‘Worse than WWII’. The story of an 85-year-old florist who is known throughout Kyiv’s Obolon district
It's Saturday, the middle of the day. An elderly woman with flowers sits in an underground passageway near the exit of the Minska metro station in Kyiv. It is unusually bustling around her. The fragrant armfuls are sold out in 15 minutes, and the owners of the bouquets take selfies with the seller. A new product is brought in half an hour later, and it is sold much more slowly, so you get to know the woman better.
Halyna Mysak is from Stari Petrivtsi. She says that the whole Obolon neighborhood knows her. She has been selling flowers in the same place for several decades. During this time, she has acquired many regular customers.
But in June 2023, Grandma Halia, as all her friends call her, suddenly disappeared. She was found in Vyshhorod in the regional hospital with a severe head injury.
"My house was blessed, but the missile couldn’t care less"
On June 16, 2023, Russia carried out one of the largest missile attacks on Kyiv Oblast this year. On that day, the Air Force press service reported that it had destroyed six Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles and six Kalibr cruise missiles.
The remnants of the missiles completely destroyed three houses near Stari Petrivtsi, and 13 buildings were heavily damaged. Luckily, no one was killed, but seven wounded were treated by doctors. Halyna Mysak was among them, because her house was one of the three unfortunate ones. The footage of the woman with her head freshly bandaged was spread by many Ukrainian media outlets at the time.
"In the morning, I started watering the flowers, and a missile hit the house, and the house caught fire. I saw it all, and I thought I was hit by a brick. It smashed my head, and I crawled out on all fours," Halyna Mysak recalls the events.
This was the second time her property was affected by hostilities. The first incident happened in March 2023. The remnants of a missile landed near her late husband's garage, smashing windows and doors in the kitchen. The second strike completely destroyed the house, which had been built over the years.
"I was so happy that my house underwent blessing, but the missile couldn’t care less. Only my soul remained, and even it was battered," Halyna sighs.
After receiving first aid, the woman was taken to the regional hospital in Vyshhorod. There, it turned out that several skull fragments had entered the brain and that a cranial trepanation was necessary. No one predicted whether the woman would be able to function, or even survive.
"I saw in this grandmother my relatives, whom I may not have paid enough attention to when I was younger"
She survived and was able to fully control her body, although her head hurt a lot. But after the surgery, she faced completely different problems. She now had nowhere to live. At the same time, it turned out that the destroyed house was not privatized, it was not in the register, and in order to receive any payments, she needed to collect all the documents proving that she had ownership of the land and the house.
All this is told to me by Alla, a volunteer who met Halyna a few months before the disaster and bought flowers from her from time to time. As soon as she found out what had happened to the woman, she came to the hospital and began to help in any way she could.
"I was interested in the fate of this grandmother simply because I may have seen in her one of my relatives, whom I could not give what they needed – because of my youth and busyness," says Alla.
It was Alla and other volunteers who offered the woman to live in a rented apartment in Obolon until the issue of her new permanent home was resolved. The rent is paid by one of the volunteers. In this way, he helps several other people affected by the war.
Halyna has a son, but the relationship with him did not work out. So the option of renting an apartment gave her the opportunity not to stay on the street. As well as the flowers that volunteers bring and that she sells near the Minska metro station are a part-time job until she retires.
"I take the first flower to my son's grave because he loved flowers so much"
If you ask Halyna to tell you about her previous life, the first thing she recalls is the death of her youngest son Yura under the wheels of a car. This tragic event seems to have radically changed everything.
Halyna Mysak is originally from Poltava Oblast. She moved to Stari Petrivtsi in 1966. Here she worked in a dining hall. Then she went to the state farm to get land. Generally, she was looking for a job that paid more so that she and her second husband could eventually complete their house, she recalls.
This house was supposed to be the home of their children: the elder son Mykola from Halyna's first marriage and the younger son Yuriy.
Since childhood, Yuriy stood out among his peers, was very gentle and loved flowers, Halyna says. When the boy was asked what he wanted to become, he said that he did not want to be a mechanic or a bus driver like his father, but preferred to be a priest.
At the age of six, Yura started school, and his teachers began to say that he always walked around with flowers, putting the blossoms he picked somewhere along the way in his briefcase, cap, or primer.
"He learned from me (to plant flowers - ed.), and I learned from him. He saw that I was growing flowers, so he started planting them himself, and when he went to school, he picked them," the woman recalls. This son's love of beauty may have led to the circumstances that ended in his death.
On October 2, 1986, Halyna's husband had a part-time job at a wedding. Seven-year-old Yuriy asked to go with him to help. The boy held colorful ribbons and waited for his father to decorate the bus together. A suspicious car pulled out onto the road. Yuriy stepped off to the side to let it pass, but this did not save him from instant death under the wheels. The driver, as it turned out later, was drunk.
It was after this tragedy that flowers became a separate and integral part of Halyna's life. She began to grow more of them to have something to take to her son's grave. She says she had only seven acres of garden. On this land, she planted several buckets of potatoes every year, grew strawberry bushes, and the rest of the grounds was occupied by flowers.
"When I was younger, I used to plant in the field, not walk around. Wherever the first flower blooms, I bring it to his grave, because he loved flowers so much," Halyna sighs sadly.
On the gravestone, her son is depicted in full-length with a primer in his hands. The original copy of this portrait was kept in a prominent place in the house in Stari Petrivtsi for many years. Missile fragments destroyed the house, but the picture survived, and only the frame was damaged. The woman considers it a miracle. She took the painting with her to her rented apartment, along with several icons and her cat Bilochka, who was later found in the ruins of the house. The rest of her belongings remained in her previous life.
"This war is more terrible, the missiles strike brutally"
Halyna is 85 years old, which means this is not the first major war in her life. She was the oldest child in her family, and had two other sisters. When the Second World War broke out in her native Poltava Oblast, she was only three years old, but she still remembers a lot from that time.
Her father was drafted to the war and returned from it without an eye. They had a cow, so they had a glass of milk a day. The neighbors also helped as much as they could: one would bring a piece of bread, the other would bring oil cake.
Lice were perhaps the biggest household problem of that war for them, she says. She still remembers well how they bit, how her mother combed them out before letting her child go to school at the end of the war. Absolutely everyone had lice.
"The Germans spent the night in our house, gave me honey, and were looking for eggs, chickens, and whatever flour anyone had, and they took it away, and they took cows, I know. But for some reason, that war is not so [scary] to me, but this war, with missiles hitting, is scary. I think this war is scarier," says Halyna.
She also believes that people were kinder back then than now, they helped more. And now they have become angry because of the war.
Then there was the famine of 1946. The woman remembers well what it was like to go to the field to collect the last ears of grain. Once she almost died. During one of her trips to collect ears of grain, a guard caught her and threw her into a chasm. She stayed there for almost two days with a bag of harvested grain on her shoulder. Shepherds who were herding cows found her after they heard her crying in the pit and rescued her.
During the famine, they ate potato scraps that they brought to feed pigs and cows. They would wash and mash them, mixing them with leaves from trees, and then, sometimes, vomit from such a delicacy. When they managed to get a piece of bread somewhere, they had to divide it among three people, and then little Halyna would cry from hunger.
Later, the food situation got better, but she had to learn how to manage the farm herself as a child:
"Everything depended on me, because my mother and father would go to work, and I would carry sacks, pull weeds to feed the cattle. I didn't even know how to weed, and my mom didn't have time to teach me. One day I pulled out both weeds and beets, and my mom put me in the nettles. Once I was herding geese, I lost them because I didn't know where to take them."
New hope
I meet Halyna once again in a small one-room apartment that volunteers have rented for her. A large portrait of her son is hiding in the semi-darkness of the corridor – there is nowhere else to put it in this apartment. In the corner are photographs, icons, and a Kobzar (a book of poems by Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko -ed.). The apartment is small, but the woman is quite happy: in such circumstances, she has no choice, and this apartment costs 10,000 hryvnias ($278) a month without utility bills.
Volunteer Alla lives very close by, so she comes here all the time. She opens the door for me and immediately goes to measure the blood pressure of the elderly woman. Everything is fine, but her injured head still hurts a little. Halyna keeps saying that she must not worry, but it's hard to tell whether these words are directed to the people around her or to herself.
Nine years ago, she lost an eye to glaucoma and now has to constantly take eyedrops to prevent going completely blind. She estimates that these medications cost about 1,000 hryvnias ($28) a month.
"Before the missile strike, I used to go less [to sell flowers], but now my house is burned down, I take one or two bouquets every day and go to make a living. Medicines are expensive, and what can I do with my 3,000-[hryvnia] ($84) pension?" she complains. In fact, the volunteers provide her with almost everything, and so her pension can be saved for future expenses for a new home. If only she lives to see it.
But again, it is impossible to start the compensation process until Halyna's house is registered in the State Register of Property Rights. Or rather, it was not. After our conversation, the local authorities of Stari Petrivtsi issued the necessary documents for land and housing. They have already been registered with Diia, and Halyna can expect compensation.
It is not known when it will be paid, but we know that Halyna wants to spend the money to buy an apartment in the capital, not to repair the house because it is difficult to travel from Stari Petrivtsi to Kyiv all the time at this age.
But who will take care of her destroyed house and land? What will happen to her favorite dahlias? War raises thousands of different questions.
"Let’s support each other"
A small restaurant on the outskirts of Obolon is buzzing with dancing on a Saturday night. Dozens of photos of the military are hung on the walls at the entrance. It turns out that this is a memory of the beginning of the full-scale war when the owner of the restaurant fed Ukrainian defenders who took up positions nearby for several months for free.
In the far room, at a long table, young people are talking loudly and laughing about something. Halyna is sitting in the center. Behind her back are large balloons with the numbers "8" and "5". She is wearing a simple evening dress and a purple scarf.
Everyone who has gathered has something to do with the volunteer movement. Halyna invited her friends and acquaintances to the event, but they refused to come for various reasons.
I recall how, in between calls inviting people to her birthday party, Halyna would say something: "I say: I'm not a simple person, because I feel sorry for all people, that one person (Putin - ed.) emerged and is doing such harm. Let’s support each other."
There are no relatives or old friends around in the festive twilight, but the woman is still smiling with satisfaction. Because she knows that in life there will always be someone who will support her in times of trouble. This means that you can believe in the future. Even when you are 85.