Even in Ukraine’s ghost towns there are people – those who will not leave

Three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the disaster relief organisation, the Global Empowerment Mission (GEM), arrived. Three weeks later, I followed. As the fourth anniversary of the war in Ukraine is marked, I’ve come back, having been there a total of nine times.I’ve worked with them since 2019 and I now sit on the executive board, but I also like to be on the ground. As a charity, we focus on rapid disaster response and crisis relief, working in three phases: immediate response, distributing food, water, hygiene kits, and medical supplies after disasters; short-term relief, getting essential goods, temporary shelter support, and logistical help to those in need; and long-term recovery, rebuilding homes, restoring infrastructure, and supporting community resilience.Four years after the Russian invasion, GEM remains deeply embedded across Ukraine. Their Farm to Frontline programme moves food directly from local farms to the hardest hit communities, cutting delays and ensuring supplies reach people quickly and efficiently. In January, Russia carried out hundreds of long-distance aerial attacks, specifically targeting the country’s energy infrastructure. As a result, Ukraine lost more than half of its energy-producing capacity, and emergency power cuts have affected 80 per cent of the country. This happened amid a winter in which temperatures have fallen below -15C.GEM runs a critical window programme that helps Ukrainians repair and secure damaged homes by replacing windows shattered by nearby missile strikes, helping families remain in their homes. One thing is clear whenever I go there. Ukrainians want to stay in their homes.Possibly most critically, GEM teams distribute family necessity kits filled with food, water, hygiene products, and basic supplies along nearly 600 miles of the front line. Our trucks travel into hard-to-reach areas where residents might otherwise go months without support. During my latest trip, I met a grandmother living in a small house still vulnerable to daily missile threats. She started to cry when I hugged her – GEM, she told us, is her lifeline. Six months ago, when I last stood in Kyiv, there was still a thin thread of hope humming beneath the surface of daily life. This time, that hum had quietened.After Russian strikes critically damaged two thermal power plants and hit key substations, residents can now depend on electricity for only a few unpredictable hours each day. As my friend Olga told me, “You do not know when the electricity is coming. If the power returns in the middle of the night, you get up to do the washing.” In sub-zero darkness, she sleeps in three coats, and mothers lie awake, counting each breath, terrified they cannot keep their babies warm until morning.Across the city, heated stations have also become places of refuge, offering warmth, tea, and the chance to charge battery packs or even take meetings. In a capital learning to function in cold and darkness, they have become small but vital sanctuaries.While there, I sat with grandmothers and university students, young mothers and ageing fathers. I played with children who have lost parents and talked to families fractured by occupation, exile, or death. Young graduates described feeling suspended. They are educated, ambitious, thoughtful, and yet their lives feel paused. How do you plan a wedding or imagine children when the horizon itself feels unstable?One man described living under Russian occupation for 142 days after helping neighbours escape. When Conrad, my son who had returned with me to volunteer, asked what it was like, he said he looked into a Russian soldier’s eyes and saw “a pigdog looking back”. His friend, who also tried to assist others, was captured and tortured, with bleach poured over his hands and metal picks forced beneath his fingernails. He showed us photographs. A grandmother told us she was alone now. Everyone was dead, she said. There are no dramatic flourishes to these conversations. Just facts delivered in exhausted voices.Olga and I went to the opera. It might sound like a bizarre thing to do in the middle of a war, but Olga says people like to go out if they can. They refuse to sit depressed at home. The Opera House was only half lit, conserving precious electricity. The cast was noticeably older than usual because so many younger men are fighting on the front lines. Still, the audience dressed carefully. Lipstick applied. Coats brushed. Heels clicking softly against stone. To Olga and her friends, it has become hugely important to keep up appearances even under these circumstances. She also told me how tired she is after years of war. “I carry my crying children underground as missiles drop,” she said. “They do not understand the danger, only that they want their own beds back.”After the performance, getting home took far longer than expected. GPS signals were blocked as the military prepared for anticipated attacks that night. Even navigation becomes uncertain. And yet Kyiv endures.From Kyiv, we drove to Zaporizhzhia, past newly carved trenches slicing through the frozen earth, rows of concrete anti-tank teeth waiting for armour that may come.The Russians have pushed forward so far since I was last there that the brand new underground bunker school we had visited and built so hopefully, so children could return to safe in-person lessons beneath the threat of missiles, now stands abandoned. Brand new. Fluorescent lights are still humming. Desks lined up. And no children. A school built for safety, emptied by the very danger it was meant to defy. I remember being shocked when we visited, that boys and girls were being taught how to handle and shoot guns, childhood compressed into survival training.I have headed deep into the east several times, right to where we can hear missiles overhead and feel tremors under our feet. We are fully bulletproofed, which feels very unjust as we spend time with people who are completely unarmed and unprotected. We drive enormous distances, following the 18-wheeler trucks carrying food, generators, clothing, blankets, battery packs, and torches. Sometimes it is too dangerous to bring the freight trucks close to the red zones, so the aid is offloaded into sprinter vans that can get in more discreetly.Even in the ghost towns, there are people. Mainly the elderly, those who could not or would not leave. In the cities, there are hundreds. In the countryside, handfuls. Everyone is desperate, but everyone is grateful. Some nights there is silence. Most nights, there are sirens. Ukrainians in these remote places burn the pallets and boxes the aid was delivered in just to stay warm. Their spirit is still strong. “We will never be Russian.”We met again with our friend, the general, who described the accelerating role of drones. Some are small first-person-view devices adapted from commercial models and used for reconnaissance or precision strikes. Others are loitering munitions that hover and wait for a target before diving. There are drones nicknamed waiters that land and sit silently on the ground to conserve battery life, activating only when a vehicle approaches. It is a battlefield of trenches and microchips, mud and algorithms.At an IDP centre for internally displaced families, we brought gifts for children forced from their homes. They lined up politely beside a stark display of shell casings, rocket fragments, and disabled artillery parts gathered nearby. For them, these are almost ordinary objects. The reality of war lay out like a museum of survival.Each passing year deepens the humanitarian crisis. Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress have become daily companions. Needs are growing faster than aid can reach them, just as the world’s attention shifts elsewhere. The first few weeks after a disaster are when relief organisations hit the ground with energy and determination. Over the following months, these organisations tend to pull back. Funding runs out, energy fades, new disasters happen. In my opinion, the heroic humanitarian organisations are those that stay long after the press has left and the world’s attention has shifted. In the countries that the Global Empowerment Mission serves, we stay for the long haul.What I carry home is not only the devastation, but the endurance. The mother navigating blackout schedules. The opera sung in half light. The volunteer loading trucks before dawn. The child waiting patiently beside the remnants of rockets.God is everywhere in Ukraine. The people believe and the people pray. Churches and faith stand tall in this rubble of war, gold domes glint, and the answer to the question “What can we bring you, what do you need?” is always, “We need God to bring us peace.”Across Ukraine in the darkness, resilience persists.