In 2022, their house was flattened – not a wall left standing. Their farming equipment was destroyed. They were cut off from regular access to water, gas and electricity.

Everyone fled here. Cattle were walking around – herds, without any owners… Cows were even blown up by mines.

Anatolii

Anatolii had a herd of more than 50 sheep. He stayed to care for them, for as long as he could, living in the cellar of their ruined home.

“It was under the house,” he says. “When it rained, it leaked a little, and we put a basin under it to stop it from flowing.”

He lived in the cellar for months, waiting for breaks in the fighting to care for his sheep. He would run out to give them food or water when the shooting stopped, then run back to the cellar when it started again.

If shooting started while he was outside, “I would drop down beside a wall,” he says. None of his sheep remain.

Since the frontline moved on from Dovhenke, only a few dozen from the hundreds of people who used to live there have returned.

Anatolii and Ihor rebuilt their home from scratch. “From whatever we had,” Anatolii says. Empty ammunition boxes littered the area – and were turned into the walls of the new house.

They found an old stove and built a system of heating pipes using discarded artillery shell casings. Destroyed tanks provided wheels for new farming equipment. Craters mark the earth around their new home.