Sasha’s mother explains, “Sometimes he acts as though his father is still here. He’ll sometimes ask the others to be quiet because father is sleeping.”

Pavlo chose to stay in Ukraine and help his country towards victory. He is a mechanic and is working hard to repair damaged military vehicles.

Yhaidne village, Chernihiv region – where this man lives – hit the news when over 300 locals, including babies, children and elderly people, were locked into a school basement for over a month by Russian troops.

A woman sits outside while volunteers replace broken windows in an apartment block in Nova Basan, a village in Chernihiv region. She had returned home after the region was liberated to find everything in her home broken, destroyed, robbed, and contaminated.

After months of constant shelling, during which people retreated to their basements and tried their best to be invisible, Lyman became like a ghost town – with so many of its buildings destroyed, infrastructure wrecked and homes now lacking basic utilities. A study in May 2022 by the World Food Programme found that one-third of households in Ukraine were food insecure.

The Bobyk family live in a rural area of Sarny region and are enrolled in Mission Without Borders’ family sponsorship programme. They have a piece of land where they grow potatoes, beets and other vegetables, and keep two cows. The family of eight live in an old one-roomed house, with its toilet and bathroom outside. They had hoped to build an extra room onto the house, but the war put their plans on hold.

The war has affected families’ livelihoods and economic opportunities in Ukraine, leaving many parents without sufficient income to meet their families’ basic needs. The war, cost of living crisis and destruction of infrastructure means that children like Denys are even less likely to access the essential services they need to be safe and thrive. They are more at risk of child marriage, violence, exploitation and abuse than they were a year ago.

80 per cent of houses have been damaged or destroyed in some towns and villages in Chernihiv region. Air attacks in October 2022 left 1.5 million homes without electricity and about 40 per cent of Ukraine’s electrical grid damaged.

“Now I live in a penthouse,” Oleksandr said. His dry sense of humour and optimism is evident, even as he shows his visitors how a mine destroyed the roof of his apartment and made his home a ruin. There is sadness in his voice only when he shares how the soldiers took away his Bible.

Misha, the MWB photographer who took this picture, said, “So many people have returned to find their home in ruins – but they’re all eager to rebuild. If the situation stabilises, even more people will return home. Our help is urgently needed in the Kherson region as well as in other regions. There are people with almost nothing left, with no savings, in a country caught up in an exhausting war.”

The woman’s daughter said, “Our apartment is on the fourth floor of the building. It was incredibly painful for me to run down the stairs to the basement every time the bombs started, leaving my mother in her bed. Every single time, I was afraid to return in case I found that that my mother was gone. Once, a rocket hit the apartment across from ours.”

Along with so many other people, she cannot understand how such atrocities can be committed – or how her community will ever recover from all the tragedies it has suffered.

Ukraine has 5.7 million school-aged children. Around two-thirds of them are now displaced, while about half a million students are continuing their schooling from abroad. In September 2022, when the new school year began, 3,000 schools reopened in person, 5,660 operated virtually, and 3,602 used a mixed method. For the thousands of schools that operate virtually in Ukraine, electricity blackouts and poverty affect children’s ability to access their online classwork.

Similar to many places in Kherson region, Posad-Pokrovskiy’s water supply, electricity, gas and communications infrastructure were destroyed by Russian troops before they abandoned the town.

As one resident said, “One bomb ruined everything I carefully gathered and built just to live a normal life. What should I do now? How can I start all over again from the beginning?”