be nothing.” There will be no Ukraine left to save.
Anyway, she adds, “we have no choice” but to carry on.
Mr. Putin’s imperial fever will not break because of the suffering it has engendered. Despite diplomatic chatter in Europe and increasingly in the United States, there is no trading land for peace with the Russians, she thinks.
“Not any territory will be enough for them,” she says wryly. “It will be step by step; they will take more and more and kill more and more and then one day they will come to Poland or Lithuania or some [other nation] which is closer.”
Despite diplomatic chatter in Europe and increasingly in the United States, there is no trading land for peace with the Russians.
She understands that as a Christian she is supposed to be a peacemaker and to turn the other cheek, but with Mr. Putin, “after the cheek, it will be your head” that he comes for.
How can Ukrainians negotiate with a force that seems intent on simply obliterating them? “How could we talk? Just to say, ‘Kill us’?” She finds hope in the solidarity that the people of Ukraine show her, remembering how they responded so generously so that fellow Ukrainians displaced by the fighting could have food, clean clothes and a safe space to sleep.
“And when I see that solidarity, when I see this sharing and caring about others, I understand that the future will be bright, actually, because our people are so, so strong.”
Father Grynevych calls the future the “most difficult question.”
He has buried three friends lost on the battlefield, and he wonders, “If I saw the terrible things that [Russian soldiers] did in Bucha, in Irpin, what would I have to do as a man, as a priest?... I know that I have to pray, but I also have to protect the people that are close to my heart.”
He does not have an easy way out of this dilemma, balancing love of country with the Christian demands of mercy and forgiveness.
“It is very painful to think about forgiveness,” Father Grynevych says. “I know that is a moment that will be in the future, that we have to. But I have to meet some family from Russia, for example, and I cannot imagine how it will be.”
The silence of the Russian people is a great mystery and misery to him. “I thought that we are from the same field, from the same experience of the Soviet Union,” Father Grynevych says. How could his friends in Russia and Belarus have been so completely taken by Mr. Putin’s justifications for the war? How can they remain passive and mute, “like vegetables,” before this injustice, he wonders.
He knows “the war will not end in the moment when there will be agreement of peace. The war will be done when we can forgive Russia.” That is something he struggles to imagine now.
As the second year of the war begins, he can offer no easy answers about how peace may come, only a soft appeal to the American people and others who have stood by Ukraine over the past year.
“Please pray for us,” he says. “Do not forget us.”
