From our special correspondent in kyiv,
“I have lots of games on my phone,” exclaims Vitali happily. The seven-year-old boy sits on a colorful beanbag in the playroom where a few children are having fun. Small traces of colorful hands decorate one of the walls. This refugee center opened by Save Ukraine Association in kyiv hosts forty-three families. It is nicknamed “Hope and recovery center”, the “center of hope and recovery”. In its brutality, the war has destroyed a myriad of homes, taking away the homes of childhood. Replaced, for the lucky ones, by shared playrooms. The Russian invasion displaced five million Ukrainians within the country, like Vitali and her grandmother. Sitting on the edge of her bunk bed, Natasha twists her gnarled hands.
This is the second time that the sixty-year-old and her grandson have been forced to flee. At the start of the war, the family lived under Russian occupation, but “when Ukraine took over the Kherson region, the bombardments were stronger, more frequent and more dangerous,” she recalls. So the grandmother and her grandson fled seventy kilometers away to the village of Chkalove. “We both went on bikes,” she explains with a burst of laughter. For a new life that only lasted a few months. Natasha and Vitali were again evacuated by Save Ukraine and arrived in the center on March 15. “Our main role is to evacuate civilians from combat zones,” explains Mykola Kuleba, director of Save Ukraine.
“My life is worth more than my house”
Because civilians are also paying a heavy price. At least 8,000 of them have been killed since the start of the war, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, who claims that this is only “the visible part of the iceberg”. The refugee families in the center all speak of the indiscriminate shelling by the Russian army. Olena shares a room with her two sons, 8 and 13, and another family. They were neighbors in Druzhkivka, a town about forty kilometers west of Bakhmout, the epicenter of the fighting. The bombardments were daily. Natasha cannot “get used to the calm” of kyiv. Olena, she refuses to think about this tumult that punctuated their days. “I don’t want to remember,” she breathes. She explains, lovingly running her hand through her teenage son’s hair, that her husband stayed there, in their house.
On the other side of the room, two red-haired children play happily under the protective eye of their mother, Alona. “It’s calm here, that’s the most important thing,” breathes the young woman. Her husband, Andriy, joined them two weeks ago. “One of my colleagues was killed by shrapnel as we moved behind each other,” says the farmer, who shows videos of the impact and the vehicle where his colleague lost the life. “My life is worth more than my house,” says Andriy firmly, looking tenderly at his children. The man wants to find a job in kyiv. “It doesn’t make sense to go back, it’s far too dangerous. Especially with children. »
“Everything is mined there”
“We were afraid to leave our house”, abound Sasha and Viktoria. The couple and their five children lived in Chervonyi Mayak, Kherson Oblast. Their home is separated from the territories occupied by the Russians only by the Dnieper. The bombings were incessant. “There were about twenty strikes daily. One day, I counted 32,” recalls Viktoria, who is expecting a sixth child. Only a few kilometers from the front, the family was without electricity for five months. “We warmed up with a stove but we couldn’t go and get wood in the forest because everything is mined there,” explains the couple. A family in our village ran over a mine, the parents and the two children died. »
The dreadful memories stand out in the serenity of the center. A bombardment in front of the church when they had just crossed the threshold of the door. Their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter stumbles over my foot with chirps, carried by her toy cart. A bombardment during a Red Cross humanitarian distribution. New impact of the cart, new child’s laughter. A neighbor who was hit in the head by a shrapnel and miraculously survived. Sasha grabs the cart and tries to steer the blond head to a new target. Five people who were decimated on their way to the pantry. The girl rolls over to me with an innocent laugh.
Clarifying a “blurry future”
The walls in the center of kyiv Ukraine are home to many children. It is for them, often, that these survivors flee the bombs. In the next room, Natasha, has had custody of Vitali since her parents died five years ago. She ends the interview in tears, terrified for the future of this little boy she is desperately trying to watch over. Aleksandr left Druzhkivka, a town in Donetsk Oblast, south of Kramatorsk, in early March. “I left for my family, for my children”, explains the father of the family who adds that the front “was approaching little by little”. The tall, imposing 30-year-old lets his tattooed arms rest on his knees as he tries to sketch out a future. “The future is blurry,” he sighs. To clarify this, Save Ukraine accompanies the beneficiaries throughout the process. At the “Hope and Rehabilitation” centre, families stay between two and five months.
“So that people have the means to leave, they are supported in their search for work, housing and also for papers. We help them, for example, to obtain government aid for displaced persons,” explains the director of the centre. “With this program, we help survivors obtain long-term housing,” says Mykola Kuleba. And the association intends to continue supporting civilians uprooted by the Russian invasion. “A new center will open in a week and another in April. We need more places”, explains the former representative of the presidency for children’s rights. In the hope that those who “have nowhere to go” find a temporary home in Save Ukraine. And the promise of a calmer future.