Inside a restaurant in Lviv, in western Ukraine, baker Olena, displaced by the war that has ravaged her country for almost two months, draws on an egg with a wax-covered needle a message that has become ubiquitous: “Glory to Ukraine! »
The egg decorated by this 50-year-old woman from the major port city of Odessa in southern Ukraine is for a soldier fighting Russian forces.
Holding her creation over a flame after dipping it in blue ink, Olena then gently removes the melted wax.
“The most important thing today for Ukraine is to win,” she says, bursting into tears. These eggs will be sent to soldiers on the front lines. »
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, tens of thousands of displaced Ukrainians have arrived in Lviv, a large city in the west of the country relatively spared from the fighting.
Inside a popular Georgian restaurant on Wednesday, more than a dozen women and children decorated hard-boiled eggs and baked traditional Easter breads with yellow and blue icing, the colors of Ukraine.
Orthodox Easter will take place on Sunday, and volunteers baked 290 candied fruitcakes over two days to be blessed by military chaplains in the east, before being eaten by soldiers.
“Proud”
The volunteers wrapped the batches of bread in layers of plastic and tied a ribbon with a handwritten note.
“We are proud of you,” read one of these messages, written by a woman from the city of Kharkiv, in the northeast, currently bombarded daily by the Russian army.
” You are the best. The Ukrainian army will win,” proclaims another message.
Anastassia Rojkova, a law student also displaced, wrote about fifteen in a few moments, “from the bottom of her heart”.
“I imagined what I would say to this person if they stood in front of me,” said the 20-year-old from the Donetsk region in the east. In this area, plagued by conflict between kyiv forces and pro-Russian separatists since 2014, fighting has intensified since the start of the invasion.
She says that her mother, her little brother and her little sister fled to France, but that she decided to stay in Ukraine to help other displaced families.
Yulia, 44, is also from Donetsk. She watches as her 7-year-old son, Ivan, dips his second Easter egg into a bowl of blue ink.
As soon as the Russian offensive began, they fled to Lviv. His other 17-year-old son was exfiltrated to Latvia by the basketball federation with his teammates.
Her voice cracks as she recounts the moment she saw the ad on social media for Easter egg painting, one of the most important holidays in Orthodoxy, the majority religion in Ukraine, but also in Russia.
“I knew I had to come,” she says.