For Ukrainians, memory fuels the fight for sovereignty
The visitors enter the building on Yaroslavksa Street through a scuffed metal door and climb two flights of stairs under the weight of unwanted memories. In a gray office with blank walls, they meet attorneys with the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, who sit at desks behind laptops, poised to listen. Here the men and women and children reveal their anguish and loss. The lawyers type notes as they talk, and with each recorded narrative, the larger story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gains another detail that history cannot erase.
Natalia Rudenko arrives at the office on an ashen February morning with her young son, Egor, to share an account of wartime terror spanning three generations. A year earlier, as Russian troops surged over the border and bombarded Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, mother and child found refuge in the basement of an apartment building near their home.
They lived underground for the next three weeks, their days and nights splintered by the ceaseless sounds of war above. Venturing outside in March, Ms. Rudenko, whose husband volunteered in the country’s territorial defense force, discovered that an artillery shell had damaged their home.
She packed two suitcases and traveled with Egor by train to the western city of Lviv to stay with a relative’s friend. The distance from the fighting eased her anxiety without subduing her concern for loved ones left behind.
Soon after invading, the Russian military captured Ms. Rudenko’s hometown of Staryi Saltiv, a summer resort destination 25 miles from Kharkiv and half that far from Russia. Her parents, Tatiana and Yuri, who still lived in the house where she grew up, resisted her pleas to evacuate.
In early May, facing a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian forces pummeled the area with artillery to cover their
