Blackout 47 hours+1 hour of light+12 hours of darkness. We are having a second blackout. Kyiv, the right bank, 19−20 December. The city is in darkness. For the second day, the power has been out in the apartment. The refrigerator is now a regular cabinet, nobody is expecting to get food from there anymore. The food is out on the balcony. The freezer lasted for a long time. During …
Like mostly everyone, we were nervous before February 24, but had not dared to fully believe in the possibility of war. The morning of the 24th woke me up with the sounds of explosions and phone calls. From my brother, who is now defending us near Kharkiv, came a short message: it started, be careful. The following hours and days were as if in a fog. How to be careful, what to do, will this …
A woman in a pink jacket is trying to push a baby carriage up the ramp of the underground passage. It’s morning. Rush hour. The wheels are twisting around and the carriage won’t go. The woman is practically in tears. The streetcar has just come up and the passage is jammed. The woman and her carriage immediately become an obstacle in everybody’s way, those who are taking advantage of the …
I slept through the beginning of the war… At 5 a.m. on the 24th of February, there was an explosion outside. The car alarms went nuts. I jumped out of bed. Everything felt foggy. I was exhausted from all the hospital visits and sleepless nights I’d had with my son, who’d been sick. He’s not yet three years old. My brain shut off and I fell asleep …
Kyiv railway station on March 1 was absolutely packed. Everyone listened out for when there would be trains heading West. Our train is announced and the crowd rushes madly towards it. There are soldiers with machine guns on the platform. Parents lose sight of a boy, and scream in panic. The soldiers are looking for a child who, covering his head with hands, falls …
A garage on Yablunytsia in Bucha. Tracks from rascist tanks and a tanker car marked «soviet railways»… And the garage where civilian women and men were hiding. The rascist soldiers closed the garage and threw a grenade through the ventilation slot… The remains of burned bodies… That’s all that was left of people who were simply hiding from the enemy. Today, the …
Train Kyiv-L'viv. An evacuation route. We, two girls with a dog, are going from Kyiv to Poland. Next to us, two elderly women — very elegant — are heading to their relatives in France. Also next to us are Sasha and Katya — two sisters, Sasha is only ten years old, and Katya, even though she is older, is so young. They were going to Germany. Also, we had a boy called Danya …
An apartment building one block away from my mom’s place was shelled. That’s it in the photo. My mom’s ok. My mother-in-law's also relatively fine — they’ve already equipped their cellar and have a supply of preserves and potatoes. We’ve already moved four times since we fled to Western Ukraine. Our lives fit into a couple of bags. My children are wearing borrowed shoes, we got a stroller from the humanitarian …
My parents lived close to the Zhytomyr highway right outside Kyiv. My brother was able to find a driver who drove them to the rail station. Several buildings were blown up in their area that day. My parents had to wait another 8 hours before the train arrived. It was not scheduled. Mom (65) and Dad (76) waited in the cold, carrying only two backpacks. Suddenly there …
