Thad friends all over Ukraine...then we started seeing Russians lining them up and shooting them

TANYA Burch has friends she will never see again. When Russians invaded her native Ukraine in 2014, taking Crimea and part of its eastern territory, her country changed forever.

- By DECLAN CAREY

They came again in 2022, launching one of Europe's biggest conflicts since World War Two.

Ms Burch a Salford councillor who was born in western Ukraine has lost two personal friends in the fighting.

She remembers them both as men who died to protect others.

Like many Ukrainians, Coun Burch has struggled to find ways to deal with the unimaginable grief and stress that her country faces daily. Her regular life as a councillor in Ordsall normally involves helping residents, going to meetings, and trying to improve things in the community.

Meanwhile, more than a thousand miles away, her country is bombarded with Russian rockets and drones.

One way she copes is at the gym, exercising until 'crashing out' from exhaustion.

She was born in the Ukrainian city of Lviv in 1970, a place with narrow cobblestone streets near the border with Poland, where some of her family still live..

Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union at the time, which collapsed in 1991 and saw countries across eastern Europe open up to the world for the first time in decades.

It was shortly after that, in 1996, that Coun Burch arrived in Greater Manchester with an invite from a church she was working at as a volunteer. She met her husband Phil and the couple moved to Salford to be near a Bible school she was attending at the time.

They have two children.

Later, Ms Burch wanted to get more involved in what was happening in her community through local politics. This led to a meeting with her local councillors, which at the time included current Salford mayor Paul Dennett, who encouraged her to stand for election. 2014 proved to be a monumental year in her life.

She was elected to Salford council, and says she is the first Ukrainian councillor in the city. But back in her home country, tensions were escalating with Russia.