Lack of glass is impeding efforts to rebuild and repopulate areas hit by Russian shelling such as the village of Shevchenkove
The village of Shevchenkove wants its villagers back. There is one significant problem: very many of its buildings do not have windows.
From the early days of the war, up until November last year when the Russian forces were pushed over to the other side of the Dnipro River, Shevchenkove and its surrounding hamlets in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson were on the frontline.
The mayor was taken prisoner and its local people terrorised by hourly shelling. Many fled. Then the Russians withdrew. While the danger of artillery and rockets remained, many were motivated to return home.
There are 11,000 people in the region now but that is still 5,000 down from peacetime. In Shevchenkove, where the prewar population was 3,200, there are 2,200 residents today. This is not enough for Oleg Pylypenko, 37, the mayor, who was released in a prisoner swap. He wants everyone back. But the remaining stumbling block is clear: glass, or rather the lack of it.
People want to rebuild their lives and homes but it will take time, and to do so they need to at least be in the village.
Shevchenkove’s largest buildings, including a former orphanage with two dormitories, could accommodate those coming back on a medium-term basis but they no longer have windows and, even if they did, it would probably not be long before they were smashed again.
It may be hot under the August sun but Ukrainian winters can be cruel and cold, with Russia likely to renew its attack on electricity supplies.
It is a problem writ large across the country. Take a tour of almost any city, town or village in the east or south and the abundance of gaping windows is striking.
A glass frame can smash as a result of an explosion a significant distance away. An incalculable number have been broken and, when refitted, they will in many cases be smashed again.
In Shevchenkove, one in three of the buildings were destroyed and half were damaged in some way. That is a lot of broken glass.
A range of conditions both global in nature and peculiar to Ukraine have left the country struggling to reglaze, especially when it promises to be a rather repetitive process.
The price of construction materials around the world has shot up as a result of the increased energy costs caused by the war.
Then there is the Turkish earthquake that has swallowed up glass supplies in recent months. But Ukraine was also particularly ill-equipped to deal with a sudden, and repeated, shattering of its windows.
After the country achieved independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were 10 factories producing sheet glass. Since then – and conspiracy theories abound – they have one by one been shut down.
Ukraine had become almost entirely dependent on producers in Belarus and Russia despite having an abundance of raw materials.
The final sheet glass factory in Ukraine, in Luhansk in the east, was lost to the country when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February last year and occupied the region.
Kostyantyn Saliy, 48, the president of the All-Ukrainian Union of Building Materials Manufacturers, said that before the war those making windows would buy glass for $2.02 (£1.58) a square metre and sell their products for $3 but today were buying for $4 from abroad and selling for between $6 and $7.
“But a lot of glass that is coming to Ukraine, especially from the former Soviet Union countries, the quality of the glass is worse than even the Soviet Union standards,” he said.
There are those smuggling in better-quality glass from Belarus through Poland, to avoid breaching sanctions, “but we don’t want to be helping Belarus who are helping the Russians”, he added.
Saliy said Ukraine needed 750m sq m of glass to reglaze.
There is some hope. Ground has been broken on the construction of a new sheet glass factory in Berezan in the Kyiv region. Saliy’s union is planning to appeal to the EU for a grant to establish two further facilities, one to make sodium oxide, which is a key ingredient, and the second to make the sheets.
But what to do in the meantime, when reglazing can be something of a thankless job given the threat of artillery and rocket fire?
Harry Blakiston Houston, 27, who interrupted a PhD in biotechnology at the University of Cambridge to tackle this puzzle, believes he has the answer: a window that can be built in 15 minutes and costs just £12 a square metre using polyethylene, PVC piping, pipe insulation and duct tape, to create four layers of insulation that will not smash.
The windows, while temporary, are durable but when no longer required all the parts can be recycled and used for something else.
Blakiston Houston’s charity, Insulate Ukraine, fitted its first such window in Shevchenkove after coming across an elderly woman who had been sleeping in her bath tub as the bathroom was the only warm place in her home.
Since then the charity has worked across the country, thanks to some corporate sponsors and more recently World Jewish Relief. It has fitted 6,000 windows in all, and Shevchenkove and its orphanage will be some of the beneficiaries of a 2,000-window drive soon to be started in Kherson.
Blakiston Houston is keen to scale up the project. But there is another problem: the largest funder of the efforts to rebuild in Ukraine is the UN. The “build back better” protocol under which it operates means the UN will only fund windows that are like for like with what was in place before the war or of a better quality.
“That makes total sense if you’re in something like an earthquake,” said Blakiston Houston. “But the difficulty with this is that really it’s not a two-stage process [of emergency and normality]. It’s a three-stage process. So you have the initial emergency, then you have potentially a prolonged period in which people are having to live in a very different environment.”
A fire station in Nikopol, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, has had to repeatedly install windows this year due to Russian shells landing in the area, he said.
“Each one of these windows that they replace it with costs somewhere between $200 to $500,” Blakiston Houston said. “They have a new grant for more new windows but they haven’t installed them. Instead they have asked us to install the Insulate Ukraine windows. Our windows, it is $15 or $20 for the size we are talking about.”
He added: “You get most of the same things you get with a normal window. So, you get very good insulation, you get a very good thermal envelope protection. You get light coming through so you can actually work inside during the day and then very importantly, they don’t shatter when a bomb drops.”
At most with the Insulate Ukraine windows, the frame could buckle or pop out but it is an easy and cheap fix, he said. The lifespan of the product is about five to eight years but with some further tweaking of the design, he believes it could be longer. “The idea is that we visit once,” he said, “and don’t have to come back because by the end of this, then the war will be over, and actually glass will be back.”
Along, it is hoped, with all of the villagers.