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The Comfort Life nursing home, a former hotel with a pistachio-green façade, used to be a tranquil place. Set back from the main road by a forest of tall pine trees in Bucha, a quiet suburb of Kyiv, the home’s floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto clusters of holiday houses. Everyone in Kyiv wanted a getaway in Bucha: it was green, peaceful and just 30km from the city.
The home had nearly 50 residents at the start of this year, elderly people who could no longer look after themselves, all suffering from differing degrees of dementia. It was a comfortable place but not luxurious (fees started at around £300 a month); staff put on art-and-crafts sessions, games and dances. Occasionally, wedding ceremonies were held in the garden for patients who had found love in the final chapter of their lives. On summer afternoons residents would sit on benches outside, dappled in sunlight, breathing in the sharp fragrance of the pines.
Svetlana Chehovskaya, 77, arrived at Comfort Life in 2020. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she was living with her daughter in Kyiv, and was spending ever more time sitting alone in silence. She’d always had an exceptional memory, able to recite entire poems almost straight away; now she struggled to recognise her own relatives. On more than one occasion she left the oven-gas turned on when she left the house. After much deliberation, her family moved her into a shared bedroom at Comfort Life, where she received full-time support from live-in carers.
Chehovskaya had spent much of her life outside the country. In her late 40s she had fallen in love with a retired Russian-army officer called Alexander and followed him to Russia, leaving her first husband behind. The couple lived happily there for almost two decades until Alexander died of cancer in 2009. They both had good jobs (she managed the financial affairs of a local private school) and enjoyed a decent quality of life.
“We faced a choice: stay and die alongside them, or abandon them and evacuate”
She wasn’t particularly political, but became more conservative with age. When a young presidential candidate called Vladimir Putin ran for office in 2000, pledging to make Russia more stable, Chehovskaya, by then a Russian citizen, voted for him (she did so in two subsequent elections, too). She didn’t think much of protests against Russian influence after Ukraine became independent: life would be better if people lived quietly without “that revolutionary nonsense”, she said.
Her husband’s death shook her. It also marked the start of her mental decline. She asked her daughter, Anna, if she could return to Kyiv. She did not want to live out her final years alone.
Many Ukrainians dismissed warnings by Western governments that Putin was bent on invading the country. But Chehovskaya’s grandson, a web designer with sandy hair and an easy smile, hadn’t forgotten the shock of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region in 2014. Artem Yumahulov started thinking about how to get his family out of the country, and made sure everyone’s passports were up to date.
After the first bombs hit on February 24th, Yumahulov went to see his mother, Anna, and explained the plan. He would drive Anna, his sister and grandmother, Chehovskaya, to the Slovakian border. Anna started to panic, worried that her mother was too frail for an arduous journey. But she didn’t want to leave her behind. Yumahulov, impatient to get going, promised that once he’d dropped his mother and sister at the border, he’d return and find a safe way to get his grandmother out.
He hadn’t anticipated how congested the roads would be. For three days and three nights Yumahulov didn’t sleep, stuck in an unmoving column of traffic as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fled west. By the time his mother and sister crossed the border, it was too late. Bucha had become a battlefield.
Yaroslava Senyevich had been working at Comfort Life for six months when Russia invaded Ukraine. A qualified nurse in her mid-30s, she had previously taken a break from geriatric care to look after her infant son, who was now five. Her new job at Comfort Life wasn’t too bad, and paid better than state-run homes, but the work was tiring. One of her charges would tell the same stories over and over again. Another wandered about ceaselessly, would sometimes start undressing herself and had to be monitored constantly. The combination of responsibility, affection and tedium reminded Senyevich of caring for a young child.
On February 24th Senyevich woke up to the sound of gunfire. Russian forces were attacking the airport in Hostomel, a nearby suburb. As she listened to the deep booms of the shells, she realised war had started. “Everything became dark after that moment,” she says. “Even the forest became ugly. Nothing was beautiful anymore.”
Six carers were working at the home that week. If they were going to save themselves and leave their elderly patients, now was the time. “We didn’t know what to do,” says Tanya Grinko, another nurse at Comfort Life. “We faced a choice: we would either stay and die alongside them, or abandon them and evacuate.” They argued. In the end, they all decided it was their duty to stay.
Russian troops quickly encircled Bucha and set up a base for their advance on Kyiv, but didn’t seem to have any real plan for running the town. Soldiers sporadically shot at people in the street; the fighting was constant. Senyevich felt like she’d stumbled into a war film. She’d never heard a sound like the roar of Russian planes as they flew low over the town in groups of two or three: “I didn’t think we would make it out alive. I expected everyone to die around me.”
Residents and their carers sat in darkness in the main hall and told each other stories about their lives
After three days the heating and electricity were cut off. In the evenings, residents and carers sat together in darkness in the main hall and told each other stories about their lives. Svetlana Chehovskaya joined in, mostly muttering to herself. When it was time to go to bed, nurses bundled the elderly into as many clothes as they could, hoping the hats and coats would stop them freezing. In the mornings they would go outside and cook on an open fire in the street, running to hide if they saw Russian soldiers.
Then the home’s water tank ran dry. Without an electric pump, it couldn’t be refilled. They had some bottled water which had been lying around before the war, but no one could wash or change their clothes. Many residents were incontinent and had to sit caked in their own filth. At one point, there was only one litre of water left for 50 people. Carers rationed consumption, which led to vicious arguments; people were afraid of dying of thirst. Soon medicines started to run out, too.
Comfort Life was not completely abandoned. In the first few days of the war, local volunteers brought in hot food and water when they could. One neighbour, Valery, turned on his generator once a day for carers to fill water bottles from his pump. He also let them charge their phones so they could tell family members they were still alive.
Residents’ grasp of the situation varied. Some understood that they might not survive if they stayed. Others, remembering the second world war, were convinced the explosions were caused by the Nazi Wehrmacht. One woman who had lived through the siege of Leningrad couldn’t process the historical role reversal. “These are the Russians? What are you saying? I don’t believe you,” she said to nurses.
Most simply didn’t understand what was happening. “The night time was the worst, because something was exploding all the time,” says Senyevich. They’d find residents on the floor of their bedrooms in fear, lost in the darkness or fallen down the stairs. “They would go to the toilet and then be too scared to leave the bathroom,” she says. “They would scream. Even though they didn’t understand, they still were in a state of terror.”
On the eighth day of fighting, the first resident died. Anna Maximovna had been frail even before the war. Now the carers didn’t know what to do with the body. The police told them to call the emergency services, who in turn said they should phone the police. In the end, no one came to collect Anna Maximovna.
“After that they started to die very fast,” says Senyevich. “We would feed them, care for them, but in the morning we would find them dead.” The second resident died on March 9th, and two more died the following day. Some had been close to death before the war, others probably suffered from the cold or lack of medicine.
The nurses drew up a table and logged the names, birthdays and times of death of each person. Digging four graves was impossible – it was too dangerous to be outside that long. Instead, they took the bodies to the coldest part of the home, the swimming pool, and locked the door.
On March 10th Valery, the neighbour who’d been helping them, left Bucha. Shelling had destroyed his home, and with it, Comfort Life’s last source of water. Scared, Senyevich and other nurses tried to fetch water from a stream in a nearby park. Local residents stopped them. “Girls! Where are you going? Don’t go that way, they are fighting there and it’s been mined!” They saw a column of Russian tanks heading towards their side of town. It was time to leave.
As soon as Yumahulov realised he wouldn’t be able to fetch his grandmother from Bucha, he began to co-ordinate a rescue effort. He set up a Telegram group that included other residents’ relatives, the Comfort Life carers and the home’s director. Together they discussed evacuation. The main challenge was that most residents couldn’t walk far. Russian forces would allow evacuation vehicles to park only by the main municipal building in Bucha, which was a 30-minute walk from the home.
Yumahulov started to flood local Telegram and Facebook groups with messages, pleading for help getting residents to the municipal building. No one volunteered: by then, driving around Bucha was seen as a death sentence. With the help of relatives in the Telegram group, Yumahulov raised funds to hire a married couple who offered to carry out a rescue mission for a substantial fee. The pair disappeared with the money.
They took the bodies to the coldest part of the home, the swimming pool, and locked the door
There were also calls for supplies. “I am writing this without hope, I understand what is happening now in Bucha – it’s fucked up,” wrote Yumahulov. “The old people do not understand what is happening and are very scared. The nurses are in shock. The food will last for another three to four days, the medicines are almost gone. We cannot get any deliveries there from Kyiv.” Though even travelling on foot was risky, several people answered the call, keeping the home’s residents going a little longer.
On March 9th, nurses decided to take 11 of the strongest, most mobile residents to the municipal building to be evacuated. But the buses never came. At the last minute the Russians had refused to let them in. The walk back was bleak. Several residents lost consciousness and armoured vehicles prowled the streets; the carers were convinced that troops were going to start shooting at them.
Another evacuation bus was expected soon. As far as Senyevich could tell, staying at Comfort Life meant she would almost certainly die. She thought about her five-year-old becoming motherless and realised she had to get on the bus, even though it meant abandoning her patients. Grinko, a nurse who was also a mother, came to the same conclusion. The carers found a neighbour willing to keep bringing food to the elderly, and told Igor Kovalenko, who ran the home. “They were really in pieces psychologically,” recalls Kovalenko. “Their nerves were shot.”
On the morning of March 11th, the remaining staff took a smaller group of patients with them to the municipal building. This time the buses arrived. They sat, numb, as the vehicles slowly rolled out of Bucha. From the window Grinko could see bodies lying in the road and outside the supermarket and entire houses that had been crushed; husks of what were once cars, their frames melted beyond recognition, were strewn along the main street. “I wanted to cry but I couldn’t even do that,” she says. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
At every checkpoint Russian soldiers loomed menacingly with their guns. “We thought they would shoot at us and it would all be over,” Senyevich recalls. She couldn’t relax even after she reached the relative safety of central Kyiv, consumed with guilt about those they’d left behind. “They are someone’s parents,” she says. “I constantly compared them to mine, who are also quite old and frail.”
From Kyiv, Senyevich took a train to her home in central Ukraine. She sat in silence, replaying everything in her mind. That evening, when she rang the doorbell to her apartment, her son greeted her: “Mama, you came home!” Only then did she allow herself to cry.
The Red Cross finally got permission to drive a convoy of buses to rescue Chehovskaya and the other residents. The convoy started out from Bilhorodka, a town to the west of Kyiv. As the Red Cross neared Bucha, progress slowed. At each checkpoint, the convoy’s leader had to get out of the car and negotiate access with the Russian troops. “They were very courageous – there were so many soldiers, it could have got nasty at any moment,” says Kovalenko, who was following in a car behind.
Soldiers would still only allow buses to park on a street parallel to the home. Kovalenko jumped out of the vehicle, accompanied by two Red Cross volunteers. They had to evacuate the building quickly: shelling was continuing nearby and the ground beneath them was shaking.
The gate of Comfort Life was wide open. Two old women were sitting, dazed, on the ground outside the entrance. Another resident, an old man, was lying dead in his bed. Kovalenko did a head count: there were now 33 residents. Two were missing, including the old lady whose constant wandering had plagued Senyevich. It seemed as though they had walked off alone into the war zone.
At one point, there was only one litre of water left for 50 people
Most residents would need to be carried to the buses, which would take a long time with just three people – Kovalenko and the two Red Cross volunteers. Gunfire was crackling around them; there was a good chance they’d all be killed if they stayed in the area for more than a few minutes. Just as Kovalenko was making the sickening calculation about what to do next, a convoy of Ukrainian emergency-service vehicles sped up the street. Eight first-aid workers helped get the residents onto the buses. “Thank God they came”, says Kovalenko, “otherwise it would have been impossible in the little time we had.”
At the end of March, Russian troops retreated from Bucha. What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg on Kyiv became a historic military failure that left a trail of horror. Corpses had been left to rot for weeks by the roadside and in basements. Fathers and sons had been shot in the head, their hands tied, face-down in their own gardens. The body of a make-up artist, a love-heart still visible on her red and white acrylic nails, lay in the dirt.
Senyevich hasn’t been able to sleep since leaving Bucha: she keeps thinking about the two women who went missing on the day of the evacuation. She still can’t comprehend why Russia attacked and occupied the peaceful town so violently, why forces didn’t open a corridor sooner, why anyone would deprive vulnerable elderly people of heat and water for so long. “These guys also have children, parents, grandparents, how could they do what they did? They are not human.”
Comfort Life is still standing, its three-storey façade miraculously unscathed. The bodies of the residents who died lay by the empty swimming pool until early April. On April 3rd one of the missing residents, Bela Bilan, was found alive and her son collected her from Bucha. The body of the other lost resident, Senyevich’s wayward charge, was found in Bucha: she probably froze to death.
Svetlana Chehovskaya is now in a nursing home near the Romanian border, close to her grandson. She does not appear to remember anything of her ordeal in Bucha – her fondness for Russia can continue. “I am honestly relieved because I don’t think she would survive that knowledge,” says her daughter, Anna.
Chehovskaya’s life began with another unlikely escape, Anna tells me. When Russian civilians in a town called Saratov fled from the advancing Nazis in 1943, a new-born baby was abandoned on the street. The woman who found the child adopted her and called her Svetlana. Together they escaped to Ukraine. “Just imagine if she had died in that home in Bucha, from the cold and hunger and thirst?” says Anna. “What if that was the way her life ended, after all she survived?” ■
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