Refugees from Ukraine: arrival in heavy snowfall

Many Ukrainians have to wait hours, sometimes days, at the borders. In Siret, Romania, they are welcomed by volunteers. Many want to continue west – and soon back home.

The first thing young helpers offer the frozen people from Ukraine as soon as they have passed the Siret border crossing in Romania are chocolate, colorful sweets, hot tea and sandwiches. It’s snowing and a sharp wind makes the minus two degrees appear even colder.

The young Romanian volunteers first bend down to the children, who are allowed to reach first. Olga came with her 16-year-old son, both of whom have already found temporary accommodation in one of the large blue makeshift tents that the fire brigade put up here over the weekend.

“No one will bomb Kyiv!”

“It’s a disaster,” says Olga, who worked for a Swiss-Ukrainian company in Kyiv. Her friends are still there and wrote to her on Messenger Viber “about the bombing and all that.” You can’t get out, it’s too dangerous. Actually, she owes it to her mother that she was in her hometown of Ternopil in the west of the country before the war broke out.

She went home on February 15 because she had urgently asked her mother to do so and was afraid of an impending war. “I told her: ‘That won’t happen. Kyiv? Nobody will bomb Kyiv!'” That is a fairy tale. But her mother just said: “I beg you, come home!” For the evening of February 24, Olga had already bought a return ticket back to Kyiv. “The bombings started in the morning.”

Where is she going now? To Germany, to her sister who lives near Munich. And “as soon as it’s all over,” she wants to go back to western Ukraine, to her mother in Ternopil.

Turkish embassy helps

New refugees keep arriving with their meager luggage, passing the heated tents and the food stalls that have been set up along the road on either side. Numerous foreign students are also coming this Wednesday evening, they say, from Egypt, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. Many of them studied in Kharkiv: “We hid in the subway and stayed there for three or four days.”

They were taken to Lviv by train and from there by bus to the border in Siret. They had been evacuated. The evacuation from the bombed Kharkiv was organized by the Turkish embassy, ​​says Javid, who comes from Baku. A Turkish embassy employee was there the whole time and accompanied her to this point. Everything was very well organized. Turkey would also pay for their return flight, from eastern Romania’s Iași to Istanbul and from there home, to Baku.

Shot while shopping

The young Azerbaijani Javid lived with his friends, who also studied law, in a dormitory in the middle of the city center. On their mobile phones they show how they have taken pictures of projectiles hitting them from the window. They were in the center of Kharkiv and went out into the street to do some shopping. “Some Russian soldiers appeared and told us: ‘Stop!’ But we didn’t want to stop, we ran away.” Then the soldiers shot at them.

120,000 people have already come to Romania from Ukraine, more than half of them have left the country again. Many travel on to relatives and friends in western countries. The official refugee shelters along the border are usually only occupied for a few days.

“Long live Ukraine!”

A mother sits silently in a red makeshift tent warmed by a meager radiant heater, with two sons next to her, who are maybe six and 13 years old. The grandmother prefers to stand because a friend is about to pick them up. Her husband, the woman says, took her to the border in his car and then turned back. “He went to war.”

Now they are waiting for this acquaintance. He’s coming too, the car is there. Grandmother, mother and the two boys take their luggage and leave the tent. Outside, the grandmother turns around again and says in a hoarse voice: “Long live Ukraine!”