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S&U interviews

War & peace

30 March 2023

5 min read

After the anniversary

Ukrainian musician Lyuba Reznichenko reflects on the war’s anniversary and on the aid given in so many ways. Interview by Peter Robertson.

Peter Robertson

Peter Robertson is Christian Aid's senior humanitarian journalist.

A woman sits on a chair in a field holding a large stringed musical instrument.

Lyuba Reznichenko playing her bandura.

Christian Aid.

Christian Aid first met Lyuba Reznichenko in July 2022 after the then-25-year-old had fled her home, and her studies at the music academy in Dnipro, for a remote village in western Ukraine. She was sharing a bungalow with three families, including a friend from her church in Dnipro.

Her parents, brother and three sisters were still in Kherson, under Russian occupation - they were safe but Lyuba could not get to them. She spoke about her worries and said she missed playing music but was enjoying the nature around her.

I caught up with Lyuba, in Lviv, via a Zoom interview. She updated us on the liberation of Kherson but explained her parents were under constant shelling from the Russians.

Lyuba plays the bandura – the national instrument of Ukraine. Her father advised her to take her bandura with her when she escaped, so if she ended up with nothing, she could still busk. She has since staged performances in Lviv city centre to raise people’s spirits and talked about how emotional people get: “They all want peace and victory,” she said.

She also spoke about her faith, the work she has been doing helping refugees and the support she received from Christian Aid’s partner, Hungarian Interchurch Aid.

Lyuba said when she looks back at the past year, she gets frustrated:

“It sometimes feels like I am ready to succumb to all that. But I understand that we cannot do that. We must hope, we must pray. I do believe that God will help us and victory will be ours.”

What was your life like before the war?

I was studying at the Music Academy in Dnipro. Before that, I went to see my parents in Kherson during the New Year holidays… I was planning to go visit them again in March, but 24 Feb changed everything. I was in Dnipro and my entire family was in Kherson.

What did you feel when you learnt about the Russian invasion on 24 Feb?

Like the majority of Ukrainians, I started getting phone calls at 4am from my friends who were saying: “get up, the war has started.” It was horrible, I was very scared as we heard the first air raids and explosions. Horror is the only thing I remember about that day.

What happened next?

I stayed in Dnipro until mid-March. To avoid plunging into panic and depression and as a believer, I will be honest with you, I prayed a lot. I do believe that God supports, protects and helps. The church I used to go to opened a centre for the first wave of refugees from Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhya regions. As my own family was in the area under occupation and I could not do anything to help them, I decided to start helping those refugees.

Then I learnt of an opportunity to evacuate to western Ukraine in March, I grabbed it. This is how I ended up in Transcarpathian Region.

What’s your experience of interaction with Christian Aid?

I stayed with a very kind and hospitable family in a village there. They have many children and helped other refugees and I helped them every time I could. Then, in May I learnt of the Hungarian charity HIA, Christian Aid partner, and registered with them…

They supported me financially. As a student, I did not have any means. I could not ask my parents for helps as they were living under occupation and banks did not work there…

How did you stay in touch with your family?

It was a very difficult situation. There have been protracted periods, like a week, two weeks and a half, when I could not get in touch with them as there was no phone connection, no internet in Kherson. I was horrified by the news I read: a strike here, an explosion there. I was thinking about my family all the time.

But there were moments when I could reach them on a chat app. The connection was bad, but still, and when you hear the voice of your nearest and dearest, that’s a great relief…

How is your family now?

Kherson was liberated on 11 November… But then the situation only deteriorated because the Russians were shelling it from the right bank almost non-stop. My parents tell me that it is going on almost without interruptions.

When did you move to Lviv and return to Dnipro?

At the end of August, I moved to Lviv where I met other believers who were actively involved in charity work. I worked with them, too. We staged performances in the city centre. I played bandura and sang patriotic songs to raise people’s morale.

Then I returned to Dnipro to complete my studies… I continued cooperation with this organisation there… We were quite active there, too. We toured the region with performances, I played bandura a lot.

What is people’s reaction to your performances?

The reaction is abundant. People do react to my songs. They cry, too. They become very emotional. They all want peace and victory.

What do you feel about the first anniversary of the war?

It is all very difficult. When it all started, there was hope that it would end in a week or two. And then a month passed, another… Still there was hope that it will just come to an end.

When I look back at the year, I just become frustrated. It sometimes feels like I am ready to succumb to all that. But I understand that we cannot do that. We must hope, we must pray. I do believe that God will help us and victory will be ours.

What do you think about the UK charity organisations helping Ukrainians?

First, I want to thank you from the bottom of heart for supporting us all this time. This is an awful situation and many Ukrainians need help. Especially those living in eastern Ukraine, in hot spots, which have seen fierce fighting, the newly liberated territories where people have no place to live, where they lost loved one… Those people need more support.

I would like to say that more aid is directed there. Still, it is impossible to live there. It is not safe at all because of the non-stop raids and explosions. Those people who evacuated to the west of Ukraine need help. But they sometimes cannot get it because all the attention is focused on the east.

So if you can it would be good to distribute all the assistance among those staying in the east and those who moved here, to the west.

Article

Ageing

Care

Change

31 January 2025

5 min read

Delicate, fragile, frail: how we cope when we age

The insights and analogies that help.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

An old woman wearing a shawl looks pensive.

Valentin Balan on Unsplash.

“Who could dissect a portion of the human frame without marvelling at its delicacy, and trembling at its frailty?” mused preacher Charles Spurgeon in the nineteenth century. Songwriters, artists, authors and surgeons alike are fascinated by frailty. Within, beneath and beyond that fragile frame though, could there be a deeper reality, waiting to arise – and endure?

Fragile Lives is the ‘heart-stopping memoir’, operation by operation, of heart surgeon Professor Stephen Westaby. “The finest of margins,” he writes, “separates life from death, triumph from defeat, hope from despair – a few more dead muscle cells, a fraction more lactic acid in the blood, a little extra swelling of the brain. Grim Reaper perches on every surgeon’s shoulder.”

To what shall we compare this fragility of frame? - which means we can shatter sudden as glass, our “breath becoming air” in the blink of an eye? (Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, called his memoir When Breath Becomes Air as he fought his own battle with cancer). A snowflake? A spider’s web? A butterfly wing? In Dutch still life paintings, the transience of life is variously depicted in dry, fallen withering petals, rotting fruit, and a glass vessel, like a vase. At some funeral services, it is said that we are made from dust, and to dust we shall return. Elsewhere in the Bible, we are likened to a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes, or to a flower that withers away, a fleeting shadow that does not endure. Our days are a mere handbreadth, our life but a breath, writes one Bible songwriter.

Medics talk more commonly of frailty than fragility – and it’s not just a byword for old age. According to the British Geriatrics Society, not all old people live with frailty; not all people living with frailty are old, though age is a recognised risk factor, with nearly 40 per cent of adults aged 85-90 being frail. Described as a vulnerability to external stressors which can result in sudden marked deterioration in function, frailty might feature as a combination of falls, immobility, delirium, incontinence, and increased side effects of medications, suggesting the body is struggling to cope. “A minor infection or minor surgery results in a striking and disproportionate change in health state – from independent to dependent, mobile to immobile, or lucid to delirious,” writes a team of doctors in The Lancet.

Frailty is a sign of advanced biological rather than chronological age. Often, it’s an unwelcome term, with consultant physician Patricia Cantley noting that, “from a patient or relative’s point of view, the word frailty seems to be at best somewhat vague and at worst, derogatory and demotivating”. She prefers to talk in terms of paper boats. Picturing young healthy patients as little tugboats of wood and steel, built to withstand storms, she likens the frail patient’s clinical situation to a paper boat, which can sail the sunny seas, but is soon buffeted and may be brought down by ‘medical winds’.

Encompassing also psychological and cognitive symptoms alongside the physical, frailty is not a fixed state, nor is decline in mind and body inevitable once frailty begins. Seen increasingly as a dynamic spectrum, reversal of frailty is sometimes possible; the paper boat being, to a degree, storm proofed and made to chart a different course. According to Dr John Travers, professor of public health at Trinity College, Dublin, twenty minutes of daily exercise can reverse physical frailty and build resilience in over 65-year-olds, while others suggest that movement based mind-body therapies such as tai-chi and yoga can strengthen both mind and body. Could there also be something of a spiritual strengthening in the frail patient? As the body decays and declines, could the soul, the spiritual self, enlarge, emerge and ultimately endure as life ebbs away? This was certainly the sentiment of Paul, one of the early church leaders, in the Bible, who, after much suffering, wrote: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day…we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was seen on our television screens to diminish physically in her last days, her purple hands, tiny frame and walking cane causing concern among viewers. She was, at her funeral, described simply as “our sister Elizabeth”, her small coffin dwarfed by pageantry and a crowd of 2,000 including presidents and kings. And yet, the former Moderator of the Church of Scotland has revealed that she talked much of her Christian faith in her dying days, while her funeral was an explosion of scripture, hymns and sermons that expressed the strength of her personal faith. “It was her way of eloquently, beautifully and powerfully speaking to me and 4.1 billion other people of her Christian faith,” writes Pastor Skip Heitzig. For me, the funeral brought to mind the tides (continuing with the theme of the sea). As the tide recedes, the waters move away from the shore, in what is known as an ebb current. As the tide rises, water moves toward the shore in a flood current. As our Queen’s life ebbed away physically, her spiritual self arose, roaring like a mighty flood. Ocean motion, in currents, waves and tides, is driven by the sun, moon and the planets. Our late Queen also looked upwards, to her God, for spiritual succour that would turn life’s ebb to a soul-flood.

Hymnwriter Timothy Dudley-Smith sought a similar exchange, from the physical to the spiritual, the mortal to the immortal, in yet more words about boats, in his hymn “My boat so small”, based on the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer.

“Adrift when strength and courage fail, O Spirit, breathe to fill my sail”

And, happily, he trusts a safe voyage, finishing with - “My voyage done, all trouble past, to haven bring my soul at last.”

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