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Uzhgorod.in collected all sweet Christmas trees made by the famous confectioner Valentin Shtefanyo. Most of them were made with a noble goal.

For a resident of Nyzhnye Selyshche in Transcarpathia, the most important thing is to have a cow. Then you will be fine. 13 years ago, the socio-economic project was launched there – Selyshche cheese factory. Cheese made the village famous, and gave people opportunity to earn money. True connoisseurs of ecologial products and tourists became regular visitors to Selyshche.

The construction of the Selyshche cheese factory took about eight years. The director Petro Pryhara, mathematician and economist by training, studied the intricacies of cheese making in Switzerland. He says, over the years, thirty or forty thousand tourists have visited the cheese factory.

“It began in far away 1994, when the group went to France – to see the Longomay cooperative and to think what we could do in this depressed village, in this valley – Petro recollects. – Something that neither big business nor the government can do. We decided that it should be a socio-economic project, which most of the population would be involved in. People must feel financial and economic support.”

Maxim Ermolaev from Uzhgorod is only 25 years old, and he has already experienced war, captivity by separatists, abuse, hunger and fear that he would never see his loved ones. On September 24, last year, he returned home after 27 days in captivity. Since then, he has never spoken to journalists about the war, but now, when the horrors are somewhat forgotten, he agreed.

“The captain shot himself in the head in a train compartment”

On the day, when we met with Maxim, he had just received the combatant documents. That is 10 months after returning home. The guy quit the army, he says, he has served long enough. Especially since the separatists made it clear: if they catch him again, there will be no exchange, they will kill him immediately.

“April 9, last year, I received a call. I was not hiding, went to the military commissariat immediately. There, they sent me to the 51st Mechanized Brigade and said that I would spend there only 10 days. I realized that it would take more than a few days, when we were taken by bus to Volodymyr-Volynsky. There, we lived in an old abandoned military unit, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. I was sleeping on eight stools stacked next to each other.