BERDIANSKE, Ukraine — The waves from the Sea of Azov lap along the narrow beach in the seaside village of Berdianske, Ukraine, but children can no longer swim there for fear of anti-ship mines. The beach sand is dotted with cement pyramids to prevent military landing crafts from reaching shore, and the large metal umbrellas fixed into the sand are bent skeletons devoid of the canvas that once shielded beachgoers from the sun.
The coming summit between Vladimir Putin of Russia and Joe Biden of the United States is of little consequence to the people of this war-torn village a few miles from the front line of the war between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists. The quasi-state a few miles away known as the Donetsk People’s Republic, formed with Russia’s support, has divided families and upended a once peaceful way of life.
“We ran away when there was war, but we came back because it is home,” a shopkeeper in Berdianske who only gave her name as Alyona told the Washington Examiner through a translator.
The jolly woman with dyed blonde hair in her late 40s raised three children in the village. Two have grown up and left, and one remains but can no longer attend school in nearby Shyrokyne because the village was so thoroughly shelled during Russia’s proxy war with Ukraine from 2014-2016, during which all 1,500 villagers were evacuated, and no building stands intact. Instead, he is bused further on.
TRENCH WARFARE: ON THE EASTERN UKRAINE FRONT LINE AS CONFLICT WITH RUSSIA RAGES
The shelling was constant at the war’s start, and Russian separatists once held nearby villages before being pushed back by the Ukrainian Army. Now the village is inside the military’s joint forces operation area, where armed checkpoints stand along all the roadways allowing locals and those with proper documents to come and go.
Alyona fled when war broke out but quickly tired of the tiny flat she rented in the nearby industrial city of Mariupol. After six months, she chose to come home, where through the open door of her shop, she can hear the ocean. Almost everyone came back.
“It’s not safe, of course, although it is not as intense as it was [at the] beginning,” she said. “Now, when you hear the shelling, you understand that it is farther away in the field, but it is war, and at any time it can come here as well. But we are sort of used to this already.”
Alyona isn’t sure whether she wants the soldiers to stay or go, she just knows she does not want to be part of the breakaway Donestk and Luhansk People’s Republics. She wants to be Ukrainian.
‘It’s not that I’m against Putin or against Biden’
Leonid Logozynski, 67, has lived in a home steps away from the Azov shore his entire life. When tanks rolled on the sandy street in front of his home, he stayed.
“Sometimes they shell, sometimes it’s far, sometimes it’s close,” he said through a translator.
Logozynski was neatly shaven, with sunbaked skin and deep wrinkles around his eyes, a corduroy hat was slapped atop his head as he spoke next to the aquamarine-painted metal fence enclosing his garden.
He lived through Soviet times, but what he experienced during the war he had only seen before on television.
“Of course it bothers me that they are here,” he said of the Ukrainian soldiers. “If they weren’t here, there would be no war.”
The reception on the one television station he receives is not enough for him to form an opinion about the coming summit. He just wants life to be like it was before 2014. Before tanks, before shelling, before sea mines, checkpoints, and soldiers.
“They were loud and made the dog bark,” he said of the nuisance the tanks were to him.
At the start of the war, Alyona’s father was in the occupied territory. She was cut off and could no longer see him.
“They just divided us,” she said of Russia’s move to foster instability in Ukraine, an issue President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes Biden will discuss with Putin.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Last week, Zelenksy gave a list of talking points for Biden related to Ukraine to three visiting U.S. senators.
“It’s not that I’m against Putin or against Biden, or in favor of them,” Alyona said. “I just want peace, and Ukraine was here, just like before. I don’t know whose fault it was.”
