Of smoke and mirrors: Ukrainians wish to be back in their homes soon, but what is stopping them?

Shevchenkove is a small hamlet in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region. Up until November last year, it was on the frontline like its surrounding villages, before Russians withdrew to the other side of river Dnipro. Now, that the Russians are gone, many have come back to their homes and many more wish to soon, but they have a clear problem: glass. They need glass to reglaze their windows before the cruel Ukrainian winters arrive. And they don’t have enough of it. The village’s population before the war was 3200 and today there are only 2200 people in the village. Oleg Pylypenko, the mayor, who was taken prisoner by the Russians during the occupation and was released only in a prisoner swap, want everyone back, but for that, they must repair their houses and that would require them to first stay in the village. The village orphanage, which has two dormitories, can accommodate those returning, but the windows are shattered and even if they were to be repaired, chances are that they will be shattered again soon. Schevchenkove is but only a village. The situation is the same in the rest of the country. Most of the houses in the regions touched by the war bespeak the same story. A few reasons, both international and local have led to Ukraine’s glass problem. Foremost among them is the high cost of construction materials due to the rise in fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine. Then just a few months ago Turkey saw one of its deadliest earthquakes and the reconstruction efforts there have consumed most of the glass supplies. But even with these two external problems, Ukraine finds itself in a position to not be able to do anything independently to address the demand. That is because there are no glass sheet factories in Ukraine. After its independence from the Soviet Union in the early nineties there were 10 factories in the country, but they shut down one by one. The only functional enterprise was in Luhansk, a region Ukraine lost to Russia in the early days of the war which started on 24 February, 2022. Despite having the raw materials required in abundance, Ukraine had become totally dependent on Belarus for glass supply. And even though smugglers imported the glass illegally after the Russian invasion, which Belarus supports – in fact a flank of Russian forces entered Ukraine from Belarus. Glass cost $2.02 (£1.58) a square metre on the international market and was sold for $3 before the war, but today it cost $4 from abroad and is sold between $6 and $7, according to a Guardian report. And even the glass that is coming into Ukraine is not helping much for its poor quality. “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,” Kostyantyn Saliy, 48, the president of the All-Ukrainian Union of Building Materials Manufacturers told Guardian. Saliy said Ukraine needed 750 m sq m of glass to reglaze. Only now the construction of a new sheet glass factory in Berezan in the Kyiv region has started. Saliy’s union is also planning to appeal to the European Union for a grant to establish two more facilities, one to make sodium oxide, which is a key ingredient, and the second to make the glass sheets