The ruins of their village of Bilozirka lay along a rutted road, beyond which lay trenches and the artillery guns engaged in the battle for the southern city of Kherson.
Russian forces fire volleys from the southern end of the road, where they have been entrenched since their withdrawal from this village in the first month of the war.
The Ukrainians have tried to push them back further in a more recent counteroffensive in hopes of closing in on Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014, beyond Kherson.
On the Bilozirka bench, Angelika Boryssenko explains to her older friend that anyone can get used to anything — even a large-scale war like the one currently taking place under their eyes.
The 20-year-old mother of two spent the month of March unnoticed by Russian soldiers who occupied the village and had set up base camp at a school across the road.
She spent the next few months, marred by Russian bombardment, hiding in cellars or calculating when to go out in search of water and food.
“At first, we thought only when it was finally going to end. But now it seems normal. We got used to it,” says Angelika Boryssenko.
Natalia Popesko frowns, implying that her friend has not understood anything. “Personally, I feel dead inside,” testifies this 38-year-old woman.
“We didn’t get used to it. We just came to terms with it being real,” she says.
– Hope and despair –
The Ukrainian forces’ counterattacks in the northeast and their thrusts deep into the south have left territories that neither side fully controls.
Bilozirka is one of those “grey areas” deprived of everything.
Some hardened locals have returned, and Ukrainian troops feel safe enough to use the village as a rear base. But there are neither state services nor means of assistance for the few hundred remaining inhabitants.
The school where the Russians had their headquarters is now just a devastated structure after suffering a Ukrainian assault.
This state between war and peace makes Anastassia Kouplevska oscillate between hope and despair.
“If there are no bombings, you wake up and suddenly you want to do something,” says the 40-year-old single mother. “But if they start shooting, you immediately feel helpless again.”
And on days when she’s in high spirits, there’s little she can do.
The only jobs in the village are selling basic goods delivered from the nearby town of Mykolaiv. Like her, most of the inhabitants worked before the war in a fruit juice factory further away.
– Willingness to fight –
Bridges were destroyed during the fighting and secondary roads are still heavily shelled. “I don’t even know if it’s still standing,” Ms Kouplevska says of her factory.
She is also annoyed by offers of aid from various humanitarian programs, which she says are misguided.
“They flooded us with food, but you can’t build a house with food,” she explains.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive in the region has prompted Moscow to target water and electricity infrastructure, causing massive blackouts as winter approaches.
The Kremlin seems to be betting that hardship will break Ukrainians’ will to fight.
But the months of suffering have had the exact opposite effect on the two women who chat on a Bilozirka bench.
“Many of us had family in Russia. We talked to them. We considered them normal people,” says Natalia Popesko. “We now see them as animals.”
What Angelika Boryssenko had the most trouble with was the very idea that there was a war.
“We see it, we feel it and we understand that it’s true, but we can’t grasp that it’s real,” she says. “We understand it but we can’t believe it”.
