Separated by war, a Ukrainian family faces danger at the front and far away

“When are you coming?” two-year-old Snizhana asked her father, a soldier serving with an artillery unit in eastern Ukraine.

Smiling into his smartphone hundreds of miles away, Yevheniy Borysenko started to reply when three loud explosions nearby forced him to cut the conversation short.

“OK, bunny, I’ll call you later!”

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families have been separated by the war, adding to the stress of survival on the front lines and the growing dangers further away as Russia escalates missile and drone attacks around the country.

Yevheniy’s wife, Alina, lives with Snizhana and Yelyzaveta, her 11-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, in Boryspil, southeast of Kyiv.

The couple met on a dating website in 2023, the second year of the full-scale war, and married several months later. Snizhana was born in early 2024 but only sees her father when he takes home leave.

His visits are rare, often unexpected and usually short, reflecting the unpredictability of life as a Ukrainian soldier fighting a larger and better-equipped Russian army.

“Every time he comes to visit me, it’s just wow! A surprise! Unexpected!” said Alina, 32, as she sat on a bench watching Snizhana play in a children’s area outside her block of flats.

“And then his colleagues call him: ‘Go there [to the front] again!’ And again, everything inside me just breaks. He saw his child for a couple of hours, and that’s it.”

Growing threats

Yevheniy, 35, serves with the 43rd Separate Artillery Brigade in Donetsk, a fiercely contested region in eastern Ukraine which Russian forces have been trying to take full control of for several years.

“When he goes to his position, I worry about him so much, probably more than he worries about himself,” Alina said.

The worry goes both ways.

In recent months, Ukraine and Russia have engaged in an escalating air war, making life more dangerous in towns and cities far from the front.

Jet-powered Russian drones and ballistic missiles have raised the threat to Ukrainian civilians to its highest level since the early stages of the war. Russian civilian casualties, while much lower, have also risen sharply this year.

A block of flats close to the Borysenkos’ home was badly damaged earlier this month during one such attack.

“I don’t want my child to hear these explosions,” said Yevheniy, speaking at an undisclosed location in Donetsk during a break in his duties.

“When Shahed drones were flying toward Boryspil, I asked my wife to take them to their grandmother’s village … Because children get scared at night. My wife tells them: ‘It’s a thunderstorm, a thunderstorm,’ and my daughter, who’s two-and-a-half, says: ‘Bang-bang!’.”

Alina has no intention of going far, at least for now.

“I’ll stay here because my older daughter was born here, my younger daughter was born here, my husband is here, and my mother-in-law is here. I want to be here!”

Reuters