Cooking soldiers a taste of home

We meet Lilya: a home cook and volunteer who’s made thousands of meals for Ukrainian soldiers since the full scale war began - and they’re so good, she’s even got medals to prove it.

In a small village, around an hour from central Kyiv, Lilya Yemelyanenko has been sheltering animals for more than 15 years.  I’ve come to visit her with my friend Steven, who’s serving as a medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and is a big fan of Lilya. The back garden of her home is lined with kennels, housing all kinds of dogs. They leap up, barking, tails wagging furiously as we walk past - many of them have been rescued from active war zones, and now they have a calmer temporary home. There’s even a donkey, called Mila, rescued from the frontline Donetsk region.

But since the start of the full scale war, Lilya has had another full time volunteer role - cooking for Ukrainian soldiers. Her daughter Darina says it all began with home made ferments and pickles, which had already been making for a few years - but then she branched out into ready to eat meals which could be vac packed and reheated again on the front lines. Lilya wanted to find a way to provide nourishing, home cooked food in small individual packages - and started trying out recipes to see what would work best. The first dish she made was, naturally, borsch. “The main idea was to make absolutely home food”, Darina says.

All this time, Lilya has been at the stove, heating up a large pan of her trademark borsch along with some golubtsiy or stuffed cabbage leaves - while her husband Yura laid the table with plates of salo, pickled cucumber and tomato, and some dark rye bread. Lilya hands me and Steven large bowls of the borsch, with a generous spoonful of sour cream: it is rich and warming and very much tastes of home, and I can only imagine how comforting something like that must be for soldiers who’ve spent months living in the most extreme and hazardous conditions. Steven of course has a better idea: and tells us about the time some supplies were sent to a unit he was with in Zaporizhzhia. “I shared it with friends from the 115 battalion - they said it was so good, they would even pay for it”, he declares. Lilya is already back at the cooker, frying me some syrniki - which anyone who knows me, knows is my favourite Ukrainian food. Cottage cheese pancakes, fried until the edges are toasted and crisp, today served with sour cream and some of Lilia’s home made preserved strawberries.  

At the very start of the full scale war, when Russian forces were advancing towards Kyiv, the family had moved with friends to the Rivne region and began helping out at a centre which supported civilians and military defenders. “It was a small village, and we know all these people and try to help them. It was all very direct - someone would ask us - can you please send it to us?’

At first they paid for all the ingredients from their own savings - and then from donations they were able to get from friends and people who followed their animal shelter page on Facebook, especially people who had got dogs and cats from them over the years. “It was our base, our community”.

Every spare bit of space in the house is full of kitchen equipment, jars, packaging and assorted bits of machinery: Lilya shows off the contraption on the kitchen counter which vacuum seals the packs once they’re filled with food. They send most of it to the soldiers by Ukraine’s extraordinarily efficient private parcel delivery service, Nova Poshta. “And we have a lot of people who deliver it directly, right there”. 

Lilya’s repertoire has increased to around 20 different dishes: “there are a lot of kinds of soup, rice, potato with meat - but the most popular are soups. You just need to heat it.” The best part is getting feedback from the troops. On the wall are signed flags, certificates of thanks and two medals awarded for Lilya’s volunteering work. “We get a lot of videos, photos, that’s the most nice part of all this.”

Steven, enthusiastically tackling another helping of syrniki, says meals in the army featured a lot of kasha porridge, especially the time he was in hospital after a car crash. It’s why he’s now such a big fan of Lilya and her comforting, home cooked soups. “I mean, her borsch is maybe the best borsch in the country!” Lilya’s husband loads up the back of their car with a special delivery for Steven’s colleagues: boxes filled with the meal packs, bottles of home-pressed juice and some trench candles, often the only source of light and heat at the zero line. A couple of days later, he’s already posting pictures of a smiling soldier in Kherson region, clearly very happy to receive it all. 

The front lines might be hundreds of miles away, but the home front is very much here, in this kitchen, in the house with all the rescue dogs and Mila the donkey braying outside, and the narrow kitchen full of jars of pickles and preserved fruit, and giant pans of soup cooking away on the stove. As we leave, Lilya pushes a bag into my hand: there is a jar of pickled mushroom and another of sweet plums. From her home, to mine.