The rescue worker and the opera star: Love and fear in wartime Ukraine

KHARKIV, Ukraine - As Russia pummels Kharkiv with drones, missiles and glide bombs, Oleksii Skorlupin and his wife are each working to keep their city alive - in their own, very different ways.

He is a rescue worker who digs civilians out from rubble after Russian attacks. His wife, Yulia Antonova, is the lead singer of the Kharkiv Opera, performing for locals on a basement stage.

Under constant threat of airstrikes, the couple are raising their two young children in the vulnerable northeastern city - just 18 miles from the Russian border - far from their hometowns and while separated from their parents and other relatives who are living under Russian occupation in Crimea and the southeastern city of Melitopol.

As Ukraine braces for international pressure to negotiate with Russia, the experience of people like Skorlupin and Antonova - whose pasts and presents span Ukrainian regions and cultures - defies Russian President Vladimir Putin’s narrative that the land he aims to conquer belongs to Moscow.

The couple, now focused on preserving and protecting their adopted city, hope they will one day reunite with their family in a peaceful, unified Ukraine. That dream has sustained them through years of violence and upheaval.

Russia failed to seize Kharkiv in early 2022 but never gave up hopes of capturing the city - and Ukraine lacks most air defense systems capable of intercepting attacks on a city so close to the border. Air raid sirens often do not start until after the missiles and bombs have already hit.

Skorlupin’s rescue job comes with immense risks: Russia often bombs the same location twice in a row, killing first responders who rush to the scene after the initial attack.

In Kharkiv, Skorlupin is responsible for attending the biggest attacks, where he always hopes to find survivors. Usually, he said, he just collects bodies - or what is left of them. He now detects the smell of death before he finds the person, he said. Many victims are children - badly burned or without limbs.

“When you find just … body parts of a child … It’s just … You can’t understand it,” he said, standing in the wreckage of a home goods store Russia bombed in May, killing 19 people.

There, Skorlupin was tasked with searching for a missing woman and child. His team found the woman first, and eventually, his colleagues found “whatever was left” of the child, who had been thrown by the shock wave.

“The worst is also when you find a body, but the eyes are open and it looks at you,” he said. “It hits you really hard.” The day before that strike, he had been in the same shop buying a tool.

For about a year and a half, Skorlupin did this harrowing work and briefly fought on the front line while Antonova and their children, Darii, now 8, and Yeseniia, 2, were safe abroad.

In spring 2022, the Kharkiv Opera - hoping to save the lives of its performers - went on tour in Europe, bringing more than 250 staff and performers to stages in various countries.

Antonova decided to join after spending the early days of the war breastfeeding in a parking garage where the family was sheltered. She was reluctant to leave Skorlupin, knowing he - like their parents - would now watch the kids grow up over video calls. Under martial law, men below age of 60 are not allowed to travel abroad except under special circumstances.

It was Darii, then just 6, who helped lug their suitcases and care for his sister as they took trains, buses and ferries far from home. Antonova performed in Italy, Lithuania, Germany and Slovakia, where Darii enrolled in school and started to learn the language.

Once they left, Skorlupin joined the fight - lying to his wife to keep her from worrying. Friends urged him to focus on rescue work to survive for his family.

While his family toured Europe, he survived aircraft bombing, shelling, mortars and gunfire.

“At that time you remember everything: what you did as a child, that you took someone’s bike, that you didn’t share something with someone,” he said. “It’s very difficult because you don’t pray at that moment, but you remember all your sins and try to ask for forgiveness for them.”

Five times, Antonova brought the kids back to Ukraine to visit. Skorlupin knew firsthand the risks of any such trip. Even so, Antonova - tired of separation - returned for good last winter.

The international tour was over - the opera would try to reopen underground. The city was still under attack and the couple still separated from many of their relatives, but they would be together.

As the months passed, they developed a routine.

The kids accompany Antonova to rehearsals, and Darii sometimes even performs in shows - including a recent rendition of “A Zaporizhian Beyond the Danube.” When a missile or bomb hits, Antonova and Skorlupin call to make sure the other survived. Skorlupin then often deploys to the scene to start digging through rubble.

Kharkiv’s triumphant reopening of its opera house this spring demonstrated the city’s resilience against Russia’s invasion and rejuvenated a population exhausted by war. The first day Antonova performed, she recalled, “I hadn’t even opened my mouth yet, and people were already crying.”

But for Antonova, everything is shrouded in a layer of grief.

“I suspect that sometimes it’s not easy for her due to worries about her parents and husband, but it doesn’t show,” Igor Tuluzov, general director of the theater, said of the soprano. “She holds up well and is always cheerful and smiling at the theater. When it comes to work, she is very focused and never refuses any part, despite having a very young daughter who is almost always with her at rehearsals.”

Backstage after performing for a small crowd in June, Antonova wiped tears away as she mentioned her home in Crimea. Yeseniia - who has never met any of her grandparents - clung to her mother’s legs and giggled, hiding under the hem of her gown.

“I haven’t seen my parents for a very long time,” Antonova said. “They are very sad and don’t know what to do.”

She and the kids video-chat with them nearly every day, she said. Although her dad is a native Russian speaker, he knew Antonova and Darii had performed the Ukrainian song “Bilia Topoli” together - so he learned it on guitar to play for them over the phone. The song, which translates to “Near the Poplar Tree,” was written to honor fallen Ukrainian soldiers.

“My dad speaks Ukrainian very poorly; it’s difficult for him, but he learned the song and sang,” she said. Their parents are deeply worried the family in Kharkiv will be hurt or killed by Russian strikes.

Russia’s war on Ukraine left the family “divided like, I don’t know, chickens,” Antonova said.

Still, she sings even as she fears for herself and for her relatives, and she lives, she said, for the moment she will be with “my parents, my grandmother who says: ‘I want to live to see you.’”

“The main thing for them is that we are alive and healthy,” Antonova said.

Skorlupin, too, is more anxious now that his family is in Kharkiv.

In June, the school where Darii takes sports lessons was hit on a day he wasn’t there. “There are so many moments like that,” Skorlupin said, scrolling through photos of attacks on his phone, as his kids sipped juice beside him. “You can’t show them all.”

Antonova believes deeply, though, that her work is helping Kharkiv survive. “Music is a kind of movement,” she said. “Because people constantly living somewhere in basements, under these air raids, have forgotten what life is.”

Skorlupin, however, wishes his work wasn’t necessary.

“To be honest, I would like to not save anything at all,” he said. “I would like people to live.”