On March 1, 2022, during an attack that destroyed or damaged numerous homes in the previously peaceful town 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of Kyiv, Vasylenko and her neighbors sought refuge in an ice-cold basement.
They emerged to find a scene of destruction, with the bombing causing the air to turn blue, melting snow, and igniting cars, bare trees, and frozen grass around the building.
“Have you ever seen hell? That’s what it was,” Vasylenko, 80, told Al Jazeera.
Disoriented and deafened, Vasylenko could not locate her daughter Olena, a 41-year-old nurse, and her son-in-law Serhiy Khukhro, a 37-year-old construction worker, who hid under the collapsed section of the basement.
Their bodies remained crushed in the flooded basement as Vasylenko was evacuated to central Ukraine with their young children, Milena and Bohdan.
Meanwhile, Russian soldiers occupied Vasylenko’s apartment for a month, leaving behind trash, excrement, graffiti with Soviet symbols, and looting all valuables before Moscow ordered their retreat from Kyoto and northern Ukraine.
‘She doesn’t smile any more’
Weeks later, Vasylenko returned to Borodyanka to bury what was left of Olena and Serhiy.
Her grandchildren were sent to safety in Poland, and she couldn’t bear to tell Milena about her parents’ deaths for over a year until they returned to Ukraine.
Milena is now 12. She returned to Borodyanka with Vasylenko and is deeply traumatized.
“She doesn’t smile any more,” Vasylenko said, sitting on a bench next to a community center where she and her neighbor sing in an amateur choir.
“She can’t bear to see parents hugging and kissing her classmates after school because her mum and dad will never do that again,” the 79-year-old neighbor, Hanna Ryashchenko, told Al Jazeera.
Both women and their relatives live in small rooms in a dormitory donated by Poland, with communal bathrooms and kitchens.
Excavators only started removing debris from around Vasylenko’s building two weeks ago.
From hell to limbo
At least 300 civilians were killed in Borodyanka, according to survivors, Ukrainian officials, and human rights groups.
Russian forces bombed Borodyanka despite it never hosting a military base or plants producing weaponry.
Amnesty International, a rights monitor, concluded that the bombings were both disproportionate and indiscriminate under international humanitarian law, thus constituting war crimes.
Russian soldiers operating tanks and artillery shelled apartment buildings at close range, also targeting shops and malls to loot their contents. They also fired on anyone they saw and threatened those attempting to recover bodies or assist survivors.
Moscow has consistently denied targeting civilians.
“I preferred to remain at home and starve,” Volodymyr Robovyk, a 69-year-old retired factory worker, told Al Jazeera.
Most of the trapped civilians, including children, were buried alive as they froze to death or starved.
Only one woman managed to save a family of eight by sneaking food and water into a tiny crevice at night.
Fifty-five apartment buildings, hundreds of houses, shops, and offices have been destroyed or damaged, leaving thousands homeless and jobless, officials said.
A slow restoration
A dozen apartment buildings have been fully restored or retrofitted with heat-saving padding, plastic doors, and windows, residents say.
But many more remain untouched.
“They dug this hole and are doing nothing,” Robovyk said, pointing at a construction pit on the Tsentralnaya (Central) street once named after Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin.
Behind the fence was a brand new excavator that tumbled into the pit and lay upside down.
Robovyk’s tiny, shell-damaged house was patched up by volunteers in the autumn of 2022, but renovating larger buildings is far from over.
“The end of reconstruction is December 2024,” a plastic sign on the side of Valentyna Illyshenko’s five-storey apartment building reads.
But the house is still encapsulated in scaffolding as workers finish covering it with heat-saving plastic that also hides bullet and shrapnel holes.
Illyshenko fled her apartment with her husband and their six-year-old son on February 28, 2022, when Russian tanks and armored vehicles entered Borodyanka or roared by on their way to Kyiv.
She said Russian soldiers occupied their apartment, drank all the alcohol, destroyed every family photo, and stole each electronic device.
At least one of the unwanted guests was a sniper who set up in the kitchen and cut a hole in the drapes.
The soldiers left the refrigerator and the washing machine only because they were too heavy to carry down from the fourth floor.
All heavy household appliances have been removed from apartments on lower floors, and the Russians left Borodyanka with trucks loaded with stolen goods.
“Hatred is what I still feel,” she told Al Jazeera. “I could choke them with my own hands.”
Having escaped the hell of the occupation, she now lives in a construction limbo with the noise, dust, and dirt.
Turf wars
She blamed Ukraine’s endemic corruption and the dismissal of Oleksander Sakharuk, a community head elected in 2020, for the slow renovation progress.
“They don’t let him work,” Illyshenko said.
Sakharuk was a member of the Platform for Life, a pro-Moscow party banned in 2022 whose members were banned from holding elected positions.
Although many Platform for Life members in Russia-occupied areas collaborated with Moscow, some remained staunchly pro-Ukrainian, including Sakharuk, several Borodyanka residents told Al Jazeera.
He got his job back in June 2023 and last October after court rulings, but both times, the justice ministry overturned the decisions.
“When he’s back to work, things move. When they fire him again, things stop,” Vitalii Sydorenko, a 47-year-old war veteran, told Al Jazeera.
Ukraine’s widespread corruption scandals have also delayed Borodyanka’s renovation.
Last December, anti-monopoly officials cancelled a contract to restore the apartment building where Vasylenko’s daughter and son-in-law died due to alleged corruption ties of the construction company.
Vasylenko also spent several months and hundreds of dollars to restore the deed on her apartment and other destroyed documents.
“I’m hoping to move back, but I’m too old to wait for years,” she said.
