A couple of sentences from Liudmila, 68, are enough to sneak into her marriage with Gregori, 73. When asked about her occupation, she says that what she really does is give him a hard time.
Gregori laughs behind her back, on the way – very snowy – from his small stable to the module where the couple lives.
Liudmila also sarcastically says that the construction of her new house is going slowly;
that he has ailments, arthritis, he gets dizzy, but that, and here comes the sting, his father was better off than he was at 80 years old.
Gregori resigns himself, but does not lose his smile.
On March 29, 2022, a projectile – whether friend or enemy is unknown – blew up the home of the Vovk couple, in the Ukrainian village of Zagaltsi, about 70 kilometers northwest of kyiv.
They had already fled.
They had cows, ducks, chickens;
crops of tomatoes, barley, oats, potatoes.
The Russians rampaged and ate everything.
Two years will soon be over and Liudmila and Gregori will still not sleep in a decent home.
Reconstruction in Ukraine is advancing, but slow for thousands of affected people.
The case of this marriage is in many ways a good example of how war can plunge someone who lives perfectly with what they have into the abyss.
Zagaltsi is a small town a handful of kilometers from Borodianka, one of the symbols of Russian barbarism.
In this municipality, the aircraft attacked fiercely to completely lift the gable roofs of dozens of homes.
Liudmila and Gregori had their farm and lands with which they subsisted.
They spent the few savings on their trip to Slovakia, where one of their four children lives.
He left them some money to return to Ukraine at the end of April of that year.
The Russians were gone, but neither were their animals.
They found the severed head of the bull they had and pieces of meat stored in a refrigerator.
“I felt a lot of pain when I saw him,” says Liudmila, “I tried to go to the garden without looking at how the house had turned out.”
Reconstruction in Ukraine is not monolithic — a study by the Kyiv School of Economics estimates that at least 167,200 houses have been damaged since the start of the large-scale invasion.
Small repairs were undertaken as soon as the Russians fled;
Considerable damage was faced shortly afterwards, between volunteers, humanitarian agencies, local governments and the State.
The difficult thing was and is the third category, that of destroyed and, therefore, uninhabitable homes.
That's where the Vovk marriage comes in.
There are cases in which destroyed houses were raised from the foundations, but it depends on their own resources or external help.
The latter, through, for example, private companies, needs to comply with the protocols of the State or the UN, which coordinate the work;
in addition to finally finding someone to do the work.
Gregori and Liudmila Vovk, inside their stable, in Zagaltsi (Ukraine), this Monday.Óscar Gutiérrez
Yurii Glava, 47, from Novosilki, is an engineer specializing in reconstruction.
He has worked for the company Miyamoto International in the restoration of the Zagaltsi nursery school (27,500 euros).
They wanted to show that something destroyed could be recovered without spending a lot of money in an adequate amount of time.
“Rebuilding a school with government standards or UN protocols,” says Glava, “complicates the process, and the subcontractors, those who have to do it, end up rejecting these orders.”
Restoration or new house
The Government is now working with the eVidnovlennya
(eRecovery) program
, a digital platform launched in May 2023 with which it coordinates reconstruction work.
According to data provided by the Ministry of Infrastructure, as of January 16, 35,100 requests for repairs have been attended to, for a total cost of 78 million euros.
Now comes the next phase, the certificate program: the owners of houses destroyed by the war can access, after evaluation by the Administration - always, all via the Internet -, new homes.
The first case executed serves as an example: a woman from Hostomel, one of the points in the kyiv region attacked by Russia, was given a house in Bucha.
According to Infrastructure, there are already around 8,000 applications to obtain certificates and 76 have been approved so far.
But this is not the case for Liudmila and Gregori, who, after almost half a century on that piece of land, do not plan to go anywhere.
“Our dream,” he says, “is to rebuild the kitchen so we can live there.”
The kitchen in many homes in rural Ukraine is located in a separate house, next to the main one, where the living room and bedrooms are located.
Reconstruction here began with demolition.
Liudmila says that the first thing they did after returning was to demolish what was left of their house down to the pillars — “I begged the neighbor to let me have the excavator,” she says while cutting a piece of cake and serving tea, “and we demolished the house.” ”—.
They also buried the bodies of the cows that had died as best they could, but that way because the dogs ended up eating them.
While they turned their land upside down, Liudmila and Gregori lived in their son's home, which, although it suffered damage, was still standing.
Volunteers and humanitarian organizations began to bring food and materials.
A Polish religious organization gave them the small module where they sleep next to a stove, while some donations allowed them to buy the cows, the milking machine and other animals to recover their farm and start again.
Help paying bills
The Vovk couple depends on the help that their son and volunteers give them to advance the works.
“By summer I want us to be done with it,” says Liudmila, “let's see if the war is over too.”
The two do what they can while milking their two cattle a couple of times a day;
while they take care of the baby ducks they have;
while they feed the chickens to give them good eggs, or rescue something from their two greenhouses in the sub-zero temperatures.
The interior of his future home still shows the bare beams and bricks.
A handful of huge rolls of insulation wait at the entrance.
There are no windows, but the roof is already there.
An American donor gave them 1,700 euros, which covered the work.
In addition, they have 50 euros a month each that the State gives them as they are considered internally displaced—3.7 million throughout the country—despite the fact that the module is a stone's throw from their former home.
“It gives us bills,” says Gregori.
Construction work on Gregori and Liudmila's new home, in Zagaltsi (Ukraine), this Monday.Óscar Gutiérrez
The mayor of Zagaltsi, Sergui Nedashkivski, 50, likes the thing about government certificates.
“I would accept it,” he says from his office.
When asked why some reconstruction works are going so slowly, he gestures that this is what there is with what there is.
“You have to understand,” says Nedashkivski, “that the State does not have that much money or buildings”—the cost of what was damaged by the war in housing alone is estimated at around 51 billion euros.
The holes are covered by others.
In the case of Zagaltsi, for example, almost two years after the Russian offensive, the school is not operational.
The restoration is carried out by the Hungarian State and its reopening is planned for the next academic year.
The councilor also highlights another small problem: older people like the Vovks do not have the property documents they need to access state programs.
There is no more than 50 centimeters between Liudmila and Gregori's beds.
At the feet there is a small table with a television, the refrigerator, a kitchen cabinet, a closet with clothes and the stove.
While she continues taking out jars of cottage cheese, jams and empanadas, he goes back and forth to see the cows and chickens.
―Liudmila, would you leave here to have a new house?
"We don't want to go anywhere, have you seen the land we have here?"
Although many of our neighbors have died, we all still know each other.
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