LUCH, Ukraine -- It was when a blaze of flying glass and shrapnel fanned across their apartment that Mykola and Natalya Andryushchenko decided it was time to go.
At the time of the explosion outside their window, his son and two grandsons were visiting the pensioners at their apartment in a southern Ukrainian village. Natalya, who had been standing close to the two boys, shielded them with her body as everyone hit the floor.
“It was only after this that we decided to leave this place,” Mykola said, gesturing toward the holes in the walls of his now-vacant home in Luch. “We lived in a basement for a month, but what are you going to do? War is war.”
After a month in a neighbor’s basement, the couple moved north to Mykolayiv.
Luch lies in a corridor between the southern cities of Kherson and Mykolayiv, in an area that was fought over fiercely for months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Artillery and air strikes would turn much of the town into rubble, including the Andryushchenkos’ apartment building.
The 70-year-old building is uninhabitable and, residents say, needs to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, as nobody repairs these Soviet-era two-stories anymore. Many hope to return now that Luch seems relatively safe following Russia’s retreat back across the Dnieper River last fall. Today, the Mykolayiv region finds itself on a new front line: The frontier in Ukraine’s battle to rebuild, even as the country continues its fight to drive Russian forces out.
City On The Wave
Russian forces made major advances in the south in the early days of the invasion, seizing Melitopol, laying siege to Mariupol, and swarming Kherson. They came close to Mykolayiv, occupying part of the region but never managing to take the city itself.
At the confluence of the twisting Pivdenniy Buh and Inhul rivers, Mykolayiv is known to locals as the “city on the wave” -- and it’s where the wave of Russia’s southern advance broke before receding.
Ukraine recaptured the southern part of the Mykolayiv region in a rapid counteroffensive last autumn that climaxed with the liberation of Kherson in November.
Kherson remains under persistent shelling by Russian artillery on the opposite bank of the Dnieper. But Mykolayiv and its outskirts, while subject to frequent missile attacks, are safe from less predictable artillery strikes. A crucible in the counteroffensive a year ago, the area is now freer to pick up the pieces.
Like other major cities that were threatened but never captured by Russian forces, Mykolayiv is the site of major damage and destruction. And it was under siege longer than Chernihiv in the north and Kharkiv in the east, for example.
“Mykolayiv was under fire every day for eight months straight,” said Dmytro Tarasenko, who leads the local operations of the Ukraine Support Team (UST), which coordinates NGOs and foreign aid in hard-hit parts of the country. Sheets of plywood have replaced the glass panes in all the windows of the office the UST works out of, in the shadow of the shattered Mykolayiv regional administration headquarters.
As the workday began on March 29, 2022, a Russian rocket strike gutted the building in the very center of the city, killing 37 government workers and military personnel. Nineteen months later, it is a prominent symbol of overall destruction, but it’s hardly alone: All over town, apartments, schools and bridges are in ruins.
There are 130 buildings and facilities requiring reconstruction in the area, according to Anna Bilyavska, a Mykolayiv native who works for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). UST tallies 1,279 educational, medical and energy facilities destroyed throughout the Mykolayiv region.
But in what was hardly a model city before the war, there’s more to it than that, Bilyavska said. A “reconstruction of minds” is needed, she believes.
“We need not only to bring people back, we also need to get them to stay,” said Nils Christiensen, a project manager for the UNDP. “Even before the war, it wasn’t the most developed place in Ukraine.”
“Mykolayiv was always a city that people moved away from,” said the UST’s Tarasenko, himself a local. “We are now building ourselves a reputation. So far, it’s working out.”
On The Waterfront
Always overshadowed by nearby Odesa, Mykolayiv struggled in the wake of the Soviet collapse of 1991.
The city’s name is a nod to the patron saint of sailors. Mykolayiv’s perch just upriver of the Black Sea made it ideal for shipyards. It was here that the Soviet missile cruiser Slava was built, later to be rechristened the Moskva and sunk last year in one of the first major setbacks for Russia following the full-scale invasion.
Anchors and compass roses adorn city banners. A cast-iron frigate stamped with the city’s foundation year of 1789 greets visitors arriving at the main train station, breaking the monotony of its boarded-up windows.
For much of the Soviet era, Mykolayiv was off-limits to foreigners as a military production zone. An economic lifeline at the time, its shipyards fell into disrepair as the U.S.S.R. collapsed, with nothing much to take their place within the local economy.
“A lot of people, especially the older generation, say, ‘Don’t you see how good we had it back then? Everyone worked,’” Bilyavska said.
“But it’s been a long time since the shipyards actually made anything,” she continued, describing them as zones of both high-powered corruption and low-level theft since the twilight of the U.S.S.R.
As the Soviet era receded into the past, local government set its sights on development, but progress remained elusive. And then came the war.
Build Back Better?
Mykolayiv’s role in halting the Russian advance has instilled a new sense of pride, and the success of its effort to rebuild has implications for the country’s broader ambitions: Vidbuduvaty krashche nizh bulo -- to build back better, especially parts of the country that remain occupied.
Local resources are desperately limited. The city budget before the invasion was about 5.5 billion hryvnya ($150 million), and that number has fallen far, with Mayor Oleksiy Senkevich now fighting against changes that would redirect income taxes paid by soldiers from the cities to the federal government.
The city and the nation are turning to foreign aid, from both NGOs and governments. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has taken an active role in lobbying foreign aid for Mykolayiv and its region. Denmark has taken the lead by partnering directly with the city to support its reconstruction. The Netherlands has also been a major player, with both countries drawn in on the basis of their own substantial shipping and shipbuilding interests.
Actual reconstruction remains a tentative process, slow to break ground. Denmark, for example, announced the formal opening of an office in the city at the beginning of October, without clarifying whether it’s actually open. They would not accept visitors.
This water-oriented city is struggling to rebuild its water grid, cut off in April 2022 and now thoroughly salinated. And all the city’s children are still studying remotely, amid fears of further attacks on schools.
“We are working to restore quality water supply to the city's residents and to make Mykolayiv residents feel the consequences of the war as little as possible,” the mayor said on his Facebook page in September, predicting a return of water services in June 2024.
One source of optimism in the traditional shipbuilding city is talk of the need for Ukraine to rebuild its naval fleet, much of which was lost when Russia seized Crimea in 2014 or destroyed early in the full-scale invasion.
Much of that optimism remains prospective, however.
High-Tide Mark
While Russian forces never captured Mykolayiv, they advanced on three sides of the city and briefly took Voznesensk, a smaller city further north, occupying it for three days before Ukrainian forces pushed them out.
“We were by and large the city that was first to stop and then beat back the Moskaly,” said Mayor Yevhen Velychko, using a pejorative term for Russians.
Voznesensk is visibly further along on its reconstruction and repair, thanks in part to the brevity of the occupation and a relatively robust budget fed by local wealth.
A bridge that Ukraine blew up to trap Russian forces in Voznesensk has been fully repaired. The city government is building a new office downtown that’s ready to open soon. A long-closed cafeteria outside the local hospital which had largely been ceded to stray dogs and squatters is now being converted into a rehabilitation center. And maybe most important, according to Velychko, children are back in school -- in staggered schedules so all present can fit inside the air raid shelters.
Trickle Down
Progress is much slower to the south, in the corridor between Kherson and Mykolayiv.
Svitlana Hinzhul proudly counts herself as one of 38 residents who never left Luch. She runs the local Palace of Culture, a multipurpose hub that serves as town hall, club, performance space, and home for Hinzhul and her husband.
The Russian invasion has turned Hinzhul into a community leader. During the initial onslaught, she tried to rally her neighbors to dig bomb shelters. Many of those neighbors, she says, treated the first days of the invasion as a joke, but ultimately ended up staying in the shelter she dug.
Now, Hinzhul and her husband, when he is not fighting, are living in what was once a dance hall, one of the less damaged parts of the building. Most of the windows have been blown out -- but she’s grateful the electricity is back.
A sheet of plywood latched with a bent nail leads to the theater in back. Light falls in plumes through holes in the roof and drop ceiling, hefty chunks of which are stuck up in the rafters. More debris lies on the control monitor and the 300-odd seats, whose vinyl padding is covered with dust. Another blue tarp rustles as the wind whistles through a gaping hole in the roof. At center stage is a set piece, a big blue “30” surrounded by doves and a sunflower, remnants from an August 2021 .performance marking the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence.
“We need to rebuild everything from nothing,” she says. “People are coming back — at least, those with somewhere to come back to.”
Nongovernment organizations and scrappy volunteers are providing much of the aid for early-stage rebuilding, but that aid remains occupied with the bare necessities of home repairs.
Insulate Ukraine, a project that replaces broken windows with double panes of plastic, has been active in the area. Its managers tout the transparency and insulation of plastic as far better than plywood, while also being much more resistant to explosive blasts.
Caritas Ukraine distributes doors, windows and roofing materials for free as long as the locals can install them on their own. And the ubiquitous blue tarps covering roofs are stamped with the name Samaritan’s Purse, a U.S.-based Christian aid organization.
“Architects came and asked my opinion,” said Nastya, a teacher who lived above Andryushchenko in an apartment that is now demolished, and gave only her first name. “Give people homes and the village will come back to life. We’ll have full schools. Living here will be like it was before.”
Frontier Mentality
Southeast of Luch, across the line in Kherson Oblast, Posad-Pokrovske effectively remains deserted. Except for the Ponomarenkos.
“It all starts with water,” said Anatoliy Ponomarenko, who goes by the diminutive, Tolik. “And the well has run dry.”
Tolik was a prosperous farmer who also worked at Luch’s now-destroyed radio center. His wife, Olena, is a teacher who has returned from spending most of last year in Novovolynsk, near the Polish border, to help rebuild the homestead.
In addition to being further south than Luch, Posad-Pokrovske has the misfortune of straddling the M14, the main road between Kherson and Mykolayiv. According to Tolik, Russian troops passed by on the highway for the first month of the invasion, more or less ignoring the village until they were routed further north, at which point his home became a battleground.
Missile scars are everywhere. The Ponomarenkos’ greenhouse is cracked open wide, with plastic covering flapping in the wind. All of his animals are gone, barring a brace of new ducks and chickens that a volunteer gave him, and Umka, the family dog.
Tolik shows off his tractor, the front wheels blown apart and the engine wide open. “I gave it to my friend and he took it into the field and ran over an anti-tank mine,” he says. “We don’t go into the fields anymore.”
He is now fitting together corrugated PVC sheets into a new terracotta-colored roof. The rest of their courtyard is slowly recovering thanks to a combination of his own craftiness and money coming in from his son and daughter, who live abroad -- his daughter chipped in $3,000 for the roof, for example.
Tolik has sculpted a couple of cement statues that, in conjunction with the vines growing across the wires overhead, lend the scene the air of a Greek estate. He’s used the same talent to patch up holes from shelling, especially in the surrounding wall, where he says Ukrainian forces set up a grenade launcher.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal designated Posad-Pokrovske and five other war-ravaged municipalities as the first tranche of the new “build back better” program at the end of April. Sweden donated 20 “modular homes” that are effectively tent canopies.
“Zelenskiy came here twice. He even laid down the first brick. And according to that plan, they said they were going to have houses up by this autumn. But you can see, they haven’t even put down a single foundation,” says Tolik.
The scene is grim. A woman with a massive walking stick and a head scarf plods along a dried-up canal at the village’s southern edge. A man rides a bicycle laden with an improbable number of jugs to the current water source, a lattice of spigots emerging from a bladder the size of a waterbed flopped out under the sun.
In Luch, the skepticism was also palpable, especially with winter coming.
“Two organizations came, and I told them about the village so they could help rebuild these buildings. They promised to do it, and then just left,” said Nastya.
“You know, a lot of people have come to me and they all did this -- they made promises and then left and then forgot,” Hinzhul said.
Behind her, an old woman eavesdropping on the conversation outside the shattered Palace of Culture let out a snort. “And they all forgot,” she repeated with a derisive laugh.
