It’s a crisp winter day, and soup is bubbling on Lilya Yemelyanenko’s stove. It’s always bubbling now, on Lilya’s stove: day and night, spring and fall, winter and summer. For nearly two years, one pot of soup has followed another, cooking up over 1,500 servings a month and, by the time of our visit, over 25,000 in all.
The soup Lilya makes isn’t always the same. Sometimes it’s borshch, the crimson beet soup that’s sustained Ukrainians for generations; sometimes it’s tangy solyanka, thick with sausage; sometimes it’s kulish, a rich millet porridge that once fuelled the famed Cossacks as they roamed the steppes of Ukraine. Sometimes, it’s just a simple chicken noodle, which is every bit as beloved by Lilya’s diners as it is humble. It just tastes like home, which comes as a comfort to those who know they may never see theirs again.
On the day my friend and I visit Lilya at her house, tucked in a village a short drive west of Kyiv, the soup is bograch, a savoury favourite from Ukraine’s mountainous Transcarpathian region. By the time we arrive, it’s been simmering for hours; soon, Lilya and her husband will ladle it into packets, pass them through the heat-sealing machine they found online, and pack the bags into tall metal canister of their home pasteurization system. Within hours, 100 more bags of soup will be shelf-stable and ready to ship to the front lines, where they’ll warm the bellies of exhausted soldiers; another pot of soup will already be going on the stove.
There are days Lilya would like to take a break, and put the soup-making on hold. But then she gets another call from another front-line unit, asking for more soup for their fox holes and trenches, and she puts another batch on the stove.
“Sometimes she's tired, she wants to stop, but the boys are asking, ‘please, we need the food,’” Lilya’s daughter says, translating for her mother. “Our soldiers told us that it's a big support to know that someone cares for them, and it's very important to feel like they’re at home.”
Lilya was not, prior to the war, a big cook. Nor was she from the village. In fact, she’d spent most of her adult life living in central Kyiv, working as an event planner for the capital’s glitterati; she once planned a wedding for former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s daughter. But 15 years ago she decided to retire, buy a house in the village and start an animal shelter, where she and her husband could live out the peaceful sunset of their lives.
The war changed everything, of course. When Russia invaded in February 2022, they came within just five kilometres of the village. After working frantically to find safe places to evacuate the dogs, donkeys and even foxes from their shelter, Lilya and her family fled. But they never wanted to leave Ukraine, and after the Russians retreated from the capital region, they returned home, where Lilya was gripped by the need to do something, anything, to help Ukraine’s defence.
It was as if, she said, she went to sleep on the night of Feb. 23 as an average Russian-speaking retiree, and woke up the next morning as a die-hard patriot. It’s a story you hear a lot these days, in Ukraine; both in how the invasion called people to draw new lines around what they love, to reconsider how they saw themselves and their nation; and also, to consider what they could do, on the smallest scale to the largest, to shore up the fight.
“We just didn't know how we can help our army, so we decided that we can make something that we already know how to make,” Lilya says. “So it was the food.”
It’s not that the Ukrainian army lacks food — sustenance is available at the front, in various forms. But soup has a particular place in many Central and Eastern European cuisines; one of the most memorable news quotes of the entire war came from a U.S. military official who, in March 2023, described Ukrainian soldiers training in the U.S. as being “very… soup-centric” in their menu preferences.
And the soldiers love Lilya’s soup. Sometimes, they send notes of gratitude speckled with enthusiastic expletives: “I tell them, ‘okay, that’s very nice but I can’t post it on the Facebook page,’” she says, laughing. “Children are looking at it.” Once, a soldier told her the borshch was better than his wife’s version — not that he planned to tell his spouse. Another soldier was skeptical of the mushroom soup Lilya sent his unit, having a lifelong dislike of mushrooms; after tasting it, he asked her to send more.
So that eases the long days over the stove, the repetition of the making; two years now and no signs of stopping, because the war is still going on.
“You should cook with your soul, not (in large volume),” Lilya says. “When you do a lot, it gets boring. But I love what I do. I know who I'm doing it for. And I really like to receive all kinds of thanks from the guys. Sometimes they thank me so much that I can't look at it without tears. The connection is very important. For us and for them.”
And when Lilya is asked how the last two years have changed her, she takes off her glasses, and wipes her eyes. She’ll try not to cry, she says, but it’s brought her family closer together. They feel more united than they were before, and less distracted; it’s the simple things that matter most to them now. Simple things, and the soldiers who every day reach out, asking for more. She can’t make enough to fulfill all the requests, but she tries. And she fills each package with love for the guys.
“All of them is like a member of your family and you're worried about all of them,” her daughter says. “It's hard to be honest, because not all of them are still alive, but we are doing our best.”
That last part, that’s what wrenches the hardest. Each serving of soup they send out could be someone’s last meal.
“I don’t like to think about that,” Lilya’s daughter says. “I hope not.”
Someday, Lilya will not have to make soup anymore. There’s no knowing when. On that day, they like to imagine gathering all the implements they bought to make the soup, all the machines and pasteurization systems, and never using them again.
“We were joking that on the day when this war will finish, we will throw it all out,” Lilya says, with a laugh. “Burn (the equipment) somewhere. But till the end, we will cook, we will make, we will help.”
This is the greatest power of Ukraine, I think. It lives in the people. The nation’s best hopes grow from the root, from the multitude of stories like Lilya’s, of people finding ways to care for each other, in the ways they are able.
On the way home from Lilya’s village, my friend — a fellow Canadian — and I talked about that. If Canada was under the same pressure, would we find the same ability to show up for each other, however we could? I think so, I do. But we don’t need to wait for a war to find out. We can always start now, where we are.
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Making 25,000 servings of soup doesn’t come cheap. Each pot, Lilya says, costs about $100 USD. You can donate to her work via PayPal at 4461973@ukr.net.
For those with access to IBAN direct bank transfer — which I don’t believe works in Canada, but perhaps I’m wrong — you can send it to UA573052990000026201679172.
If you’d like to chip in but don’t have access to any of these, Canadians can e-transfer me at doubleemmartin@gmail.com — make sure to leave a note that it’s for Lilya, and I will absolutely send it to her via PayPal.
For those with a Ukrainian bank account, you can send directly to PrivatBank 305299.
And if you just want to follow her soup-making efforts, you can find her on Instagram at @trench_souppai, or on her Facebook profile.
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I write now in the fleeting hours when there is power. When there isn’t, the house is dark and the Internet doesn’t work. (Luckily, my phone’s data plan usually still does.) For the last few weeks, most apartments and businesses in Kyiv have seen their daily electricity dip as low as four hours a day.
This is manageable in summer, at least for those who are healthy and abled. The days are long and warm. Generators purr loudly outside shops and restaurants, as they did over the winter of 2022-23. But the power situation is worse now than then. In the last several months, Russia has destroyed even more of Ukraine’s wounded electricity grid; this week, embattled Kherson went completely without power.
Ukrainian officials say the situation could improve by August. If it doesn’t, the winter could be dangerous, and unbearable. You fear for the vulnerable: for seniors living on the upper floors of high-rise apartments, with elevators out of service. For the sick, or disabled, huddled in houses without heat. To make an entire nation unliveable; this is a crime by any definition imaginable.
I have tentatively been planning to come home near the end of the year, but a part of me looks ahead and thinks — I can’t leave this country then, not when it’s under that kind of pressure. But I’ll probably have to for logistical reasons. We’ll see, we’ll see.
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Lilya was kind enough to share her recipe for bograch; I thought some readers might enjoy giving it a try. The amounts can easily be halved to test it out, and play around as you need. There’s probably some magic in the making that I’m not a good enough chef to know; but when I tasted Lilya’s, it was heaven. Hearty, savoury, grounding.
Ingredients
Beef or pork: 1 kg
Pork lard: 100g (about 1/2 cup)
Smoked chicken filet: 150g (about 1 1/4 cups)
Sausage: 150g (about 1 1/4 cups)
Two potatoes
Two onions
One carrot
Two Bulgarian peppers (red bell peppers would work)
Two tomatoes
Three cloves of garlic
One tablespoon tomato paste
Two tablespoons ground paprika
Pinch of cumin
Salt and black pepper to taste
Oregano and coriander as desired
Directions
Chop all ingredients into small pieces. Fry everything in the pork lard. Pour one to two litres of boiling water over the ingredients, and cook until done. “You can use more water, but the soup should be quite thick,” Lilya says. She likes to season with oregano and coriander, though not every version of this soup uses it.