How the Soul Leaves the Body
Of the Death of a House and the End of a World: The Testimony of Irina from Kherson.
Do you know how a soul leaves the body? When a person dies, their soul leaves instantly: right before your eyes, the body simply stops breathing.
But do you know how life leaves a healthy, living person? On February 24, 2022, at 4:45 a.m., I called my mother. My husband had already been informed that the war had begun, and we were packing our things, calling everyone. My mother wasn’t sleeping anymore. She hadn’t read or heard any news yet, but she already understood…
Her house was on the left bank of the Dnipro River, near the Antonovsky Bridge. She had built it herself. After divorcing my father ten years earlier, she had bought a small plot of land and started building her house from scratch. It was difficult and took a long time, and yet she still managed to pay for my university. She moved in when the walls were only plastered. In the yard, there was only sand. There was no kitchen. But gradually, she recovered from the divorce and sought a new purpose in life. When my daughter fell ill with leukemia and we had to raise money for a transfusion, the construction was put aside for a while. Only after two years did she begin to rebuild her life, piece by piece, into something good and bright. She met a wonderful man, finished the house, where our grandchildren laughed happily, and we celebrated together.
Then the war broke out… On February 24, she and her husband gathered a few things and moved to her apartment on the right bank of the river. Everyone knew that the Antonovsky Bridge was one of the two bridges crossing the Dnipro and that the invaders would use it to advance from occupied Crimea toward Odessa. The bridge is about 90 km from the Kalanchak checkpoint. This meant the Russians would arrive soon. No one knew exactly how long it would take, but everyone, almost instinctively, understood that the Ukrainian forces could not hold the left bank—they would be surrounded and forced to retreat. And so it happened. My mother and her husband left that very morning. They took the sphynx cat and a few days’ worth of food. They thought they would return soon—it couldn’t last forever. The husband’s apartment had been empty for some time. It had only the bare essentials.
A week passed. Russian troops had already occupied the city of Kherson. They needed to return home to grab at least the essentials. There, it seemed, the shooting had stopped. They reached the bridge but didn’t dare cross it by car. What if our forces bombed the bridge? In that case, they could still have crossed by boat. But the Russians were everywhere: it was dangerous. They walked along the bridge for a kilometer and a half. It was still cold. On the bridge were pieces of flesh in Russian uniforms and a body without legs. My mother told me she felt nothing—only disgust: she never thought, she said, that one could feel such contempt for a person. But the first question she asked herself was: “Why are you here? On my bridge, which I crossed every day, multiple times. You dared to enter someone else’s home, and you paid for that arrogance with your life.”
They simply continued, reaching the end of the bridge, where the occupiers had their improvised checkpoint and their machine guns. One of the guns was aimed directly at my parents. They asked for identification, scrutinized them, and asked where they were going. My mother answered: “Home.” They let them pass without saying a word.
It was cold at home: there had been no electricity since the first day the fighting for the bridge began. They collected our things and clothes—everything they could carry for almost 3 km. They passed by the body again. During all that time, it still hadn’t been removed by the soldiers at the checkpoint—yes, the infamous “we don’t abandon our own” of Russian propaganda.
They spent another two weeks standing in line for whatever remained on the store shelves. During that time, we realized that the occupation was deep. FSB agents came by the apartment next door looking for the neighbor’s grandson, a soldier in the ATO. They smashed the door, but found no one.
It was starting to get warm. They needed more supplies. From Telegram channels, they knew that cars were crossing the bridge. They decided to go, taking along old flip phones as a precaution so as not to raise suspicion. Everyone already knew that people with pro-Ukrainian views were being arrested at checkpoints. The checkpoint had already been reinforced: barricades, trucks, fortified positions with machine guns. The soldiers checked their documents, looked at their phones, and let them pass. They entered the courtyard. The front door was already open. There were boot prints on the floor; in the kitchen, bottles of alcohol—everything they could find in the house; on the bed, signs of “presence,” and next to it, a condom. They had stolen my mother’s favorite perfume.
And it was then that I saw that pain in my mother’s eyes for the first time—not because of the perfume or alcohol, but because she realized that, simply like that, someone could enter your home and destroy everything you had loved and built from scratch over the years. She steeled herself: it doesn’t matter, she said, our people will come, we’ll clean everything up, buy a new perfume, and burn the bedding.
Another month passed. The occupation worsened: Ukrainian food was no longer available in stores. No one wanted anything to do with that Russian crap—neither humanitarian aid nor shopping. They realized they had to leave. So they decided to go back one more time to get their things. They returned. Again, there were signs of life, but evidently, they couldn’t live there: they didn’t know where to get water or how to heat the place without electricity. In short, it was inconvenient; they didn’t stay—they probably went to one of the many nearby houses. They only took my mother’s fur coat—a warm pink sheepskin. Again, that pain in her eyes: they had torn away another piece of her soul. That evening, she told me she had looked at the house and, like the last time, felt as if she had said goodbye. She immediately pushed the thought away. She would return soon.
They left. They stayed in Kyiv for three weeks. Then my mother came to me (we had left for Italy in the early weeks of the invasion—my daughter needed post–bone marrow transplant support therapy). For now, we decided this was only temporary. Just until our people win.
The cat made the entire journey. Sphynx cats are just like people. They have intelligent, almost human eyes. He traveled for five days, stayed at friends’ houses, but endured everything with great strength. He was just very quiet and meowed sadly. He truly cried. On the second day after their arrival, we decided to take him to the vet. It turned out he had a tumor and fluid had already accumulated in his lungs. The vet said it was completely inoperable and that we could only wait for him to die in agonizing pain or have him put down immediately. I can’t even describe the pain I felt; I didn’t understand how my mother could bear it… Mom told me that when they were leaving, the Russians had started shooting toward the Ukrainian-controlled side. He was very frightened. He could have lived longer; he was only four years old. For my mother, he was like a child. He was the most important thing that reminded her of home in a foreign country. She says he was her guardian angel: he brought her to us and then died, as if he had to save her from the war.
We all began to recover together. After a couple of months, the neighbor called me and said: “There are new owners in your house; they park in the courtyard, hang laundry—men’s and women’s.” A whole major, he boasted of being a communications officer. Miserable… insignificant, miserable beings…
In the fall, on November 11, 2022, the Ukrainian army liberated Kherson. The happiness was immense. And our apartment was free. I remember my tears when my husband called via video from our apartment. We were all happy, and my mother was happy for us, but I saw how sad she was: her home was still occupied. There it was, already very close, just behind the bridge, only 2 km away. But those 2 km were an abyss between two worlds: free Ukraine and Mordor.
Finally, 20 days after the de-occupation of Kherson, the neighbor called again. He was one of the three people who had remained in that coastal village. He said there were no Russians left, it was too close to the Dnipro, but it was almost impossible to live there, and he would leave soon too. The house was still standing, but in the meantime there had been several rotations of guards, and everyone had taken what they could. The last ones had even taken the bed and kitchen, dismantled the boilers and shower cabin, and broken the bathroom tiles. They had taken everything with a truck, five people working all evening.
A year passed since February 24. Every day, the occupiers bombed Kherson more and more intensely. On our channels and on pro-Kremlin channels, I constantly looked for videos captured by various drones to see how the house was doing. Even in that area, there were periodic bombings, but the house was still standing. Every time, we rejoiced and prayed: at least let it hold. It didn’t matter if those bastards had looted everything—we would repair it all. As soon as they cleared the mines, we would go back home! Just let them liberate the left bank.
Then came the morning of June 6, 2023. The occupiers blew up the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant to slow the advance of the Ukrainian armed forces. Our horror knew no bounds. We understood that our house would surely end up in the flooded area, since the left bank is much lower than the right. We thought about the flooding… I won’t recount all the horror of the power plant’s destruction, but after three days, we saw my mother’s house in a video filmed by a drone. Two floors were underwater. Only the roof remained above. The nearby garage was completely submerged. We watched the video and could hardly believe it: everything was immersed in that dirty, murky water. Again, so much pain for my mother. But she continued to believe.
After two weeks, the water receded. In drone videos and satellite photos, we saw that part of the fence was gone, part of the garage roof was missing, and all the courtyard tiles were covered in mud. The neighbor’s roof had collapsed into our yard, destroying the gazebo and the woodshed. But the house was still standing. Dirty, flooded, but standing. We will not abandon it—it is our home. We will rebuild everything and return, as soon as our forces launch a counterattack.
Our soldiers are true heroes, and we thank each one of them for liberating our land from this filth. But the house was still occupied. We waited, searched for videos. Each time, the neighboring houses disappeared one by one. Among them, we recognized the neighbors’ homes. Then only ours remained…
“The Dnipro troops group destroyed the fighters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces who were attempting to take positions on the islands to cross to the left bank. Recon drones located the enemy, and the coordinates were transmitted to the flamethrower systems to carry out the attack.”
This is how, on October 19, 2023, the occupiers announced yet another event on the propagandistic Telegram channel Dneprovskij Rubezh. They attached a black-and-white video filmed with a night-vision camera. In the video, a projectile strikes my mother’s house. Flames rise above the roof. No Ukrainian soldiers are visible in the footage. I hope no one was injured or killed.
I understand that the house is gone. I don’t want to, but I show the video to my mother. And she doesn’t cry. This is how hope dies. And in the soul remains a void that nothing can ever fill: neither a new life, nor a new house. Not even Ukraine’s victory can help. Simply, a person stops being herself. Now she is forever a person with a wounded soul. You can’t see it. She is strong, smiles, cares for her loved ones. But she has been uprooted like a tree and must somehow live this life, go on with this torn soul.
More than two years have passed since those strikes. Sometimes I still look at satellite images and videos of the place where my mother’s house stood… now it is just a white patch of building debris, slowly being covered by grass. I no longer show it to her.
In December 2024, Mikhail Shatsky—one of the software developers for various lethal weapons of the Russian Federation—was killed in Moscow. And on October 25, 2025, Vasilij Merzoev was eliminated—the son of Arkadij Merzoev, lieutenant general of the 18th Joint Army, responsible for the use of “Solnzepjok” weapons in the Kherson direction. I cannot in any way prove that they were directly involved in destroying my mother’s house, but when someone tears away your soul, the only thing that keeps you from going insane is the hope that there will be justice.
I always wish one thing for everyone: that each person gets back a thousand times what they gave… and that all those who helped me once are a hundred thousand times happier than they are today. But those who hurt my mother’s soul so deeply, leaving her homeless—they too will get what they deserve… in this world or the next.