“They were bombing and burning every day. We slept on the basement floor for many nights. We heard the shells and rockets whistling overhead. It was cold and wet down there, and my husband became sick.” She grimaced slightly, then finished her sentence. “He died five months ago.”
The 84-year-old woman who gave her name only as Babushka Halya, or Grandma Halya, is one of a handful of residents left in this once-bucolic town about 14 miles north of Kyiv. In the early winter months of 2022, it was the site of one of the most fiercely fought and decisive battles during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Frontlines seesawed from block to block for more than two weeks as Russian forces attempted to break through toward the capital.
In the end, Ukrainian forces prevailed, but Moshchun, once an affluent town of about 1,500 where Kyiv residents kept vacation homes, was left in smoldering ruins. Many inhabitants fled or were evacuated during the early stages of fighting. Government surveys found that at least 2,000 houses and other buildings were destroyed. Officials also said 600 Ukrainian troops were killed and another 600 were wounded.
More than a year later, life here is beginning to hum again. With help from government and private programs, shops and houses are being repaired. In the center of town, a once-flattened grocery market is getting a new floor and roof. Along a residential road bordered by tall pines and poplars, a few returning families are sleeping in government-provided trailers, amid stacks of lumber and piles of bricks, while they rebuild ruined homes.
Most houses, however, remain empty and untouched, their residents long gone. Some were once imposing stone mansions, but their charred roofs and chimneys have collapsed over doors, windows and porches. Others are smaller houses that burned practically to the ground as Russian artillery, missiles and attack helicopters rained fire upon the town.
Yet even in places where debris has been hauled away and homeowners have returned, the trauma lingers. Alesia Fabrovan, 49, moved here with her husband a decade ago from the Luhansk region in the east, which is now occupied by Russian forces. They built their dream house, with a hot tub, fruit trees, and a menagerie of ornamental sheep, rabbits and dogs in the yard. But last Feb. 28, with the Russians closing in, the family was evacuated.
“They took over our house and put snipers on the balcony so they could shoot at our soldiers trying to escape through the woods,” Fabrovan said, starting to weep. She brought out photos of the half-destroyed house, taken shortly after the battle ended, with several dead Russian soldiers lying amid the rubble. “I don’t know if it will ever feel the same,” she said.
The people of Moshchun share a painful bond with survivors from Bucha, a town several miles away. It too stood in the way of the Russian drive to encircle Kyiv, after Ukrainian forces cut off other access routes by blowing up a local bridge and dam and by shelling the runways of nearby Antonov Airport — crucially preventing Russian planes from landing.
The combat in Bucha lasted more than a month, while many residents remained trapped, enduring wanton, systematic violence that Ukrainian authorities later said had amounted to war crimes.
In late March, after Ukrainian forces finally expelled the Russians, gruesome images from Bucha stunned the world, showing streets heaped with charred and mangled cars, bodies dumped with gunshot wounds and bound hands, and bagged corpses being buried in mass graves. Ukrainian officials said 458 bodies had been recovered, 419 of them bearing signs of shooting, torture or violence.
Last week, outside a construction supply shop on Moshchun’s main street, stocked with pickaxes, wheelbarrows and bags of concrete, a man from Bucha stopped by to say hello to the owner, a friend from childhood. After embracing, they laughed and joked a bit, but the visitor never really smiled.
“You can see he lived through it all,” said the shop owner, Sergei Markhonos, 63. The visitor, Serhii Azarov, 62, nodded and took a deep breath.
“It was horrible … horrible,” Azarov said, searching for words. “Every family suffered. I lost friends, schoolmates, neighbors. Some people are still missing.” When he and his family started to flee in their car, Azarov said, “we passed crushed vehicles and bodies. The Russians were shooting at everything that moved. We just kept going.”
Like many other towns across Ukraine, Moshchun has a large, formal monument to local soldiers who fought with the Red Army in World War II, when the Soviet Union sided with European and American allies against German Nazi forces.
The monument here, which dominates the town park, features a tall bronze statue of a soldier holding a helmet with a Russian star embossed on it. On either side are stone plaques with about 500 names of fallen soldiers. In front is a large stone, engraved with a message: “Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the fight for freedom and independence of the Motherland.”
But all those soldiers and their cause are long gone, and anti-Russian sentiment here is perhaps as angry as any place in Ukraine. “We have had a lot to do with the Russians over the years, and some people here still speak the language, but please don’t confuse us with them,” Markhonos said with a short laugh.
If Moshchun is still a little too quiet, it also feels safe and unhurried. Children play on ladders and swings in overgrown playgrounds. Groups of cyclists pedal through town; traffic is light but constant. The only hint of danger, residents said, comes from packs of wild boars that roam freely among forests, fields and yards that were once enclosed or fenced.
Grandma Halya, who lives alone with her cats between the old church and the town’s overgrown cemetery, leads a remarkably self-sufficient life. She said she receives a pension from a long-ago government job, and that a niece and nephew in Kyiv come to check on her often.
She admits to having trouble remembering names, but like many younger people who have returned to Moshchun, she can instantly name the date Russian forces entered the town, the date she and her ailing husband were evacuated to Kyiv, and the date she returned after the fighting was over, when she learned that their old house had been burned down.
“I have lived in this village for 63 years,” Halya said firmly. “My father was buried here. Now I have buried my husband here, and I’m alone, but nobody bothers me. I don’t want to go anywhere.” She added, “I just try to keep walking and watch out for the boars. We don’t want them doing any damage to the graves.”
