![]() ![]() Lee saved Mikhail’s life in more ways than one. “I am here thanks only to Alexander,” Mikhail says. He found Mikhail in a shelled-out village outside Nova Kakhovka, living without a home or documents. Soon after Kherson was liberated in the fall of 2022, Lee began driving to outlying villages in an unarmored Honda Sedan, knocking on doors and visiting health care centers to track down vulnerable residents. Mikhail was brought to the shelter by Alexander Lee, a project manager with a local charity in Kryvyi Rih. “It was one of the worst days of my life,” Mikhail says, gazing down at his hands. The man standing immediately to his right was shot dead. A soldier used the butt of his rifle to permanently maim Mikhail’s face. Less than a week after Moscow’s forces invaded the country on February 24, his neighborhood was surrounded. This, he says, serves as a permanent reminder of the day his home became a war zone. Sunlight from the nearby window poured in, flooding the craters of his pockmarked cheek as he slowly dragged his index finger toward his dented jawline before pausing over his crooked nose. Mikhail, who asked to only be identified by his first name out of privacy concerns, began telling his story in late February by tracing a path across his face. Since the beginning of January, the 38-year-old has taken refuge in the ground floor apartment in the industrial city, miles away from his home on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. Crouched on the bottom bunk bed of a shelter for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine, Mikhail counts himself among the lucky ones. ![]()
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