‘I never thought bread could be so beautiful’

Ukrainians describe the hunger they faced during the first weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion

Interviews by Iryna. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.

Even though many Ukrainians expected Russia to launch a large-scale invasion, and some even prepared for it (such as by joining the Territorial Defense Forces), few could have predicted how rapidly the Russian military would seize multiple cities, sparking a humanitarian crisis. Mariupol, the Kyiv region, and many smaller towns that found themselves in the invading army’s path faced severe food shortages in the early months of the full-scale war. Meduza asked Iryna, a journalist from Kyiv, to record the stories of several Ukrainians who faced dangerous levels of hunger and thirst in March and April.

Valentina, 70 years old, pensioner from Bucha

What she ate: three spoonfuls of buckwheat porridge a day, water from a dirty well, boiled potatoes, and soup made with pork fat and onion

On February 10, 2022 — her 70th birthday — Valentina had surgery for necrosis of the hip, a condition she had lived with for three years. After she contracted COVID-19 in the hospital, she was discharged without having her stitches removed. Her children, who were unable to reach her due to Russia’s invasion, soon evacuated. Valentina thus found herself alone — with little food and no way to leave.

It was the water problem that scared me the most. The well at my house is really bad — the water’s putrid. It’s very old and hasn’t been cleaned for a long time; it’s full of slugs and toadstools. I don’t have running water inside, though I still had three or four liters of clean water that my children had brought me. I would even have been willing to drink the water from the well, but I couldn't retrieve it without help. So there I am, lying there, not knowing what to do. Lying there, praying, and seeing all my prayers amount to nothing. Where did everybody go? Then I put two and two together: there was a war, and my children were gone, and that must mean they were dead. It was all just such a nightmare.

Then, literally within a single night, the last bit of warmth seeped out through the old frames and cracks of the house. I took all of the blankets I had and threw them over myself, covering my body as much as I could. And I didn’t have a heater, or even hot water, to warm myself. I tried to get up, but it was so painful; I didn’t have the strength. I spent an entire night like that. Then I poured some water into a small bottle and lay on top of it to melt it, because it had already frozen. I drank a little at a time, but then it started running out. It lasted me about four days.

[...]

On the third cold night, I could feel that I was starting to freeze completely; it was hard to even make a sound, though I always pray out loud. I realized I was surely going to freeze to death, and I said a prayer for the Lord to accept me. Then, all of a sudden, my brother Slavik (name changed) shows up. He had stayed with his son in their home. They live nearby, but we'd had a falling out over ten years earlier and hadn’t spoken since. And now, God had evidently put it in his mind to come here. “I have a potbelly stove,” he said. “I’ll set it up in your kitchen, stoke it, and the room will warm back up. And then I’ll use it to cook for everyone.”

I was dreaming of boiling water. Slavik set up the stove and boiled me some. And finally, I was warm. I felt the life return to me. Slavik started coming over to cook food, but he didn’t have much of it, either. My first meal was two boiled potatoes. [...]

I ate once a day, at noon. My brother would come over and make soup with fried pork fat and onion, watering it down. And those bowls of soup would save my life.

We drank hot water; I ran out of tea after using the last teabag for three days straight. We boiled the water from the well. But you can get used to anything — even putrid water with woodlice in it.

[...]

Heaven forbid you ever learn what it feels like to have no strength left. I couldn’t even hold my prayer book in my hands. But the whole time, I was praying that God would perform a miracle and the occupiers would leave.

At the end of March, Russian troops retreated from the Kyiv region. In early April, volunteers and doctors started arriving to help Valentina.

Anna, a 36-year-old housewife from Mariupol, and her family

What they ate: pickled vegetables, 2 pounds of potatoes, groats, some dry bread, dried dates

Before the war, Anna (name changed) lived with her husband, her three-year-old son, her mother, and her younger sister in an apartment on the left bank of the Kalmius river in Mariupol. But in the earliest days of the war, they decided to move to an empty apartment in the city center that belonged to their friends to escape nearby shelling.

We found a bit of groats, pickled vegetables, and some flour in the apartment. But there was no way to bake anything; there was no power. We used the flour to make dumplings with some cottage cheese that we had bought on one of the last days before the war. Everyone got five dumplings, and then we fished a few more out of the pot. That made us so happy.

As soon as all of the supermarkets had been looted clean, people started looking for warehouses or for any other place to buy groceries. The city ran out of potatoes early on. At one of the stores, we were lucky enough to get a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of leftover potatoes from the bottom of a trailer for free. We made them last: soup with a potato, groats, and carrots for four adults and a two-and-a-half-year-old kid. We also managed to buy some cabbage and carrots, and our neighbors gave us some semolina. We used it to make vegetable cutlets. But we mostly ate starches: durum wheat, rice, and a bit of millet. The first thing we ran out of was pasta, because that was my son's favorite.

[...]

Literally just two days before we left, for some reason, I opened the owners’ refrigerator, which had been shut for a long time (since we’d long since emptied it). I found two jars of pickled cabbage, a jar of pickled tomatoes, and a jar of mushrooms. Since everything was pickled, it hadn’t spoiled. You should have seen us eat it!

[...]

One time, we got word that some humanitarian aid had been brought to the courtyard next door — all of the neighbors would share hearsay like that. We went to the courtyard, and a Ukrainian soldier had brought a car full of bread. [...] When I saw that bread from three meters (10 feet) away, I caught myself marveling at how beautiful it was. Before that, I never thought bread could be so beautiful. But there wasn’t enough bread for the other people in our apartment building, so they left. Then they told me that I had a small child, so they would give me two loaves. We gave the second loaf to a family with a young daughter who also lived in our building.

Pavlo, 71 years old, pensioner from Mariupol

What he ate: buckwheat, soup with raw peas, one egg a day, dried bread, water

Pavlo first learned about Russia's full-scale invasion from a radio news broadcast. He had expected an escalation, but he didn’t expect Mariupol to come under siege. Pavlo, who has almost lost the ability to walk, ran out of money just days after the full-scale war began; he wasn’t able to withdraw his last pension from the ATM, because his relatives had long been doing it for him. Until mid-March, Pavlo's niece, Maria, brought him food regularly. After the shelling of the Mariupol Drama Theater, though, Maria evacuated, and her family was unable to take Pavlo with them.

Once I had eaten everything I had, I went outside to where the other people were. Everyone was making fires to cook over. At first, it was my neighbor, Lyuda, who fed me: she made soup. After that, things got bad: I didn’t have any groceries left, and neither did anyone else. I would take a little bit at a time from my neighbors, but I didn't want to put them out, so I went hungry. I fainted from hunger twice.

In March and April, the fighting got really intense; shells were landing right in our courtyard. But people continued cooking out there — there was nowhere else to go. We learned to tell the different types of shells apart by the sounds they made in the air. And when people needed to, they would run back into the apartments, everyone into his or her building. Then, as soon as things quieted down a bit, they would go back out and continue cooking.

When the shelling began, I would get under a warm blanket, including my head, as the crashes rang out and shrapnel went flying. And I’d wait it out. As soon as it stopped, I would crawl out. One day, it hit my house directly. But my bed is in a good location — far from any windows. All that fell on me was a piece of plaster; I just had some slight dizziness. But the room next door was destroyed. Good thing it wasn’t a heavy caliber weapon, or I would have been killed.

They mostly cooked buckwheat; I don’t remember the other things. There was a potato shortage, so we rarely ate them. We made pea soup with dried peas. We were trying to save wood, so the peas weren’t cooked all the way. They were like little rocks. Most of the time I had one egg a day. And some oats washed down with water. Sometimes I had two eggs. That’s how it was from mid-March to mid-April. [...]

My neighbors would call me over, and I would go to their apartments to eat. They didn’t try to rush me, but I would leave anyway. It was uncomfortable to have them see me like that — as someone who needed to be fed. We would eat once a day, usually in the morning. Then I would go to sleep to make the hunger go away. I had no energy. Sometimes I would sit in the yard and read. One time, a blast wave knocked some books that my neighbor had left behind in his apartment out onto the street, and I found [Ukrainian-Canadian historian] Orest Subtelny's book Ukraine: A History among them. So I sat under the shellfire and read. I wasn’t holding my breath for anything good to happen; I thought my relatives had been killed and nobody was coming to save me.

Photos by Soi (real name omitted for safety reasons)