Putin's invasion forces embattled Ukrainian citizens to face the grim realities of combat – again
When she found out Russian tanks were rolling into Ukraine, Anna Myasnokova, 27, left her pet parrot in her apartment in Kharkiv and went to stay in the basement of her office building.
The next day, when she went back to visit her bird, heavy shelling outside sent her into the bathroom to hide. Once the noise quieted down, she washed dishes, just to calm herself.
Back at her office, she was telling her story to USA TODAY when a boom came over the phone receiver. She grew quiet. "I apologize,” she said. “They are bombing us badly right now. I have to go down into the basement."
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Myasnokova is one of millions of Ukrainians under siege as the Russian invasion creates increasingly worrisome humanitarian problems, leading more than a half-million people to escape their homeland and forcing people to take cover in bomb shelters, scramble to find food and sleep in subway terminals.
The latest on Ukraine: Fighting continues between Russian and Ukrainian forces
The war is a dramatic escalation of an armed conflict that has lasted since 2014, when Ukrainians held a revolution over their president's ties to Russia. In response, Russian-leaning separatist areas in Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence from Ukraine, and Russian President Vladimir Putin took over Crimea.
By the beginning of this year, fighting in the Donetsk and Luhansk region had killed 14,000 people, a quarter of them civilians, and displaced 2 million Ukrainians, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Myasnokova herself left home in Donetsk when the Russian-backed militia took control.
Days into the latest Russian invasion, Ukrainians are feeling the cumulative impacts of the years-long conflict and going to great lengths to stay safe and survive while observers worry about more potential hardship to come. Ukraine's Ministry of Health reported 198 Ukrainians dead and 1,115 injured as of Sunday.
“This will lead to a devastating impact on already damaged civil infrastructure, further restricting peoples’ movements and disrupt essential public services such as water, power, transport, markets and banking,” said Amgad Naguib, spokesman for the organization CARE, which is assisting People In Need with humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.
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Exodus from Kyiv
The outmanned but determined Ukrainian forces have fought to keep control of the capital city of Kyiv. Almost-hourly air strike alerts at night warn civilians to take cover in basements and metro stations.
Natalia Zabolotna decided Saturday morning to leave Kyiv with relatives, including a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. The children had spent the night in a Kyiv metro station, and they were hungry. Zabolotna and her niece rushed the children out of the city and headed for the Romanian border. The trip took three days.
“During our entire journey we did not find a place to feed the kids properly,” Zabolotna said. “The food was gone from gas stations. It took us several hours to fill up diesel. Gas stations sold not more than 20 liters per vehicle. Our country could have never got prepared for this devastating exodus, hundreds of thousands of people escaping on the same day.”
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More than 677,000 people left Ukraine for neighboring countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Most of them are going west to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. More than 100,000 others are displaced within the country.
Mykola Kovalchuk, the president of the World Boxing Council’s Ukraine office, used to live in the Kyiv region, not far from the border of Belarus, the country run by a Putin ally that has joined Russia’s side of the war.
Russians bombed Kovalchuk’s house on Friday during an attack on a nearby airport, a strategic target because the Air Force could land there. When he learned an attack could be coming, he brought his wife, four children under age 10, and parents to a safe place, so he could work with the military.
“We are a nation of Cossacks, you know,” he said, referring to the ancient warriors who lived on the Dnieper River that runs through Ukraine. “In the 15th century, we were the most powerful army in the world, so we know how to fight, and it is in our genes, and we are not afraid to die for our country.”
He keeps the location of his family secret, but says they have not left Ukraine.
“I just want to tell you this,” he said. “Me, my wife, my parents, my kids will never leave our country. I will leave them in a safe place. And I will go to war. I will go to fight.”
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Iryna Volkotrub, a 33-year-old interpreter from Kyiv, woke up on Thursday morning when she heard explosions. Lucky to have a car, she and her husband decided to go pick up four girls they knew from church, pile them in the back seat, and bring them along to their pastor’s home, where people from their church were meeting.
The next day, they came up with a more permanent plan: Hide out at a friend’s house 15 minutes outside the city where the house’s basement can serve as a bomb shelter.
The friends showed up and put together all the dry food they were able to get from the stores in the days before the war started. Other people trying to move west came through the house, and Volkotrub and her roommates made them beet soup.
Now, 18 people are staying in the house, including four teenagers and a young girl. They bunk together on blankets on top of the floor. A few stay on mattresses they were able to bring from home. Towels hang to dry on the railing of a spiral staircase.
They spend most of the time in the basement. With a climate similar to New England or the upper Midwest, it’s cold. The radiators are not enough to make up for the cold floor and walls, so they wear layers. On Monday night, it snowed.
Despite the hardship, they’re not going anywhere.
“This is our land,” she said. “These are our people. We just went a few minutes away to make sure we are alive to help others around. We want to help, support, carry peace and believe in our victory.”
A three-hour drive south from Kyiv on the border of the Dnieper River, Anna Bievets, a 30-year-old lawyer from Cherasky has a luxury most Ukrainians don’t: a real bomb shelter on her property.
But she couldn't get to it in time on Sunday night, when four different air strike alerts forced them to huddle in the bathroom. There were six to eight people in there together, including her 2-year-old son. She said the children sometimes sleep in the bathroom.
“The most hard thing for me is that I am a mom of a two year old son,” she said in an Instagram message. “He doesn't understand why he cannot sleep in his bed or go outside when he wants.”
Bievets’ male relatives decided to join the military because they wanted to. She said so many people have signed up that the army does not have room for everyone. Men stand in line for hours to be included, she said. “They say, ‘Go home. We will call you later.’”
Trauma on children 'increasing every single day'
While men and women alike are fighting in the war, most of the refugees are women, children and elderly people because the government banned men age 18 to 60 from leaving the country.
“Even before this recent escalation of conflict 54% the nearly 3 million people in Ukraine in dire need of humanitarian assistance were women and girls,” Naguib said. "There is a desperate lack of data on how these women and girls are being specifically impacted, or the role they play in aiding and supporting their own communities in these times of extreme difficulty. Each day is a struggle for millions.”
Lviv, a city the size of Seattle in the western part of the country, is now the transit hub for refugees trying to leave the country into Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Welcome centers have popped up in buildings around town. Hotels, with no rooms left to sell, are letting people sleep on the floors.
James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson, described fathers at the train station in Lviv on Sunday trying to explain to their young children why they could not continue on their journey with them out of the country.
“The trauma on children – the stress on children – just is increasing every single day because this is not anything that they are accustomed to nor should be accustomed to, but it's now their reality,” Elder said.
Daniel Salem, a 38-year-old actor and television host, said in a WhatsApp message that he is working with the police and army to help Odessa, a city on the coast of the Black Sea, stand its ground.
“We are all trying to hide our women and children in neighboring countries so we can focus on protecting our cities and country,” he said.
UN: 12 million Ukrainians may need assistance
Agencies within the United Nations warn that the situation in Ukraine is very fluid, and numbers are changing daily or even hourly.
Between Saturday and Sunday, the number of refugees who had left the country more than tripled, and Sunday the Ukraine government announced that some checkpoints at the border with Hungary would be open around the clock.
“We are looking at what could become Europe’s largest refugee crisis this century,” the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said in a statement.
The UN said in a fundraising appeal on Tuesday that up to 12 million people inside Ukraine – a country of 44 million – could need assistance. Another 4 million refugees could need assistance in neighboring countries.
“The humanitarian needs are growing exponentially, both in numbers but also in geographical terms,” said Jens Laerke, the deputy spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “We are seeing needs all over Ukraine. People are on the move."
Graphics reporter Karina Zaiets contributed to this story. Anna Nemtsova reported from Moscow.
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