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'This Is My Third War': Ukraine's Elderly Are Conflict's Forgotten Victims

by Agence France-Presse

   Dnipro, Ukraine --

   Shuffling down the corridor of a refugee center in Ukraine with his
   gray tracksuit sleeve rolled to his shoulder, 71-year-old Vladimir
   Lignov reveals the remains of a severed limb he says he can still feel.

   "It was on the 21st of March, I went out to smoke. Then a shell hit. I
   lost my arm," he says, recalling the strike on his home in Avdiivka, an
   industrial hub in east Ukraine and a military priority for invading
   Russian forces.

   Now in relative safety in the central Ukraine city of Dnipro the former
   train conductor is among what aid workers say is a particularly
   vulnerable segment of the population -- the elderly.

   In the Dnipro maternity hospital, hastily opened to accommodate people
   fleeing Moscow's forces, Lignov is struggling to come to terms with
   what happened and why -- not to mention what might come next.

   Medical staff at the Myrnorad hospital near ongoing fighting and where
   Lignov was treated after the strike say he should return for treatment
   in a week.

   Staff in Dnipro, he says, told him he should return in three days.

   "I don't understand what's going on. Maybe it's better if I just go to
   the graveyard. I don't want to go on living," he says, as another
   elderly man hobbles past him in the corridor.

   A van arrives from the east ferrying three elderly people groaning in
   pain as volunteers lower them gingerly into wheelchairs.

   Other passengers are erratic. One man, dazed, reaches for his
   cigarettes as soon as he gets out of the van and grabs his belongings
   as if he is rushing to safety.

   "The hardest are the people who spent long stretches in cellars," says
   Olga Volkova, the volunteer director of the center, that houses 84
   residents, most of whom are elderly. "A lot of people were left on
   their own. We helped them before the war, but then they were left to
   fend for themselves."

   The elderly are "often forgotten, very vulnerable" in times of war says
   Federico Dessi, the Ukraine director of the NGO Handicap International,
   a group that provides equipment and will financially help the Dnipro
   home.

   "Cut off from their families" and "sometimes unable to use telephones
   or communicate" they are particularly vulnerable in conflicts, Dessi
   said.

   Leaving aside physical health, the elderly often require "additional
   help, which is often not available."

   Aleksandra Vasiltchenko, an 80-year-old ethnic Russian from Ukraine is
   luckier than most of the other new arrivals.

   For one, she is sure on her feet, despite other ailments, and her
   grandson comes to pick her up as soon as she arrives at the Dnipro
   home.

   She was relieved to have escaped after spending weeks alone in her
   three-room apartment in the eastern Ukraine city of Kramatorsk, where
   Russian strikes recently killed nearly 60 people trying to flee by
   rail.

   "I was hiding all the time in the bathroom. I was constantly crying. I
   was imprisoned in my own flat," she tells AFP, saying she wished death
   on Russian President Vladimir Putin and his children.

   Perched on a bedside, her hands gripping a walking aid, Zoya Taran
   considers herself among the lucky ones -- that's despite having only
   one working kidney, precarious balance, diabetes and poor eyesight.

   That's because her rock musician son quit a career in "show business"
   two decades ago to care for her.

   "I am that elderly babushka," she says smiling. "My son is my eyes, my
   hands and my legs. I have nothing on my own."

   So as Russian strikes edged closer to Sloviansk, Taran, who had
   initially hesitated to leave, finally decided it was time in order to
   "save my son."

   "Why do we need this war? What do they want from us?" she says,
   sobbing.

   Citing Ukrainian government figures, Handicap International estimates
   that 13,000 elderly Ukrainians or people with disabilities have arrived
   in the wider Dnipro region since Russia launched its invasion in late
   February.

   Another hub, mainly for evacuees from the besieged and destroyed port
   city of Mariupol, and their children, has also offered shelter to
   elderly residents from the east.

   "Even if you open 10 places like this, they will all be full," says
   Konstantin Gorshkov, who runs the center with his wife Natalia.

   Among the 30 new arrivals joining the roughly 100 existing residents is
   83-year-old Yulia Panfiorova from Lysychansk in the northwestern part
   of the Lugansk region, under attack by Russian forces.

   The former economics professor -- now hard of hearing -- was "very
   scared" by the sound of shooting in her town and the three shells that
   stuck close enough to her home to blow out her windows.

   "This is my third war," she said, referring first to World War II, then
   the outbreak of fighting in 2014 between the Ukrainian army and
   pro-Kremlin separatists.

   "Lysychansk was freed from the Nazis in 1943. I remember how we
   returned home. Of course, I have some memories about it.

   "They were Nazis. Then our country was invaded, and now our country has
   been invaded by a foreign state. Then the freedom of our state was at
   threat. Now it is the same. We should fight... But the war is so
   scary."