"This is my community, and I'm not going anywhere." How Tetiana Svyrydenko restores her village after Russian occupation

In the occupied Kyiv region, Russians tortured and abducted community leaders. If they refused to cooperate, they could be killed. Even though Tetiana Svyrydenko, the head of the Ivankiv settlement territorial community, was well aware of this, she refused to be evacuated. She stayed with her people and had to go into hiding for 36 days until the Ukrainian military liberated her community.

We invite you to read about the extraordinary moral courage, responsibility, and love for your land in this hromadske article.

“If we find her — we’ll shoot the kids first”

“Who is this Svyrydenko? Our head of the community is a man!”

March 6, 2022. Ivankiv village, Vyshhorod district, 80 kilometers from Kyiv. In the yard, there is a fresh grave of a 26-year-old man. The occupiers shot him on the second day of the full-scale war, he was just riding a bicycle.

A woman is talking loudly to men in military uniforms. They arrived in three cars with the letters Z and V. They ask where the head of the community Tetiana Svyrydenko is. A resident of Ivankiv answers them loudly so that her husband can hear it. The husband gets on his bike and rushes to tell Tetiana that they have come for her. He reaches a colleague of the head of the community: “They are looking for Dmytrivna, she has 10-15 minutes to hide.”

“I look out the window and see Mykolaivna rushing in slippers and a bathrobe. And the temperature outside is sub-zero. She says: “Run away quickly, they’ve come for you.” Even before that, the members of the village council warned me that it was better to go somewhere. Because if they find me, they won’t let me live, recalls Tetiana Svyrydenko. — I am very grateful to the neighbors who hid me. The Russians came for me several times, but none of my people gave me away.”

The Russians hit the Ivankiv settlement community on February 24. The territory was liberated on April 1. During this time, they came looking for Tetiana Svyrydenko several times. When a neighbor went outside the house with two granddaughters and said that she had not seen Tetiana for a long time, the Russian military threatened: “Remember, if we find her, we will shoot the kids first, then you.” But even under such conditions, the neighbors did not turn the woman in.

“There was no doubt that I had to stay here”

Ivankiv is Tetiana Svyrydenko’s native village. In her entire life, she only left here for three years. In the village, Tetiana worked as a kindergarten teacher, then in the Department of Culture, and later in the Department of Education, being responsible for teacher training. Before joining self-government, she studied at the National Academy for Public Administration under the President of Ukraine.

Tetiana has been the Head of the Ivankiv village council for two years. She was chosen from 10 candidates, 8 of them were men. Tetiana won by a margin of 565 votes, which is quite a lot for a community of 30 thousand people.

Tetiana could not have imagined that Russia would try to occupy Kyiv and go through the exclusion zone, just through the Ivankiv community. A few days before the offensive, she met with the security forces, but neither the police chief nor the prosecutor spoke about such a danger. Therefore, on February 24, she had to act urgently. Tetiana didn’t even think about leaving the village. Although the heads of communities were advised to leave because they were the first who the Russian military would come for, forcing them to cooperate.

“I stayed and had no doubts about it. This is my community, and I’ll be here, whatever it is,” says Tetiana.

The woman is very energetic. She does everything quickly: she speaks quickly, moves quickly, and quickly lists damages in the villages of her community. She does this without looking at any documents or records, she has all the information in her head.

“The Russians entered the exclusion zone through the Dytiatky checkpoint, then Orane and Prybilsk. They went around Sukachi, about 30% of this village is damaged. Through Fenevychi and then through villages Rudnia-Talska and Katyuzhanka, to Kyiv. In Fenevychi, 30% of the village was damaged, in Blidcha — four houses, in Termakhivka — 30%, in Sydorovychi — 40%, in Zhmiivka and Olizarivka — 50%, in Varivsk — 70%. And Pidhayne and Yakhnivka are almost completely wiped off the face of the earth. In total, we have 81 localities in the community, 47 of them are damaged by Russian troops.”

In Tetiana’s office, the whole wall is covered with a map and many certificates. She says that the most important ones for her are from the military. When they brought them, the woman burst into tears. And on August 24, president Zelensky awarded Tetiana with the order of Princess Olha, III degree.

“I believe that you should not whine, it offends God”

Tetiana Svyrydenko’s working day starts at 8, but she wakes up at dawn because, in addition to work, she also has a family and a household. This year, she planted 40 acres of potatoes — so that there would be reserves for a difficult winter. She’s usually at work until eight in the evening. She is on the phone day and night.

“In times like this, you need to be contactable around the clock. I have taught both my deputies and heads of departments to keep their phones close. I believe that you should not whine, it offends God. In my community, a minimal number of people died — although there was a lot of destruction. We must pay tribute to God for this. And I’m at the age when I need to hurry to do what is good,” says Tetiana.

Tatiana’s age is not so venerable — she is only 54. She is mostly at work, wearing sneakers and jeans. She says that there is no time to dress up and it is better to go to the construction site in comfortable clothes. But her job title means that sometimes she needs to look presentable.

“Last week, I went to an international forum and put on a beautiful embroidered dress. So a colleague said to me: “I forgot that you can look like this,” says Tetiana, laughing.

These days, Tetiana works a lot with charitable foundations. The whole world helps the de-occupied Kyiv region: Czechs from People in Need, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Caritas”, and several other Polish and Swiss organizations.

European foundations are building temporary housing for families who lost their homes because of Russians. It takes two days to install a modular house. Filling it with appliances and furniture takes a few more days. It has everything you need for life: beds, a washing machine, and a stove. This is temporary housing for a family until they rebuild their own home. Communication with people who have lost everything they had or their loved ones is Tetiana’s daily job. She says it’s not easy to decide who gets the house first and who will have to wait.

“A boy whose house was completely destroyed mentioned to me once that he would really like a computer because he used to have one. It didn’t seem to be a basic necessity, but I felt sorry for him. I came to work, told my colleagues about the boy, and the village council employees chipped in their own money and bought him a computer. There should be such moments in our life, so as not to forget that good exists,” says Tetiana.

At least twice a week, Tatiana travels around the community to communicate with people and see how the villages live. She “needs to know about every destroyed house and the people who need different kinds of repairs or restoration.”

“Sometimes you turn off your emotions because if you let everything through yourself, life will not be enough to make sense of what happened. But sometimes I look up at the sky and think that someone is sitting there seeing every step we make, every word we say, and every action we take. I believe that everyone will have to answer for what they did.”

I didn’t give Prymachenko’s paintings to the Minister

The Museum with the paintings by Maria Prymachenko, the Ukrainian folk artist in the genre of naive art, is located in Ivankiv. On the second day of the full-scale war, it was hit by four Russian missiles. The building was destroyed to the ground, but people somehow managed to save all the paintings. Currently, they need at least 35 million hryvnias to restore the museum. Tetiana says: after the liberation of Ivankiv, the Minister of Culture himself came to see her. He offered to take the paintings to Kyiv, because there is no place to store them in the village now. But she refused.

“I asked straightforwardly: “And what will remain in the community?”. I planned to develop our community as a tourist region. We have a Prymachenko museum, a hotel, a brand-new park, a Prymachenko mural, and she lived not far from this village. In the neighboring villages, many people are engaged in various crafts: some people weave baskets and others paint pictures. It was only logical to create a tourist destination here. The community should earn money and develop after the victory,” says Tetiana.

She is most looking forward to the first day after the victory. And that all the men of their community who went to fight return from the war.

“I pray for them to stay alive and well. I really want to hug them. I also want to organize a concert of the “Bez obmezhen” band here on Ivankiv village day next year. They promised to come to us. I want the whole community to gather for the concert and everyone to have their own home by that time.”

This partner article was published as a promotion. The article was created in collaboration with the UN Women project “Decentralization Reforms and Community Security: Transformative Approaches to Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Ukraine” funded by the Danish government. 

Journalist Tetiana Honchenko, editors Khrystyna Kotsira and Victoria Beha, designer Tetiana Kostik, creative producer Anna Sokha, and translator Khrystyna Skorenka worked on the piece.