I’ll be honest: I was afraid to go there — especially so soon after deoccupation, in 2022. I dreaded the sight of a mutilated, ravaged city, because for as long as I could remember, Irpin had lived in my mind as something entirely different.
For me, Irpin was youth and joy: pine trees humming under a clear sky. In my younger years, it meant creative seminars for young people, held in the buildings of the Writers’ Union’s House of Creativity, back when the country was still the Ukrainian SSR. Poetry readings, flirtations, moonlit sighs. Later came the first year of married life — spent in Irpin while we searched for a modest flat to rent somewhere in Kyiv. And later still, a visit to see Hryhorii Kochur, the poet and translator.
In 1943, Kochur and his wife were arrested, accused of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism”, and sentenced to ten years in the camps. They served that sentence in Inta, in Russia’s Komi ASSR, doing backbreaking labour in the mines of Soviet GULAG. It was there, through constant contact with fellow prisoners, that Kochur learned languages — Estonian, Latvian, Armenian, Georgian — turning even imprisonment into a form of intellectual resistance.
After his release and rehabilitation in 1962, the Kochurs returned to Ukraine and settled in Irpin. I was lucky enough to visit their home before it became a literary museum. I met Hryhorii Kochur there, recorded an interview with him, and later published it. His life and work stand as a rare example not only of dignity and inner strength, but of creative optimism — the ability to keep believing in meaning even after everything has been taken from you.
Irpin, a quiet resort town on Kyiv’s outskirts, was long associated with pine trees, calm streets, and peaceful getaways. That’s why the news that came in the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — of occupation and the execution of civilians there, as well as in Bucha, Hostomel, Moshchun and beyond — hit like an apocalyptic shock. A place of rest and greenery was suddenly defined by mass violence and death.
***
I’m meeting Zhanna Kuiava, a writer who has lived in Irpin for many years. Together with her husband, she survived the occupation there and narrowly escaped execution by Russian soldiers.
Her blue car, “Marusia”, feels like a character in its own right. It was in that car that Zhanna fled Irpin. But at the edge of the city, near the destroyed Romaniv Bridge, they were forced to abandon it. From there, they continued on foot, under a very real and immediate fear of death. After the city was liberated, no one even tried to look for Marusia: they were afraid of finding it among the heaps of burnt-out, rusting vehicles in what had become a graveyard of cars. Then, two months later, a small miracle — Zhanna’s mother spotted it by chance in archival footage. Zhanna shows me a “wound” — that’s the word she uses — in the car: a bullet hole, left behind “as a keepsake”.
We stop at the blown-up Romaniv Bridge over the Irpin River. On the second day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, 25 February 2022, Ukrainian forces were forced to destroy it to halt the advance of occupying troops moving towards Kyiv. The decision was necessary, but it came at a cost: evacuation became far more difficult, not only for Irpin, but also for nearby Bucha and Vorzel.
I remember the footage that has since become iconic: people crossing the river beside the shattered bridge, inching their way along hastily laid planks, fighting against a biting February wind and swirling snow. Even now, rusted rebar still sticks out of the wreckage, and a white minibus remains abandoned nearby, nose-down in the riverbank gravel. And yet, just a short distance away, a new bridge now connects Irpin to Kyiv.
I read in open sources: “Tank battles broke out inside the city. On 3 March 2022, the Kyiv Regional State Administration reported that humanitarian aid was heading towards Bucha and Irpin, and that evacuations had begun in both cities. Fighters from the 72nd Separate Mechanised Brigade, the ‘Black Zaporizhians’, destroyed occupying forces attempting to break through to Kyiv. According to local authorities, Irpin was liberated from Russian troops on 28 March.”
I ask Zhanna to show me the places tied to everything she lived through during the occupation and her escape from it. She falls silent for a moment. I understand why. The memories are traumatic. She has spent enormous emotional effort trying to push the past horrors aside, to move on, to start living and working. All the more so because her son, Taras, is growing up — the very child she so feared leaving an orphan in 2022…
After what she went through, Zhanna began to imagine the same scene over and over. “We’re walking towards the car, and I hear shots fired into my husband’s and my back,” she says. “It’s as if I’m watching from the side — seeing us lying in the road, in the mud, the way so many innocent people from Irpin were killed and later found. And in my hands I’m holding our family photo, with our smiling five-year-old son. We were happy in that picture — especially the birthday boy, little Taras, who was born just before New Year. I’m afraid none of us will ever be able to smile that carelessly again — including our son.”
Zhanna shows me everything. The church whose basement became a refuge on the last night before evacuation, where she and other residents of Irpin slept. The view of the city from a high hill above the Irpin River — a panorama that, in those terrifying days, was filled with fire and flames. She points out the ruined houses that still await reconstruction. But she is far more eager to show the city as it is now — reborn and rebuilt. The restored embankment. The beach. Buildings where the black soot left by attacks from Russia’s so-called “peaceful people” has already faded.
There is a small square — more precisely, an avenue of fruit trees planted by the writer Serhii Martyniuk, a defender of Irpin. Zhanna smiles as she points out which apple tree bears the sweetest fruit.
I visit the Writers’ Park, laid out before the war, for the first time. Trees, quiet, a sense of ease, slightly quirky sculptures — all of it speaks of life continuing. Even as the war continues too.
According to Irpin’s city authorities, 321 civilians were killed as a result of the Russian invasion. Among them were the well-known American journalist Brent Renaud and the actor and television presenter Pavlo Li. Today, it is hard to imagine that every road here was once choked with debris, that it was impossible even to drive through the city — at best you would damage a wheel, at worst you would hit a mine.
Irpin is now a regular stop for international delegations, brought here to see both what was destroyed and what has already been rebuilt. The occupiers destroyed or damaged half of the city’s housing stock — more than 7,000 buildings. And yet people are coming back. The city has also taken in more than 23,000 internally displaced people.
Ukraine is the first country trying to rebuild while a war is still ongoing. And Irpin wants to be known not as a “city of pain,” but as a “city that fights.”
Of course, it matters that figures such as the Canadian actor and director of Ukrainian descent Katheryn Winnick — best known for the series Vikings — have visited Irpin and spoken out in support of Ukraine and against Russian aggression. The renowned English artist and political activist known as Banksy has also been made an honorary citizen of the city. But the most important thing is something far simpler: that Irpin’s own residents are coming back, from wherever the war has scattered them.
Without a doubt, Irpin can’t rebuild without foreign support — Ukraine’s Lithuanian partners, in particular, have been some of the most active backers. But what truly counts is how much the city’s own residents, as engaged and determined citizens, can roll up their sleeves and shape its recovery. My impressions of Irpin are, perhaps, a little tourist-like. I wanted, if only briefly, to take in this satellite city of Kyiv — a place that defended itself, the capital, and, despite the war, continues to live and grow.
On the way back to Kyiv, along the Hostomel highway — still striking for the ruins lining both sides — Zhanna, at the wheel of her “Marusia”, gives a sad smile.
“That’s exactly how I was driving to Kyiv for work on 24 February, right at the start of the full-scale invasion. Work was work, after all. And coming towards me were three lanes of cars full of people leaving Kyiv. They were rushing to what they thought were our ‘safer’ places”
P.S. In the final days of November this year, I read news from Irpin that stopped me cold
There were names of three young men: Artur Baranets (born 7 March 2000), Ruslan Filipenko (born 12 January 2000), and Oleksiy Yashchenko (born 13 June 2001).
Three friends — all very young, tall, strong and brave — who in February and March 2022 voluntarily joined Irpin’s Territorial Defence. They evacuated civilians, delivered food, manned checkpoints; they did whatever was needed to defend their city. On 2 March 2022, their car came under fire from a Russian tank between Vorzel and Mykhailivka-Rubezhivka. Later, videos of interrogations emerged showing Artur and Ruslan still alive, footage that kept their families clinging to the hope that the boys were being held as prisoners.
“For almost four years we believed they were in captivity… that they were alive somewhere,” Artur Baranets’ mother wrote. “But it turned out the Russians tortured them, killed them and burned them.” For nearly four years, the families searched for their sons — writing to every authority, collecting testimonies, grasping at every thread of hope. DNA tests eventually confirmed the truth: the bodies of three people tortured, killed and burned by Russian forces at Hostomel Airport in early March 2022 were indeed Ruslan, Artur and Oleksiy.
Today, the community laid its Heroes to rest.
