My stepfather is a soldier and I will be a soldier,” he says with a look of determination. “My father is a soldier, my uncles are soldiers and my grandfather was a soldier, too. Polite and soft spoken, Danyk says his father and stepfather are both fighting in the Ukrainian army. “This was my bedroom,” he says, standing next to scorched mattress springs that protrude from the rubble of bricks and plaster. On the way, he stops at his old house, most of it smashed to the foundations. 1, Danyk and his grandmother have been joining volunteers several days a week clearing the debris from buildings damaged and destroyed in the Russian bombardment outside Chernihiv. I have to help my grandmother too because she has heart problems,” Danyk said.īefore schools reopen on Sept. “My mother needs surgery and that’s why I have to help her. A handwritten sign wrapped in clear plastic on the front gate reads: “Please buy milk to help my mother who is injured." He sells milk from the family's cow that grazes in the nearby fields.
She keeps the piece of shrapnel surgeons removed during one of her many operations.ĭanyk lives with his mother and grandmother in a house near Chernihiv, a town 140 kilometers (nearly 90 miles) north of Kyiv, where a piece of tarp covers the broken bedroom windows. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Twenty-two weeks after she was wounded, she’s still waiting to have her foot amputated and to be fitted with a prosthetic. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.