The weapons of warfare.
I grew up in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. I never wanted to be anywhere near guns, bombs, or explosions ever again, and I would never have dreamt that one day I would actually touch a few missiles, stand beside several tanks and military vehicles that had been right at the heart of battle, and want a friend to take a photo of the scene, or talk to someone who had had a Russian bullet removed from his leg.  (IWe will tell the story of that ‘someone’ later, I hope.)

Hardly had Martin, Andrew and I arrived at Volodia and Oksana Kostyshyn’s home in Ternopil, western Ukraine, than the whole military hardware stories began.Our Polish driver Simon, his brother Gregory, and their friend, Oleksii, (a Ukrainian citizen) had brought us safely into Ukraine, and on the long journey across the bumpiest roads any of us had ever travelled on they had already set the scene, as Oleksii talked of kingdoms and wars and armies and suffering people. These lands had been fought over, won, lost ,won back, lost again, for centuries.

The conquered and conquerors had wielded weapons of all kinds. Sometimes the invading armies were German; sometimes they were Lithuanian. Sometimes they were Magyars. There were Russian forces too, of course. And other enemies. It was hard to keep track of all the battles and wars. The black, fertile soil contained memories of bloodshed and pain. The red and black flags that flew beside the more familiar blue and yellow Ukrainian flag spoke of this blood on the dark earth.

As we looked around the Kostyshyns’ garden and chatted about our plans for the following days, it might have seemed that we were in a little haven of peace. And then Volodia told us the story of the shells. Not seashells. This tale was all about missiles that they had discovered in the little garden that now has a neat lawn, raised beds, and the fondly-tended plants which Oksana has nurtured and which were only just beginning to come into bud. But in this small plot, in the days when the Grace Baptist Church and adjoining pastor’s house was being built, there was great surprise and not a little consternation when a few shells, remains of second-world war battles, were uncovered. ‘Nothing to worry about’, said the authorities as they calmly sent someone to have a look, eventually. Cutting a long story short, this was no small find of spent weaponry. It turned out to be a place where still-live shells had been deposited and then abandoned under the ground, and they had to be dealt with by bomb-disposal teams. Volodia is surprisingly composed as he tells us there is no guarantee that there might not be more shells still undiscovered. The Kostyshyns use one of the shell cases that was found as a vase for dried flowers. Oksana was preparing a meal for us all, as we listened to this fascinating introductory tale, and as we waited for the potatoes to boil, to prove that this story was not an urban legend, Volodia stooped down and picked up what looked like a small black pellet from amongst the equally-small clumps of soil, and setting it on the pavement tried to set light to it. That seemed bizarre, but the tiny piece of what looked like earth started to spark, and produced a minute explosion. The very land itself seemed to be pregnant with the remains of past cruel struggles.

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That was to be the first contact with the hard reality of the war-scarred landscape of Ukraine, but it would not be the last.

Two days later, in the small town of Kremenets, Pastor Viktor Puhach and two church leaders from the Kremenets Baptist church took us to one of their homes. They wanted us to see the remains of what they said was a cluster bomb.  It stood beside us, smoky grey, and taller than the men, and its pointy nose cone had calibrations. It made us shudder to remember that it was finely-calibrated to kill. We can only believe that our Ukrainian colleagues know what they are talking about, but if it was indeed one of those cluster-bomb weapons, then we were looking at the case of a missile that has since 2010 been banned under the Convention on Cluster Munitions. ‘I’m not sure what face to put’ confessed Martin Tatham, as the new friends took photos of the three of us EMF travellers beside the horrific missile. I think we all smiled, mainly because it all seemed so surreal. But the missile had already wreaked havoc in eastern Ukraine, in the Kherson area. We have told the story of how the Kremenets church and others from Ternopil had gone across the country to help rebuild this area, as soon as it had been recovered from the hands of occupying Russian forces. They had found villages almost laid waste, live shells half-buried beside playing fields, homes where residents were trying to survive with no electricity and a meagre supply of water and food. The missile case had been given to the Ternopil-Kremenets brothers and sisters as a memento, a macabre thank-you gift. We asked if these missiles had been reported to the war crimes investigation team. ‘Oh, yes, it is all photographed and reported’ , we were assured.
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We travelled up to Kyiv the following day.
The story of our visit to a humble home near Makariv as we approached the capital is told here.The shells that terrorised so many have left their mark on the wholecountryside around that little house, and once more we were shown the remnants of a couple of missiles ,and felt the cold twisted metal at the top (or bottom―we are no experts!) of the casing. We opened the fridge to see where a bullet had been stopped in its potentially lethal journey by lodging in the back of the appliance, behind the jams and tins that now occupy it (since it no longer serves to keep things cold).

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Still reeling from hearing the account of this family’s dreadful trauma, we set off for Irpin. Last year we met (virtually) Vasyl Ostry, our host. (This was what he told us about the role he and the Irpin Bible Church experienced inthose awful first days of the war). Now we were meeting him in person, and after showing us that famous bridge where one of the church family died as he tried to help others escape the approaching Russian forces, Vasyl took us to a cemetery of vehicles, pock-marked by bullets, burnt out in shelling. The vehicles had not been empty when fired upon, and this pile of cars and other vehicles is a kind of ugly cenotaph now, a memorial to the people who were killed as they travelled along the most normal of roads.

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We journeyed on to a tank cemetery outside Irpin. It was so difficult to imagine, as we literally looked down the main gun of one of those Russian tanks, that it had been blasting out its mortal fire upon the area not far from us just a few months before our visit. It was a sobering place, to be sure, full of Russian and Ukrainian military vehicles in different states of repair. Vasyl informed us that many of the local people had been given arms as the enemy armies advanced, and in spite of a lack of military expertise, they played a key role in keeping the Russian forces at bay, and in halting their onward journey, in March 22.

I suppose we imagined that that was the end of our close-up views of tanks and missiles. Not at all. The following day, in Kyiv,we enjoyed sweet fellowship with the Bible and Life Church and God’s Design church, and had a truly Ukrainian lunch with, amongst others, Liuda Mariash and her beautiful children Marianna and Mark, as well as with PastorOleg Larkiv and his wife Aliona. Liuda was so tired. She had been working hard,as usual, in all her various roles, but she wanted us to see Kyiv. And so we did. The crowds in the parks and squares and the traffic in the elegant streets made us feel that we must be in a pretty normal city, really. However, as we approached St.Sofia’s blue cathedral and dramatic golden domes, to which little family groups made their way with Easter baskets of products to be blessed, we could not take any photo of the historic building without also having to snap the captured tanks and military vehicles that now sit there as part of the new tourist attractions in central Kyiv. And yes, we had our photo taken beside them. That would have seemed such a strange thing to do before we came to Ukraine, but it was what everyone was doing. When in Rome … or Kyiv …
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Weapons of warfare. We can think of Gennadiy, or Anton or Valik, dodging shells as they take relief in to the most dangerous of areas: we look at the guns that young soldiers carry as they sit down to have lunch at the next table in the roadside cafe and hope the weapons are safely secured. We are pushed to the side of a road near the Polish border by trucks with police escort, no doubt (so we were told) carrying military supplies from allies. On a video call in Kyiv, we talk to Vitalli, having just taken time to look at a wall carrying the photos of so, so, many ... too many ... military personnel killed by weapons of warfare.You cannot visit Ukraine without being very aware of the arms that are being used.

And you cannot but long that very soon they will all be consigned to one great pit, never to be touched, visited, or photographed ever again.

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