She left politics alone so long as it left her alone. Then the occupation came

Introduction by Steve Komarnyckyj · Story by Halyna Pahutiak, translated by Steve Komarnyckyj · Edited by Euromaidan Press

The story

Halyna Pahutiak is a Ukrainian novelist whose work often reads like fable or myth—stories with the disconnected logic of a dream. But “The Woman From Horlivka” is something different: a beautifully observed, realistic tale of a woman torn apart by Russia’s occupation of Donbas, where she had moved from western Ukraine decades earlier. The story is set before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 but sensitively explores the human cost of the war on ordinary Ukrainians caught between two worlds.

Pahutiak, a winner of the Shevchenko National Prize—Ukraine’s highest literary honor—published this story in Take Six: Six Ukrainian Women Writers, an anthology translated by Steve Komarnyckyj and forthcoming from Dedalus Books in March 2026, with the financial support of English PEN.

The anthology gathers stories by six contemporary Ukrainian women authors that tell you what it is like to flee with almost nothing but a black sweater, or to be pregnant while shells explode in your city. But these authors also take you into a past where a Cossack roams through the snow in a landscape haunted by witches, and into the history of Russia’s genocides against Ukraine.

What emerges is a hope tested in the most extreme conditions of modern war, a courage to face the worst, and the soul of a nation surviving unspeakable atrocities across its history.

Since 2022, over 20,000 residents of Horlivka, forcibly mobilized by Russia, are believed to have died fighting against their own country. Pahutiak wrote about the city’s agony before the full-scale invasion made it worse.

What Russian literature doesn’t tell you

We need to understand Ukraine not just for their sake but for ours. Russian soft power has shaped perceptions of both Russia and Ukraine globally for decades. Russian authors ridiculed Ukraine’s desperate fight for independence after the First World War, or—like Nabokov and Brodsky—derided the Ukrainian language and culture. But Ukrainian literature offers something Russian literature does not: an honest look at what the empire actually did to people.

When we read Russian literature, we often absorb the assumptions of a society stuck in a feudal mentality, with brutality as a recurring growth in the soil of genocidal conquest. As Ukrainian author Olena Stiazhkina has noted, Russian literature has rarely been critically interrogated—and those teaching it were seemingly unable to address the violence it validated:

It is not only Ukrainians who are reevaluating the dubiously glorified Russian literary pantheon. Russian speakers whose roots lie in territories conquered by the empire and forcibly Russified are explaining how Pushkin glorified and promoted the genocide of the Caucasus, and the toxic link between Russian cultural hegemony and mass killing.

If we are to stop the repeated cycles of imperial violence, dismantling the myths that Russia has collectively exported to the world is crucial. That requires us to share and promote Ukrainian voices—particularly the voices of their authors, whose neglected work is of the highest quality and, at this historic moment, essential to understanding the war Russia has launched against Ukraine and against modernity itself.

The Woman From Horlivka

The closer she got to the village, the smaller she seemingly became. She wanted to become invisible until she stepped on the threshold of her old home and saw her mother. She was even scared of her brother and his wife, feeling either awkward or guilty in front of them. It only took one look with a barely perceptible reproach to lay her low.

She had switched off her mobile on the minibus, although she really wanted to know how her family was in Horlivka, her husband and her student son. She was afraid of crying in public. Her escape from the occupied city now seemed stupid, just an emotional impulse. Would she be able to sit out the war here?

Everything that she had was there, and she had nothing here. There was her old mother who lived in her brother’s house, because the old place has long been demolished. She had visited five years ago, her head held high, boasting that she and her husband had a business, two apartments, and were rolling in it. She said too that she had sunk deep and permanent roots in Horlivka and left politics alone so long as it left her alone.

She felt those roots being disturbed while she was riding on the train rubbing against the rocks and unable to penetrate deeper, pressing on the hard stone. Which meant that her sustenance and water were no more. All that awaited her was a slow death.

Her brother was not poor, he was a mechanic, and his wife worked as an accountant. They never visited her in Horlivka, so she had showed them photos on her mobile of her shop, car and the two apartments. She hoped to see envy flash through their eyes. She was a simple woman, down to earth, and lived among people just like her. She had grown up in poverty, finally made ends meet with her husband, only to find herself here.

The world was collapsing around her not simply because of the artillery shells on her city, but due to hatred. She had a terrible longing to be with her mother. However, that yearning had faded by the time she arrived. She knew for sure that she would not stay in Urizh for long. She would breathe her native air for a little while and return to Horlivka.

A huge transformation was happening in the soul of this, no longer, young woman unlike anything she had experienced before. Her eyes would find themselves fixed on some wet spot repeatedly and when she dozed and dreamed; her dreams were not of this world but the world of her childhood. However, that beautiful vision was always interrupted by one and the same image of a solitary tree in a field. Its leaves rustled so unbearably loudly that it was almost deafening.

She saw in the distance a crowd with blue and yellow flags. When she stepped off the bus, the first thing she noticed were two priests and girls in embroidered shirts. There were a lot of people and flowers too. That’s why the bus modestly halted far before the stop as if embarrassed. Perhaps it’s the Saviour’s Day? she thought, but it was only the end of July. Several women who were returning from the market in Drohobych disembarked with her at the crossroads and effortlessly merged with the crowd, but she was afraid of flowing into the mass like them. Those women probably knew her, but no one on the bus had greeted her. They most likely didn’t recognise her for during those past few months she had aged, probably by a decade.

What was going on here? Maybe it was a wedding? She squeezed around the crowd with a bag containing a few clothes, some presents for her family, and headed down the road. It was a pity that she hadn’t come on the bus from Vinnytsia, a longer route, by the time it had arrived here her the whole village would have known of her return.

They would have looked at her and gossiped malevolently about her. Decent people left the village, got jobs, and then returned. During her last visit she had praised her beloved Donbas so much, how many people lived there, how much money they spent in her store, and that she didn’t care about voting for anyone because they were all thieves. Everyone nodded at least in agreement with her there, that’s true. However, now she was afraid to meet the hatred in their eyes.

When she got to the house she could at least meet the glance her mother’s eyes, her old, almost blind, mother. There was only the old woman at home. She was sitting on a stool next to the wall of the house removing the stones from cherries. The colour of the fruit reminded the woman of the blood that she saw so often now.

“Mum, what are all those people doing gathered at the crossroads?”

“That lad, Dzialyn, is coming back on leave from the ATO¹. Didn’t you see our Hanna there? She went there too, with the children.”

“Do you welcome everyone back like that?”

“There are two of our people in the ATO. The village kitted them out from head to toe and sends a truck with groceries every month. First the village sent provisions to the Maidan, now we send them to the ATO. The priests collect the money for this.”

Her mother spoke so cheerfully, as if she didn’t know what annex of hell her daughter had escaped from. Her mind, of course, was deteriorating a little with old age. The woman, who was known as Slavka to her family, managed not to cry or show weakness despite her mother’s seeming indifference.

“Why didn’t your husband come with you, Slavka?” her mother asked.

“He watches over the apartment and the store, so that they don’t loot them.”

“Oh, we can’t leave iron outside in the yard either. They even take the mesh off the fences. That happened once!”

“Mum, those thieves in my town can quite easily shoot you. Do you even watch TV? Do you know what’s going on in Donbas?”

“Oh yes, I watch TV there’s that series Poor Nastya².”

The woman reflected that her mother had declined in the past five years. She could have visited more perhaps, but it is a long journey, there’s the money, etc. etc. and in any case mum is fine with her daughter-in-law to look after her. So there had been nothing to worry about. Slavka realised, when her brother and his twin girls appeared at the garden gate, that she hadn’t even asked how mum was doing. They had immediately started talking about politics. However, her mother hadn’t complained about anything and looked cheerful enough. There were still some spots of cherry juice on her forehead.

Hanna, the woman’s sister-in-law, kissed her. The twin girls ran into the house to change out of their embroidered shirts, the woman’s head spun with it all. She managed to overcome a kind of threshold which had made her wary of her family. Hanna was excited, she told Slavka how the lad was recovering from a gunshot wound and how they poured champagne down his neck.

“His mother is so happy! The president was not welcomed as extravagantly as her son. Now every girl will try and marry him, even if he comes from a poor family. We are still saving up for thermal imagers, they cost forty thousand a piece. And we need two. They have already bought one for their boy in Pidbuzh, are we any worse than them? Oh, Slavka, we need to drink to our boys.”

Are they nuts here or what? Slavka thought, forty plus forty, that’s eighty thousand. She couldn’t resist saying, “Surely not everyone at the front has thermal imagers. And if someone else from here is called up to the war, will you buy them everything too: body armour and uniforms?”

“Thirty people were called up from here, I’ll tell you this in confidence, but we bought them all out of service. The village just can’t afford to dress and shoe so many soldiers. And tell us, girls,” Hanna now turned to her daughters, “how you painted the bridge blue and yellow.”

“That’s not down to us,” the older of the twins replied. “The whole school painted it. And the bus stop was painted with a trident³ and a kalyna⁴ by the boys from the art school. It looks so splendid.”

Why does all this annoy me so much, the woman wondered, and realised that while she wanted to talk to her family, they seemed to be mocking her, talking about the men who were now killing her friends. She felt there was a kind of evil pleasure in this, a reproach for her. They did not want to understand that her heart was there, with her husband and son.

She had been in Donbas since she graduated from technical school at the age of eighteen. Her neighbours were very surprised when she went back home, how could she go to Bandera land⁵, they would kill her there. Slavka knew that she would not be killed of course, she did not doubt for a moment that her family would accept her even if she were naked and barefoot, along with her husband, and her child. The village was her reliable and safe haven. However, she imagined what might have happened if the crowd were not gathered to welcome home a soldier healthy and alive, but a coffin holding his body.

It was two kilometres from the stop to the house. The very thought made her heart go cold. Her psychological armour, what she had worked hard to earn over thirty years and which had become her real homeland, suddenly disappeared. Slavka excused herself, saying that she had to call her husband and went into the massive, chilly living room, which had a flat-screen television on the wall. She went to the corner furthest away from her family and began to dial the number while her hands trembled. It didn’t occur to her that the family didn’t usually leave the room to make calls, that they cheerfully passed the receiver from hand to hand so that everyone could say a few words. Right now, she needed their support even more.

When she heard her husband’s voice, she spoke in Surzhyk⁶ to get closer to him. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t want her family to hear the call. It was bad there apparently. There was a lot of shooting in the area. Her husband and son had spent the whole night in the basement. The store had stayed closed yesterday.

“Sit tight there, just stay put,” her husband ordered her. “I’ll tell you when you can come back, understand?”

She felt guilty that she was safe here. However, in Horlivka, all the neighbours knew that she was from the west, from Bandera land7, and they might inform on her to the occupiers.

“Don’t open the door to anyone, listen to me!” she said. That was all she could say to try and keep her family safe despite the shells and mortars.

After she hung up she thought I will at least manage not to cry and she avoided bursting into tears. The family was still sitting at the table, even though dinner had been over for a while. Slavka started collecting the dirty plates.

“Stop it,” said her brother’s wife, “you’re tired from your journey.”

No one asked how it was in Horlivka.

“Go, Slavka, have a lie down. Hanna will make up a bed for you,” said her brother.

The woman looked at the teenage girls and realised how much they had grown and that they were following her every move. It felt unpleasant. She felt that they looked at her like she was an animal in a cage. Everything from the very beginning of the time here was not what she had expected it to be.

“There is no need. I just have a headache,” she answered and, stepping outside the house, she turned into the garden, where no one could see her from the window. The grass was mowed, everything was cared for, but the apple trees that year did not look like they would bear fruit, or there would be very few apples at best. However, there would be plenty of Hungarian plums. She saw the strange fruits that sometimes grew on the Hungarian plum trees, greenish, hard and with a beer-like taste, a little bitter. She and her brother had loved to eat them when they were children. It was still a long time until real plums would be gathered, but these odd fruits were already hanging from the branches. Slavka plucked one and bit off a piece of the fruit.

There was an oval slit inside the place for the stone. She couldn’t remember if the adults had ever eaten this fruit, but it didn’t harm anyone, although it was not to everyone’s liking. There was sorrel growing on a hillock in the garden too. They had only noticed it when the stem, reddish and inflorescent, stretched upwards and the leaves were still small and nibbled by insects. Her son didn’t even know what could be eaten, that you can pick a rhubarb stalk straight from the bed and eat it without wincing. And those bitter cherries, which, when they were completely dark and overripe were not so bitter anymore. She would search for these cherries in the forest with her brother, sometimes they came across an abundance of such sweet ones, a whole domain of these trees. The fruit could be brought home so that their mother could make pyrogi. They would just eat the bitter ones among them, returning home with hands and lips stained dark with the fruit.

She also remembered the russula mushrooms that they would bake on the edge of the stove. It was a time when dad and mum were still on the collective farm, and she and her brother wanted to eat what they had collected before they returned. If you walk past a field here as a child you could pick soft grains from the spikelet of wheat. It was a long before harvest time now and the potatoes and carrots had not yet grown. I wonder if the garden has been cultivated yet?

Slavka went up the hillock, which had been mowed earlier because the grass had already grown to the full. Everything was visible from there: the garden, framed by corn, behind it the river, completely overgrown with willow and silted up. It had not rained for a long time here so the waters had probably become shallow. The blue peaks of mountains stood to one side. All this summer kingdom, faint from the heat, received the woman from Horlivka, surrounded her more truly than her own armour. She sat down on the grass, took off her sandals and put her feet on the warm dry earth, which had never spoken to her as a mother, or as a lady, or as a sister.

However, she remembered that her father had told her Urizh was enclosed within an invisible circle and that was why there had never been any battles here. He told her of the twin brothers who had, long ago, ploughed around the village borders with two bulls so that no army would come and kill people or burn houses and grain. So that no shell would fall here either. They had cast a spell to ward off evil.

That’s why she had come here.

Slavka sat, swaying backwards and forwards, her hands clasping her knees, like she had sat in the basement in Horlivka during shelling. This is what people do who don’t know how to express their fear or grief, or abandoned children in orphanages who weren’t rocked in their cradle by their mothers. Slavka had never been bereaved, everyone she loved was still alive and nothing had been taken from her. Yet she had the fear of an abandoned child. She was disgusted, albeit subconsciously, by being so helpless and defenceless here without her menfolk. They had sent her here because they knew how afraid she was. If she had a daughter, she would have brought her.

Then her mother came, helping herself up the hill with a stick, which was a challenge for those old, arthritic legs. She sat down next to Slavka and hugged her, although she had raised her two children in the village way: without nagging, without indulging and sometimes with a stick or a nettle applied to their hands.

“You’d better get some sleep, Slavka.”

“I can’t sleep, mum. When I close my eyes, I see that tree.”

“What tree?”

“I don’t know, maybe a linden, maybe an ash tree. A tree that grows in a field somewhere. My neighbour, Lyuda, knows. From the third floor of our block.”

“Aha! But you said you live in a city, where is there a field?”

“That’s a field far from the city, mum. Lyuda’s son was killed there. He was an only child.”

“Who killed him?”

“Your people killed him! Perhaps even that lad who was greeted so magnificently today.”

“That’s war, Slavka.”

“I know, but it doesn’t make me feel any better, even if it happens to people I don’t know. That woman was poor, she worked as a cleaner. We didn’t have anything to do with her. But when I think that something like that could have happened to me, I go grey, Mum. The worst thing is that there’s no-one to talk to about it. It’s scary there, and here no one will understand... my husband says you need to see a psychiatrist because of that stupid tree. And I cover my ears and cry. And he shakes me.”

Slavka continued telling her mother about Seryoha, the man who had died, and how he had once worked as a security guard in their store.

“We employed him because he was a neighbour, he was two metres tall and really fit. Then a while later he just disappeared. I asked Lyuda where he was but she mumbled something and walked away. I heard some strangers say that Seryoha had joined the militia, or, as you say, the separatists. Whether he wanted to join them or was taken by force they didn’t say. He was a bit of a lone wolf and secretive. I kept wondering if we had offended him and whether he might seek revenge and take our store away. He returned once after he had disappeared and bought some expensive sweets, imported sausages and canned goods. He was in camouflage fatigues and wearing a St. George’s ribbon⁷. He paid for everything properly - honourably. He bought it for his mother; he also bought expensive perfume.

Then, a day or two later, the militia came to Lyuda and told her that he had been killed. And what about burying him she wondered? We don’t bury our own, they said. They left them in the field. There are many of them there. And it’s not our territory now. So he had disappeared somewhere on Monday, and by Friday it was clear they killed him. The militia told Lyuda on Saturday, and on Sunday she went to look for him. I think she hoped to find him alive, she didn’t even put on her black headscarf. I was surprised by where she was going on Sunday morning. Not to church, of course I didn’t really know where because she was dressed in some kind of rag, maybe she even went out in a dressing gown. Where we live they shoot at night but rarely during the day. I don’t know how she got out of town, there are checkpoints everywhere. She asked around and found that field where he had died. There probably weren’t any mines there, or, if there were, she didn’t stumble on any.

Sometimes I think she became invisible and floated above the ground. That’s how she got there. She saw a lot of corpses and in the middle of the field a lonely tree. Her son was sitting under the tree, already dead, but still warm, even though they had killed him on Friday, and it was Sunday. Blood had flowed under that tree. So what did Lyuda do? She started dragging his big dead body across the field, through the ditches, over the thorn-bushes. I don’t know how she managed it. The woman is small, petite really. She finally reached the road and began to ask people to take her son to a cemetery. No one wanted to help her, either for money or out of pity. She stood there all day. Then the Ukrainian military arrived and took both of them away. They dug a grave in a nearby village, called a priest, and buried the body, although it was not in a coffin, in consecrated ground.”

Slavka finished her story and looked around. The setting sun no longer cast its warm maternal rays from behind her shoulders, but the enchanted circle that guarded the village remained. The twins were hiding behind a haystack and were watching over her, lest she do something to herself, or disappear, like Maryna Prystavniakova, who quarrelled with her son and lost her mind. She was found a long way away in in Mokriany, someone there recognised her and brought her home.

The End

1. Anti-Terrorist Operation, the official Ukrainian designation for military operations in the Donbas conflict zone (2014–2018). ↩︎
2. A popular Russian TV soap opera. ↩︎
3. The tryzub, Ukraine’s national coat of arms. ↩︎
4. The guelder rose, a symbol of Ukraine. ↩︎
5. A derogatory term used in Russian and pro-Russian propaganda for western Ukraine, referencing the controversial Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. ↩︎
6. A mixed language combining elements of Ukrainian and Russian, commonly spoken in eastern and central Ukraine. ↩︎
7. An orange-and-black ribbon originally associated with Soviet military honors, adopted as a symbol by pro-Russian separatists and Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine. ↩︎