NEAR PAVLOHRAD, Ukraine — The children’s author had violence in her heart.
Valentyna Shevchenko, 69, recently fled the home where she had lived for 21 years, a home now threatened by a new Russian offensive. And she was angry about the meeting in Alaska that was taking place between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
“It’s not right that the presidents of two other countries discuss our fate without us,” said Shevchenko, who clasped like talismans two poetry books she had written — one was titled “A Wonderful Adventure” — while sitting on the edge of her bed in a shelter. She added that she would like to beat the two leaders with a wooden stick, or even a shovel.
“This is insane,” she said. “Here there is war, rivers of blood, and they are making some kind of deal.”
While the much-ballyhooed summit appeared to be more a show of amiable backslapping than tough negotiating, by Saturday it had become clear that Putin and Trump had discussed proposals that would be very hard for Ukraine to swallow.
In a post on social media, Trump reversed his support of Ukraine’s position that a ceasefire must precede any peace negotiations. And in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, he said that he and Putin had largely agreed to a territorial swap and security guarantees to end the war. European officials said that Putin was demanding all of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, including land still held by Ukrainian forces.
Half a world away, people who had recently fled the fighting in that region for a shelter near the city of Pavlohrad said the whole summit felt like an insult. The fact that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was not invited. The fact that Trump had treated Putin like a friend instead of a man under U.S. sanctions, who is a wanted war criminal in Europe. The fact that the world was now talking about Ukraine permanently giving up land to Russia for peace.
It was all too much.
“I hate Putin,” said Kateryna Chernenko, 65, who has been bedridden since a stroke about four years ago paralyzed her left side. She had been rescued Thursday, carried down from her second-floor apartment in the city of Dobropillia, which had been battered by the new Russian offensive, and brought to the shelter with her son and family friends.
“How can he do this for so long?” she said. “Killing civilians while they sleep. This isn’t war — it’s murder. Trump doesn’t understand — it hasn’t touched him. If he had lived through this, he wouldn’t say what he says.”
Any land swap could involve the homes of both Chernenko and Shevchenko, who, like most people at the shelter, had fled from the Donetsk region, which makes up a large part of the Donbas. Russia now occupies almost 20% of Ukraine, including about three-quarters of Donetsk, almost all of the adjacent Luhansk region and the entire Crimean Peninsula.
Chernenko moved to Dobropillia when she was about 22. She was given an apartment there under the Soviet regime because of her work at a sparkling-water factory. She learned to do basic home repairs and repeatedly revamped her apartment, which stands in the shadow of a large walnut tree, most recently putting up pink wallpaper dotted with blue flowers.
She raised three sons there. Her oldest died of a brain tumor. She rarely talks to her youngest son, who moved to Russia to be near her ex-husband.
Her middle son, Serhii Khalturin, 40, came home to care for his mother after her stroke. He bought her a modern stove, a washing machine, a TV and a refrigerator as tall as the ceiling. Both said they would never give up their land. When asked how it felt to leave home, Khalturin gestured as if tears were rolling down his face.
“That’s where my childhood was, that’s where my school is. I don’t want to leave,” he said. “Everything’s still there — my mother’s photos, my brother’s photos — old ones from the 1980s, with my mother young and beautiful.”
His mother was lying in a small room for disabled, elderly refugees, using her bedpan, one of the few things she had brought from home, in front of strangers. At one point, the whoomp of a Russian missile could be heard hitting about 50 miles away. Neither Khalturin nor his mother reacted.
Most of those at the shelter had fled with a few bags of clothes or even less. They left behind their photo albums, their judo certificates, their winter coats, their lives. Some packed in only 20 minutes. Some prepared for hours. Shevchenko, the children’s poet, and her partner tried to bring 15 bags of clothes and food, but after their bus picked up more people, they had to leave 10 bags near a gas station. Still, she carried her son’s guitar. In the military, his code name was “Maestro,” for his musical talents.
They spoke of their homes in the present tense, as if they would return momentarily.
“We can hear terrible sounds — such awful noises — and I just sit there, scared,” said Halyna Koleshchuk, 70, who lived in the town of Bilozerske in Donetsk for most of her life. “I pray. Then — boom! Everything shakes, everything explodes. Sometimes it’s guided bombs, sometimes missiles flying. The city is destroyed. Everything is in ruins. Banks, the post office, pharmacies — everything is closed.”
On Friday, Koleshchuk and her family decided to come to the shelter. They arrived shortly before Trump and Putin met.
This makeshift shelter was set up in a former Soviet hall of culture. Beds with sheets featuring famous vacation sites and saying “Around the World” and “Full of Tourists” were jammed into all available spaces. Rows of brown chairs sat unoccupied in the back, an empty audience for all the ruined lives.
Almost 2,200 people had come through the shelter in the previous week, since Russia intensified its offensive, trying to capture more of eastern Donetsk before the summit. The people who fled were the holdouts, the ones who had lasted through years of fighting.
The shelter had been intended to move people through quickly, to register them and send them on to other cities. And then, somehow, they were supposed to restart their lives.
Shevchenko had seen her life whittled away. She used to be an accountant, before moving to a village called Oleksandrivka in Donetsk. She lived in the servants’ quarters of a rich professor’s weekend home, taking care of the garden and the house and writing children’s books. Her boyfriend — he refused to marry her, because he said she was too troublesome — owned his own ramshackle house nearby. Often, they stayed together.
The professor died of natural causes. His family moved to France. The main house was bombed. Her boyfriend’s house was split in two. The servants’ house was destroyed. The couple moved into the summer terrace of the ruined main house, basically a covered porch, patching up holes from shrapnel. A missile hit nearby last fall, setting the forest and a nearby village aflame. The village once had 300 people. After she and her boyfriend fled, Shevchenko said, nine people remain.
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If Putin wanted this land so much, and other regions like Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, why did he destroy everything in his path, Shevchenko wondered. Maybe for mineral resources. Maybe to prove a point. Regardless, she said, Putin did not want peace.
“This is our land,” Shevchenko said. “Not an inch of it can be given away. Give him just a slice and he’ll say, ‘I want Kharkiv, I’ll take the Zaporizhzhia region.’ He wants all of Ukraine and won’t stop. We must not agree. We will fight to the end, because we are Ukrainians. That’s the only way. We have no other choice.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
