Chronicles from Kiev

The journey from Ivano-Frankivs'k to Kiev is very long: over 13 hours. A new stage of the Cicogna mission to get the humanitarian aid prepared in Italy where it is needed.
This time we will be escorted by three soldiers. We are already thinking of Bucha, of Irpin, of the countries we will have to reach. But there are also villages that are in worse conditions. The military make us understand that it would make sense to go there too. We accept the challenge. On the other hand, we are here to serve.
When we enter the Kiev region the landscape changes completely. We begin to see the first signs of the bombing.
Silence falls, the radio stops. We go ahead on the motorway with our eyes wide open on what we see: incinerated warehouses, huge holes, everywhere the traces of tanks on the asphalt.
Some have been bombed and there are pieces of sheet metal everywhere, a little farther on pieces of cars, rags of clothes, pieces of military uniforms removed from who knows who, civilian cars on the roadside completely riddled with artillery fire.
At one point the escort pulls over.
Nazirii tells us on the radio to stop. We pull over: in front of us a completely charred Russian tank on the side of the road.
"Come on, let's take some pictures," shouts Nazarii in a tone that knows more of order. We approach the tank with caution. Above a large "V" and an inscription on the front cannon "wolverines!" (it is the name of the Ukrainian resistance inspired by the famous 1984 movie Red Dawn).
Silence pervades the atmosphere, that destruction enters us as a clear and strong message. I take the flag of peace and place it on that pile of metal sheets as if to baptize them with a new life.

In front of such scenes you can only pray, pray that God will enter those places of death and bring us his resurrection.
We get back in the car, Kiev appears in front of us with the grandeur of her immersed in a very gray sky. Left and right the usual destruction, a series of bombed buildings.
A precise, clear black line shows where the plane arrived when firing and where it stopped. On the street so many people who clean, collect what remains of this madness. We enter Kiev. I can't count the number of checkpoints and checks we passed.
Pasha (pastor of the Reformed Church) awaits us in Motovylivka (a village just outside Kiev). We arrive at him at 20.59. At 9.00 pm the curfew takes place and we are welcomed by several people, all refugees. We hug each other, thanking God for being saved. They accompany us to a structure where to sleep and eat something. Ukrainians are very hospitable and love to do things right.
The morning comes early. The first destination is Irpin.
To get there we pass inside
of Kiev. The city welcomes us at dawn in its grandeur and with all the traces of an ongoing war: the public gardens transformed into trenches, the entrances to the streets, the monuments hidden behind the walls of sandbags and Friesland horses from which they sprout the Kalashnikovs of both civilian and military militias.
We pass the checks. We are in Irpin. Machines, tanks, rubble, sheet metal… repeat. From now on, this will be the litany that will accompany us. We arrive at the reformed church of Irpin.
Next to us several buildings still standing but completely charred. The buildings that have not been touched by the bombing still have all the windows broken by the shock waves of the bombs. Inside the garden of the Reformed Church there are piles of charred and riddled cars.
"In this car there were only families who were running away," says Irina, Pasha's wife. "What need was there to shoot a family car loaded with suitcases, with the white flag tied to the mirror that is escaping?" Irina looks at me and shrugs with sad eyes. "A few days ago they shot 12 people who were queuing for bread."
The nonsense of this war in 2022 is taking shape more and more. As I wander among the metal sheets, a handful of volunteers are sweeping the windows from the street so that no one gets hurt.

One of them approaches me and comes towards me.
She is called Olga. She speaks a little Italian because she has been a Spanish mediator in her life. She is holding two boxes of amoxicillin in her hand that we brought. She smiles, she begins to tell me what she has seen, what she has experienced. “I've always lived in Kiev. I have spent my life mediating in Spanish and have always traveled so much that upon retirement I had decided to move to Irpin to have a quiet life with my two cats. Irpin was a beautiful city, equipped with everything, a comfortable life was lived here, so much so that many young families with children moved here from Kiev. Then all of a sudden all hell broke out. We remained in the bunkers throughout the siege. We have seen things we can't even tell. They were bombing all the time and we couldn't believe what was happening. Who could have escaped.
Do you know what it means to give up everything you have built in a lifetime and have to escape? ».
I remain silent. I say that we are together and that we will not leave them.
I greet Olga, the military has arrived to take us, through Bucha and Hostomel, to Dymer where we will deliver the aid.

As soon as we leave Irpin, we enter Bucha. We all know by now what happened there.
Words are not enough to describe the level of destruction we have found.
At a certain point in front of a house a rectangular hole makes us understand with great probability that bodies have been exhumed from there.
Our prayer continues. As soon as Bucha is finished we pass through Hostomel ': same scene.
To the right and left, however, just outside the city there are endless fields of corn.
"On these two wheat fields there were most of the Russian army vehicles and a very strong battle was fought," Pasha said on the radio.
Traces of Russian encampments and armored vehicles (and their carcasses too) were everywhere.
Towels, bags, shopping bags used as cabinets still hang from the trees, along with the remains of food and more scattered everywhere.
Near the camps the signs of grenades, cannon shots follow one another.
We arrive at Dymer.
There are several people waiting for food in the main square. So many people tried by the war.
"The Russians have left control of the area a few days ago," says one of the boys.
"They emptied the houses of everything that was inside" - another lady tells us a little further on. "Are you Italians?". "Yup".
"And did you come here?" Thank you, God sees everything and blesses you for what you are doing! " - an elderly woman who is obviously moved yells after us.
I too am moved by thinking of the supply chain of love that starts from Turin and crosses all of Europe.
It is the Church that simply seeks to live the Kingdom that is reaching the people.
The text of one of our songs comes to mind: "No one can take from God the eternity of every act of love from him". Here you are.
Christians should be made to remind each other in the most difficult times.

We open the doors of the vans and with Rosa, Marco, Albano, Filippo, Sofia and Rarash we begin to open the boxes and prepare the shopping packages.
A little milk, pasta, rice, sugar, canned goods, sweets, candies. More or less 10 kg per family.
A composed and in some ways interminable line is created.
I open a box and find a lot of Italian chocolate.
I turn around, two little girls cling to their mother's leg with all the strength they have, as if to keep themselves upright.
I approach and the older girl looks me straight in the eye.
I pull out two sticks of Kinder chocolate from under my jacket.
Her eyes light up and the sound of her astonished breath is a sound that will be hard to forget.
An elderly lady who witnessed the whole scene, smiling and ironically, says to me:
"And nothing for me?"
We all laugh and I extend a piece of chocolate to her too, who with a baby starts to gloat in her arms.

The mother of the child between smiles and tears says to me in a low voice: «Please close the skies». God only knows what he saw.
The question of the No Fly Zone is a request that we have received from many sides, but we know well how controversial the question is. Distribution continues unabated. The soldiers of the escort on the sides of the vans begin to collect the requests of older people further away. The tail never seems to get rid of, while the food decreases visibly. We begin to worry that it will not be enough for everyone and that we would like to avoid a riot. We start decreasing the quantities until we run out of everything we had.
We remain suspended and instead, to our amazement, people still come to thank us for what we had done. Some tell us not to worry that whoever has had will share food with others. What a lesson in humanity!
It's 4pm, it's very late, and we still have to get to Rivne before curfew. We leave for a bit of a run, with people coming out to the street to greet us. We leave heaps of cardboard on the road, but people signal us to leave. Who was there started to collect in our name.

We continue on the way we started but this time they take us towards the road to Zytochymir to shorten.
The country lanes that we walk along show all the horror of the war that passed from there.
Suddenly in front of us a completely bombed bridge is a road that goes down with a slope that is difficult for our vans to bear.
"These are Borodyanka and Makariv."
We thought we had seen so much of this war.
But no.
Borodyanka was ghostly, completely bombed and destroyed by the Russian army.
Heaps of condominiums in rubble, cut like puddings from the surgical bombings, in which people continue to dig to look for the bodies and survivors.
Shortly after Makariv arrives… the two cities are separated by a road of 1-2 km completely covered with crates of weapons, mines and grenades.
The village consisted of small country houses.
Now there is no longer one standing.
"Here they killed all the men" - Pasha says on the radio.
What did they look for here? What kind of threat was there within these walls?
The nonsense of what we are seeing would like to impose itself on reality.
This is one of the effects of war: to steal everything from you, including hope. But you have to stay focused on the light.


Texts and photos by Marco Maccarelli
NP May 2022