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Charity helps forsaken elders of Donbas find comfort in peace

Residents play at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — Yevhen Tkachev, a cheerful man in his 40s, enters the yard of a huge countryside house carrying a big box of fresh vegetables in his hands. He walks toward a group of very old, frail men slowly dining at a table in the yard.

“Oh, the lunchtime!” Tkachev smiles as puts the heavy vegetable pack down near the table. “How are you doing here, my sweet old-timers?”

The old men acknowledge his greeting in weak voices. Several other elderly men in the yard do not react at all. They sit on benches and chairs stock-still, hugging their crutches, their pale eyes blankly gazing straight ahead.

In the serenity of this homestead, these abandoned elders have found a haven that has taken them in and saved them from dying alone amid the ruins of war.

This is one of the few charity-run hospices for infirm elderly people located in the Donetsk Oblast town of Chasiv Yar, some 650 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. Yevhen Tkachev, a local Baptist Christian charity activist and businessman, is its founder and main sponsor. He spends most of his income to maintain it.

This shelter has no official status due to flawed legislation — and Tkachev and his helpers have assumed the uneasy mission of taking care of those who cannot rely on public aid: lone elderly people rescued from the war zone, the terminally ill, those abandoned by their own families and even people who have been officially pronounced dead, despite still being alive.

One of four houses serving as a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar, pictured on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient lays on a bed in a ward for severely disabled at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
Patients dine together at a hospice for the elderly in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient lays on a bed in a ward for severely disabled at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A nurse helps a resident shave at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient walks out in the open at a hospice for the elderly in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

Long-held dream

In this war, Tkachev himself has built an impressive — and rather gruesome — resume.

With the beginning of the conflict, he ran afoul of his local Baptist community. The community insisted on rendering help only to fellow believers, while Tkachev insisted on helping everyone in need. This eventually led to him breaking away.

His stubborn endeavor repeatedly brought him face-to-face with death. During the battle of Slovyansk in 2014, he was held hostage by pro-Russian fighters led by infamous warlord Igor “Strelkov” Girkin.

While he was helping evacuate civilians during the battle of Debaltseve in early 2015, he was stopped and searched by Russian regular troops — soldiers without official insignia, but wearing top-notch combat gear and easily recognizable by their accent. Thankfully, they let him go.

But the months spent in the war zone gave Tkachev this dream of providing permanent, decent shelter to the most vulnerable civilians: helpless, ill elders.

It all started when Tkachev decided to purchase a shelter house in March 2017.

“We had a sort of ‘database,’” Tkachev says.

“So we knew many such people personally. And we naturally had connections with the humanitarian organizations, with the military. Everybody knew I had this dream, and they all occasionally pestered me, asking me to give shelter to a certain person. So when we finally opened the hospice, we knew it would be fully packed — and quickly.”

Yevhen Tkachev, a Baptist Christian charity activist and businessman from the Donbas town of Chasiv Yar, pictured on June 11, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)


Faded away

Soon it became clear that the shelter needed expansion to an extent even greater than Tkachev could ever have imagined. And it could not rely on outside help too much.

“Initially, there were enough places where one could take abandoned elders,” Tkachev says.

“Hospitals, churches, and holiday centers would accept them for free. But then everyone got tired, funds ran somewhat low… and, in some cases, elders found themselves at a disadvantage — one should bear in mind that most of our supervisees, nearly 70 percent, are not sane to a greater or lesser degree.”

Eventually, Tkachev ended up purchasing four houses and uniting their yards into a single place for hosting 30–32 elderly people, both those who can walk and those who no longer can.

The shelter is almost always full, and new patients come all the time at the request of various charities and other concerned citizens.

Tkachev calls this a hospice rather than a retirement facility, admitting the grim truth: the people brought to his shelter are often so old and infirm that they mostly come there to find a warm bed and a comfortable place to spend their last months.

The first elderly people admitted by Tkachev were those saved from the war zone. Through pure luck, they were found by soldiers in the smoking ruins, half-dead.

Unfortunately, they didn’t live long after the nightmare they had endured.

“Probably because of the shock they suffered from the hostilities, the elderly people evacuated from the killing zone all died within a year-and-a-half,” Tkachev says.

“We ensured medical checkups for them, but doctors never diagnosed anything horrible about their health that would lead them to wither within months. It’s probably just a sort of emotional exhaustion — the people would simply fade out and pass away.”

A patient reposes on a sofa in a ward at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
Patients reposes in a ward at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient pets a dog in the backyard of a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient lays on a bed in a ward for severely disabled at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient get off a chair at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient poses for the photo in a ward at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov


At own expense

When asked about the source of funding for his hospice, Tkachev smiles and pulls his wallet out of his pocket: The shelter is mostly funded by his farm and his work as a veterinarian.

It takes over Hr 100,000 ($3,900) a month to maintain the hospice and provide it with everything necessary: from meals to medicine and utilities. He pays salaries to a cook and three nurses.

His son works here as an administrator.

Unfortunately, Tkachev adds, the present-day expenses have reached the limit of his family’s abilities.

“Supporting residents who are mobile is not that expensive,” he says.

“We’ve got the hang of it, and our farming helps us a lot. Immobile elderly people are a whole different story. Expenses for adult diapers and bedsore creams for them are as high as for everything else combined.”

Slight relief comes from the hospice’s subsidiary farming. It has a small garden, some 20 pigs, and as many as 1,000 hens producing 800 eggs a day — not a bad financial backstop during agriculture market booms.

Charities also help a lot in repairing the houses and getting new books, table games, and painting kits for the residents.

“But unfortunately, that’s not for everyone here — two-third of them are living in their own world,” Tkachev admits.

“Shortly after the dinner, if we ask them, many won’t recall what they were served to eat.”

Forsaken

Now, nearly 80 percent of the people admitted to this hospice are not internally displaced persons from the warzone, but elders abandoned on the street by their children for the simplest reason: to get rid of them and take control of their apartments.

“For instance, we had a case in the city of Bakhmut — a son and a daughter embezzled a 4-room apartment owned by their elderly father and destroyed his passport,” Tkachev says.

“At that time, he understood nothing of what was happening. But a month after we got him, he somewhat recovered and got his memory back — down to remembering the very day he entered the Komsomol (Soviet youth organization).”

The situation is even worse for abandoned elders due to extremely flawed legislation in Ukraine. According to the law, an elderly person can be admitted to a state-run rest home only if they have no able-bodied relatives obliged to take care of them.

And this leaves no chances for those who were forsaken by their own children.

“An old person must sue his or her kids and win the case to reclaim the right to eldercare,” Tkachev says. “Almost no one ever does that.”

The very existence of retirement homes is not envisaged by Ukrainian legislation, despite dozens, if not hundreds of privately-run institutions offering their services all across the country. From the legal point of view, all these elders are not recognized as retirement home residents — just like Tkachev’s guests.

On three occasions, he had to deal with those he calls “buried alive” — elderly people thrown out by their relatives, who later reported them dead and buried.

One such person, Volodymyr Dryll, was born in 1940 and now lives at the hospice. He was abandoned on the street with no documents and spent 3 years homeless.

“It was a former superior from his job who casually recognized him in the street,” Tkachev says.

“And that person took him to us. We appealed to the post office to collect his pension, and he turned out to have been officially pronounced dead. Ever since then, we’re struggling to get his documents reissued and to judicially ‘resurrect’ him. Things sometimes come down to pure idiocy: a “dead” person can’t legally use the court system.”

Dryll suffers from severe dementia: as he rests on a bench, he can barely summon a coherent phrase when asked a question.

Not all of those lost in limbo here are elderly — the hospice also takes care of an unknown mentally disabled man in his 40s or early 50s.

“The military found him after shelling in some dugout. He was absolutely destitute. It was either shell-shock or a stroke, or both combined. They took him to a hospital, then to us, and ever since then no one knows who he is and where he’s from.”

A farm of some 1,000 hen maintained by a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A resident rests on a chair after lunch at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A resident irrigates tomato crops grown in a kitchen garden at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient wipes her eyes as she gets up in a ward at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov
A patient gathers cherries at a hospice for elders in the town of Chasiv Yar on June 11, 2019.
Photo by Volodymyr Petrov

‘Polish Princess’

Despite its residents’ tragic circumstances, the hospice also boasts several stories worthy of a Hollywood movie.

Kseniya Myakinchik, born in 1936, was brought to Tkachev’s shelter a while back by the Bakhmut authorities. She was found, helpless, in a burnt-out house. She is now cared for in a ward for patients with severe dementia.

But something truly surprising happened shortly after Tkachev started sending out official requests to locate her relatives.

“Several people came here by car from Lviv, and a Polish man was with them,” Tkachev says. “It turned out that her name and birth date may indicate her affiliation with some noble Polish family. They somehow managed to learn about my requests.

“The Polish man told us that, in 1939, when the Soviet Union occupied part of Poland, that family was reportedly separated. The men were sent to Siberia, while the women were sent (to the village of Znamyanka near Bakhmut). They tried to reach out to her, but with no success at all.”

After this visit, the other residents began to call the old woman “Polish princess.”

But the question of her origins, nonetheless, remains open.

Looking to the future

Despite the financial challenges of running the hospice, Tkachev is still planning for the future. Recently, he purchased two old apartments in a nearby housing bloc.

He wants to relocate all of the immobile patients to the apartments, so that the mobile ones will have more room to walk and enjoy themselves in the hospice’s yard. The new premises are expected to open by September.

Tkachev wishes he could give shelter to more than 30 people. “The tragic cases of elders left alone in despair are too many to count in any town, especially here in Donbas,” he says.

But he sees little improvement in legislation to help such elders — or the people like him who care for them. He says that taxpayers pay for eldercare, but ultimately it is people like him who do the work without government support.

But there’s a bigger problem than that — a moral one, he says.

“It’s simply about children not taking care about their own parents.”