“I didn’t want to leave Mariupol, but on the first night after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, high-ranking people approached me and said that my name was on the hit lists compiled by Russia. They said that I...
“We didn’t plan to leave Kyiv under any circumstances. If it hadn’t happened to us and we had a place to live, we wouldn’t have left till the end. Not all people flee the city. Everyone thinks it will end well...
“Irpin is Hell. There are plenty of Russian soldiers out there who just shoot people who enter private homes and, at best, just kick people out of their homes. They rape women and the dead are just being dumped. They open the...
“I learned by chance from social media that a shell hit our apartment in Mariupol and it burned down. My grandmother could have been in the apartment. We asked her to go down to the shelter, but whether she was there at the time of...
“We went out and down under the ruined bridge where there were like 300 people. When the guys from the Territorial Defense shouted, ‘Air! All run under the bridge, to the bases!’, within a second all the people huddled...
Oleksandr Shamrai, 34, comes from Luhansk Oblast. In 2009, he came to Kharkiv and stayed there. He is a sculptor-artist and woodcarver. Now Oleksandr is trying to survive and save his loved ones who are hiding in one of the bomb shelters...
First stereotype: Ukrainians are very poor Some Europeans viewed Ukraine as extremely poor. Many Ukrainian refugees were surprised to learn that. “They perceived us almost like we are cave people who do not know and have not seen...
