Elderly in Ukraine, left behind, mourn as Russians attack anew
MYKULYCHI, Ukraine — This is not where Nadiya Trubchaninova thought she would find herself at 70 years of age, hitchhiking daily from her village to the shattered town of Bucha trying to bring her son’s body home for burial.
The questions wear her down, heavy like the winter coat and boots she still wears against the chill. Why had Vadym gone to Bucha, where the Russians were so much harsher than the ones occupying their village? Who shot him as he drove on Yablunska Street, where so many bodies were found? And why did she lose her son just one day before the Russians withdrew?
Now 48-year-old Vadym is in a black bag in a refrigerated truck. After word reached her that he had been found and buried by strangers in a yard in Bucha, she has spent more than a week trying to bring him home for a proper grave. But he is one body among hundreds, part of an investigation into war crimes that has grown to global significance.
Trubchaninova is among the many elderly people left behind or who chose to stay as millions of Ukrainians fled across borders or to other parts of the country.
Some, like Trubchaninova, survived the first weeks of the war only to find it had taken their children.
She wonders whether Vadym thought the Russians in Bucha were like those occupying their village, who told them they wouldn’t be harmed if they didn’t fight back.
More than a week later, she found his makeshift grave with the help of a stranger with the same name and age as her son.
The following day, she spotted the body bag containing Vadym at a Bucha cemetery.
He always stood out as tall, and his foot stuck out from a hole in the corner. Anxious not to lose him, she found a scarf and tied it there. It is her marker.
She believes she knows where her son’s body is now, in a refrigerator truck outside Bucha’s morgue. She is desperate to find an official to hurry the process of inspecting her son and issuing the documents needed to release him.
“I get worried, where he’d go, and whether I’d be able to find him,” she said.
Once she collects his body, she’ll need a casket. A casket equals a month of her pension, or about $90. She, like other elderly Ukrainians, hasn’t received her pension since the war began. She gets by selling the vegetables she grows, but the potatoes she meant to plant in March withered while she was hiding in her home.
Her aging cellphone keeps losing battery life. She forgets her phone number. Her other son, two years younger
than Vadym, is unemployed and troubled. Nothing is easy.
“I would walk out of this place because I feel it’s so hard to be here,” Trubchaninova said, sitting at home
under a tinted black-andwhite photo of herself at age 32, full of determination.
“I feel so lost inside. I don’t even know how to describe how lost I am.”