A Few Kilometres to Freedom

The first thing that we noticed were the mines along the side of the road. There were a lot of them, in fact, it looked as if the shoulder was made of cobblestones. It was a deadly road shoulder. I could see how the wheels of the car travelling in front of us was sliding around on the sticky mud, how it was slipping in various directions. Our car was sliding around as well. Vlad gripped the wheel tightly, all tensed up, because our lives depended on him. I did not say a word, so as not to distract him. Silently, I was praying: Please make it, there’s just a little bit to go. There were burned out cars in the ditches. Those were the ones that did not make it. We passed a village in the grey zone, I don’t know what it was called. But that’s not important, because the village is no more. Totally destroyed buildings, open doors, hungry chickens wandering about the yard. Where was their owner? Did he leave his home, and leave them behind? Or maybe he was still in that house with no windows, just lying there?

            I didn’t know how our journey would end. Would we remain here with my husband, in the middle of the grey zone, together with the abandoned chickens? Would I see my daughter again or would she be left with just that letter that I wrote her. The only thing I wished for at that time was to live!

The price of freedom from Russian occupiers was high… but we were willing to pay.

 

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I remember the day when the occupiers entered Kherson very well. Our military couldn’t hold the Antonivsky Bridge any more. We didn’t know what would happen next when the enemy entered the city. This information was available on the official web site of the Oblast Administration, but the rumours hadn’t started circulating through the city yet. My husband and I rushed out into the street. The situation in the city could change any minute. Vlad held the phone and framed the video. Then, standing in the middle of the street, I said my first words: “Good morning, studio…” Around me, passers-by rushed to find shops and bank machines that worked. And I continued: “The Russian army has broken through the defences … and is entering the city.” I was speaking about something that the passers-by on the streets of Kherson didn’t know yet. And I was afraid.

            The next few days we observed, in horror, the convoys of military equipment moving through Kherson. Telegram Chat became our main source of information. I remember a video circulating in one of the public groups: the occupiers shot through a civilian car right there in the city centre, and one of the passengers was a teenage girl. Her mother was writing posts in every group, searching for the girl, wanting to believe that she was still alive. People were being kidnapped right off the streets, from stores. At that time the Russians didn’t know anything about us and they would grab anybody, just to scare the others. Armoured personnel carriers would go around shooting at parking lots, buildings or groups of people.

It was about that time that the tragedy in the Lilac Park happened. A few dozen Territorial Defence servicemen were shot, men who had believed that they could stop the invasion of occupiers simply with guns and some Molotov cocktails. The Russians shot them from a tank at point blank. I don’t know why our Territorial Defence did not have enough weapons, why the authorities did not do anything to defend the city, and where the police and the military were. I know that ordinary boys were among the dead. Some of them were holding weapons in their hands for the first time in their lives.

We found out from a video, also in Telegram, that the Russians had set up a check point next to our building: they occupied a two-storey building which had been a store, and had set up machine guns in the windows. Next to this stood two armoured personnel carriers and a whole lot of military. We were afraid to go out into the street.

There were a few packages of cereal grains on the old yellowed shelf and a half-dried bread crust wrapped in cellophane bag. That was all that was left in our kitchen, because we had gone through our supplies in a week. We needed to go to the store, but the armoured personnel carrier was right there on the road. And this thought was in our heads: what if they simply shoot us? Our attempt to leave was unsuccessful. We returned to the apartment and cooked up some porridge and ate the rest of the bread. At that time, we didn’t know that would be the last piece of bread that we’d have for the next three weeks.

It was evening. I was reading news in the local Telegram channel. “We are gathering for a peaceful protest against the occupiers on Freedom Square, at 10am”, I read aloud to my husband. I caught his glance.

“Shall we go?”

“Of course.”

In the morning, we went on foot. If we had gone by car, they would have stopped us at the check point for sure.

Walking around Kherson in those days seemed a luxury. Then I was amazed to see just how many people had come out onto the street. I didn’t notice it at first, but they were all moving in one direction. The pedestrians all merged into one stream of people on the central Ushakova Street. They were all going to the same place as we were, to the protest.

In the square, you could now hear the shouting and chanting, but when we came closer, I was shocked. Thousands of people with flags and signs had taken over the space, it was even getting difficult to move through the packed crowds. The Russian military with weapons stood along the white walls of the oblast administration building.

“Domoi poka zhivoi” (Go home while you’re still alive!), “Kherson is Ukraine!”, “Russian soldiers are fascists and occupiers!” chanted the crowd. The Russian soldiers with their empty eyes stood and surveyed the people, who, risking their lives, had come here with Ukrainian flags. We chanted along at the top of our voices. Through the shouting, the hate, the anger and the fear left us. Actually, we were afraid no more. And then someone from the crowds shouted out:

“Let’s go walking through Kherson! It’s our city! What are we afraid of?”

And everybody went. We were not afraid any more. This was our country. It was our Kherson!

The feeling of euphoria was pleasant and at the same time dangerous. After the protest we returned home. We felt free. In the store we picked up the last packet of oatmeal and some canned fish. That was all that we had for dinner.

And then SOBR, the Special Rapid Response Unit, entered the city. I didn’t know what that stood for, I just knew that they had been professionally trained to suppress any resistance. They started to shoot at our protests indiscriminately. The most active protesters were taken away. I remember there being a puddle of blood, and an elderly man lying in it. Three or four young men tried to carry him to a safe place. The women were shouting and crying. Someone nearby, in a panic, was calling emergency services.

After that incident, the protests did not stop, although there were fewer people now. We changed the locations, the time, but they kept on persecuting us.

It became much more dangerous. Each time more residents stayed at home. It was more important to stay alive.

Vlad and I attended the protests until the last one, until stun grenades were used against us. There was shouting, panic, people moved further back, but did not disperse. I lost Vlad, even though he was standing a few metres from me. Under our feet, something whistled by, sparks flew. Following other protesters, I started to move back to behind the cinema building, and I caught a glimpse of Vlad, and ran to him. He was uninjured. Our lips were smarting, our eyes were filling with tears. One man remained in the middle of the square. Through tears and coughing he continued to chant “Kherson is Ukraine” until they took him away. Three burly military men ran up, twisted his arms and led him away. I don’t know what happened to him next.

Two more people were injured that day. An elderly woman received severe burns, as her synthetic jacket melted into her body. A grenade hit a boy in the knee and an ambulance took him away.

There were no more protests. But the struggle continued.

 

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Walking through the city helped us remember that we were people, not prisoners. We did a lot of walking. We went to those parts of Kherson which we knew well and those parts where we had never been. They would check pedestrians less frequently, so these outings seemed safe to us. We used to leave our telephones at home. It was too complicated to delete conversations before each outing. We would always take our documents with us, in case of checks.

There were always Russian military standing at the entrance to the city hall. We always passed this place in silence, and tried to be invisible. But one time I saw a teenager who was standing on the grass verge. He was tied to the light pole with tape. He looked like he was about 13, still a child. Standing beside him was an annoyed occupier, swearing at him loudly. A second later I heard a loud slap. The young boy swayed. That sharp, loud sound remained in my memory for a long time. I started and Vlad grabbed me by the hand. The boy was sobbing, but did not try to break free. He stood there silently with his head down. At home his mother was probably waiting for him and worrying why he was not home yet, but he was standing there, tied to a pole with duct tape. Right there in the centre of Kherson. We walked past in silence. I was very ashamed. I could not defend a child, our child. It’s still painful.

 

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After some time, the coffee shops in Kherson started to open. We loved to get a coffee, sit with it on a bench, and imagine that we were living a normal life. Spring was all around us, girls were wearing dresses and families were out with their children. The imaginary idyll was only broken by the sounds of explosions somewhere else outside the city and by seeing the Missing Persons announcements pasted onto poles. First the coffee shops, and then the cafes and little restaurants began to open. The prices were crazy, the available selection was small, but despite this people were trying to latch on to an imaginary sense of normality.

We were living life the best way that we could, as well as we knew how. We did our cooking, stood in queues and fell asleep to the sounds of explosions. Sometimes they were so loud, that we had to go hide in the bathroom and play cards on the cold floor, sitting on towels folded over in four. But the thin line between normal life and the war became thinner each day…. Still, we needed to keep on living.

            One day a family restaurant opened in the city, a place where I often spent time before the full-scale invasion. I used to drink wine there with friends, and hold business meetings, and most recently went and discussed my plans for the future. It was incredible how much I wanted to return to those days. I put on a breezy white polka-dot dress, delicate sandals, and Vlad and I went out. And there I was on the patio of that restaurant, and in my hand was a glass of cold cheap wine, which didn’t taste good to me at all. However, it was something more than just cheap wine. With each sip I could taste life. It was that same normal life, which the invaders took away from us. And then at that point in time everything seemed normal to me, as long as I didn’t turn my head to the left, where a dark green armoured vehicle with the letter Z was parked.

 

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“I’m alive!” I shouted to my Mum over the telephone and then the line broke up. There was no cell service for a long time, neither in the city nor in the surrounding countryside. There were a few locations where you could get some minimal cell service, but there were always so many people there, that the network would become overloaded. And in addition, telling family about what was going on in Kherson was daunting, because the FSB (the Russian Federal Security Service) was everywhere.

For my Mum, the most important thing was just one word: “Alive”. More than anything else in the world, I wanted to hear my daughter, whom I had not seen since the beginning of the war. I listened to one ring-tone, then another. It seemed that the connection was getting better.

I shouted to my mother:

“Put Katya on the line!”

“Hello...”, I heard a small voice in the telephone.

“Honey, I love you!”

“When will you come, Mummy?”

“Soon. Hello?”

And the connection disappeared again. The conversation was over for today.

 

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I was preparing supper. Frozen pelmeni (dumplings). It was the only thing that I managed to grab in the store, having stood in an enormously long line. They had thawed in our ancient fridge and then had turned into one enormous dough ball.

“Never mind”, I smiled. “I’ll toss them in the blender and turn them into meat patties.”

I heard a knocking on the door and looked at Vlad in fear. Vlad gave me a hug:

“That was only the washing machine going into spin cycle.”

Knocking once more. This time it was someone for the neighbours.

We ate the improvised meat patties in silence. In my head, I rehearsed my actions in case the knocking was to be on our door. We were on the sixth floor, with nowhere to run. The USB stick with videos was hidden inside a toy. But perhaps we should just not open the door? What if we sat here quietly like mice, and they would think that we were not home, and they would go away?

I washed dishes. Vlad was gaming on the PlayStation. For a second I thought that I would be going to work the next day, and then later meeting a friend for coffee, and perhaps we’d go somewhere for the weekend. Outside there was a flash, then an explosion. And my thoughts returned to earth. There was a war on.

 

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I never liked having my birthday and I always cried on this day. I remember my birthday when I turned 12. I was not expecting a fancy party. “There’s no money”, my Mum always said. But this year, she allowed me to invite a lot of guests. I invited everybody whom I regarded as a friend. I was happy, I was wearing my new dress, and I had been looking out the window since morning. Then just one friend came. I cried.

My birthday just before the war was on the bank of a river. I was earning money, so I could afford it. I put on make-up, bought expensive alcohol, plenty of food on the table, shashlik on the grill and organized a wooden pavilion. Then it rained and half the guests didn’t come. My mascara ran.

It was my 27th birthday. Outside it was summer, but my country was at war. In the morning Vlad gave me a small bouquet of cornflowers, which he had bought for 50 Hryvnia from an older woman in front of a closed ATB supermarket. She spent most of the occupation sitting there and selling things. She sold flowers, nuts, and even mulberries in disposable cups from the mulberry tree that she was sitting under.  Once I saw how she was selling her new set of china. I think it was the most expensive thing that she owned at that time. I was happy with the cornflowers. They were so blue, like a clear sky in peacetime. We had an outing, walked through the city, bought some beer from a guy in the street, who was pouring it straight from a plastic barrel, and a packet of chips, which cost the same as 10 kilograms of potatoes. Damned expensive. But today was a special day, so it was allowed.

It was 2022 and we were in a terrible full-scale war. While Vlad was setting out our special birthday dinner, I went into the washroom. It seemed to me that I heard some knocking on the door. I told myself I was being paranoid. Then I heard steps, and a click. Vlad opened the front door and I heard a muted female voice:

“I need to speak to Valentyna.”

My head began to buzz. I was planning to walk out, but I crouched near the door. My legs were not obeying me. They have come! They have come to get me! In a few seconds the action plan, which I had rehearsed so often just before going to sleep, at dinner and in the shower, flashed through my head. It became apparent just how inadequate it was.

I made one decision instantly - to flush my telephone down the toilet. But no, if they had already come, then it wouldn’t help. Through the window? We’re on the sixth floor. Should I go onto the neighbour’s balcony? Sounds like something from the movies. My thoughts were interrupted by Vlad:

“Valya, you have guests!”

I was afraid of the basement, and not because it was damp and cold, but because I had heard of the torture chambers, that prisoners were forced into. They would feel lucky to have caught a journalist and it was unlikely that they’d let me go just like that. If they were to see conversations in my telephone, where I informed on enemy positions, they could kill me. They would probably also take Vlad away. He is a man, so they would beat him with more cruelty. But they wouldn’t rape him, as they would me. Although…

I pulled myself together and walked out of the washroom. In any case, the thin doors made of chipboard would not save me.

“Does Valentyna who’s having a birthday today live here?”, the voice in the corridor said once again.

I looked out. There stood a slightly built girl holding a bouquet of flowers.

“It’s for you!”

Attached to the flowers was a card: “We love you so much! Your family”—the worst kind of present. I was crying again.

 

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It was September. The occupiers decided to hold a pseudo referendum.

I remember how in those days I glimpsed a man voting through the window of our car. He was crouched down near the gate of his own yard. A Russian soldier with a gun stood over him and watched attentively, where was he putting his cross.

Another place where voting took place was the parking lot near the supermarket. There was one little table, a large woman with glasses, and a few metres away there was a Russian military man sitting on a stool. The observer.

We could guess, that when the sick fantasies of the Russians would start calling Kherson Oblast a “subject of the Russian Federation”, the horrors would start. We did not want to live under their laws at all, because I would be living under the threat of imprisonment somewhere like Magadan in Siberia, and Vlad, in the best-case scenario, would be mobilized by the Russians, or he would be lying dead in a ditch. Although… the end result would be the same.

With each day I began to understand more clearly that I couldn’t remain living next to them, standing in queues, meeting them on the street, or breathing the same air as the Russian occupiers.

We were waiting for our liberation for so long, that sometimes we stopped believing in it. We couldn’t wait any more, and decided to leave.

 

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We prepared for the trip methodically and rationally. I sorted through our things, sometimes stopping to wipe away tears, because there were many things that I had to leave behind.

The thing that I was most afraid of was that I would never see my daughter again. Since the 24th of February, when the war began, she had been with my parents. In April, they managed to leave the occupation zone. I remember how anxious I was, how there was no communication with them. But there was no way that they could have remained. My place of residence was registered as being at my mother’s address, and if they were searching for me, they’d immediately go there. It was frightening to think what they could have done to my family.

Later, my little 8-year-old Katrusia told me that during their departure, she had prayed at each check point. I don’t know who taught her to pray, but it was definitely not me.

People who were leaving would share their experiences in Telegram. They often told of the Russians shooting at civilian cars, despite them having signs saying “Dity” (children). Or they would let a convoy of people through and then shell them with mortars.

I understood that our attempt at departure could end in the same way. The worst thing was that I couldn’t say my final words to my daughter.

I couldn’t leave her anything, except her memories and some photos. However, I had made my decision. It was the most difficult decision in my whole life. Then I wrote her a farewell letter.

I tore out a sheet of paper from my notepad and I cried as I wrote. I wrote and cried. I wrote how I could imagine her being grown-up, how proud I was of her. I promised that I would always be by her side - her first kiss, her wedding, and the times that she would be sad. I wrote that I loved her more than anything in the world. Nobody knew about that letter at the time. I hid it amongst my things so that they would find it when they would come to sort them at some time after my death…

 

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Freedom lay a few kilometres ahead.

When we stopped in front of the check-point in front of the entrance to Vasyllkivka, I began to shake. We had waited for this for a month. Four weeks in Zaporizhzhia oblast, nights spent in the car, strained nerves and tears. I had spent 720 hours preparing for this departure, I had gathered the telephone numbers of those who had left earlier, phoned them and asked them a bunch of questions: what did they check, what did they ask about, to what did they pay attention?

And here I am. And I already knew: now they would pull out all our things. They would check bags, the car, and if we were lucky, they would let us through. Ahead of us was the scariest part - the FSB checkpoint. There the inspection was more serious: they would check laptops, telephones and ask provoking questions.

We got out of the car and a Russian soldier approached us. He kept his hands on his gun, as if he was ready at any moment to grab it and shoot.

“You have come late!”, he said, as if spitting out the words.

“We are on the Departure lists”, I said uncertainly.

“I said, you are late! It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. You won’t make it through today.”

I felt like bursting into tears…

Another Russian came up to him, his face was open and he was smiling. But his smile did not seem friendly to me, rather it horrified me. He whispered something into the ear of his colleague and waved his hand at us:

“Get your things out! That’s all”

We quickly unloaded our bags out onto the side of the road.

“Get your things out of the bags!”, he yelled at me and went towards Vlad.

I watched as the Russian took Vlad’s documents and put them in his pocket. In silence, I bent over the bags and laid out my carefully packed possessions onto a blanket, which I had spread out onto the road. He came up to me and scrutinized everything. I pulled out jeans, sanitary pads, underwear. My thoughts were elsewhere: I remembered the story told by my friend, who had told me that the occupiers had beaten her husband badly at the check point; and I recalled that for many people, this departure had become their final trip. I was most afraid for my husband. His eyesight was bad and he shouldn’t be beaten about the head.

Suddenly, our car started up and went through the check point into Vasylivka proper. Vlad was not there. My heart was beating furiously. I understood that something was wrong. The guy took his documents, sent him to Vasylivka…exactly! That’s where the command post was! It was a search! What would they do to him there?

“Where’s he going?” I asked a soldier in panic.

He lifted his gaze in surprise and looked at me:

“He’ll be back soon.”

“What happened?”, I insisted.

I was so afraid, but I knew that I needed to do something.

“I said, he’ll be back soon.”

He went up to the next car, and shot back at me in passing:

“All checked. Get your stuff.”

I wanted to fall onto those bags and just cry. I was imagining the most horrific things possible. I stood there by the side of the road feeling totally lost and totally petrified. Our possessions were scattered everywhere, our bags were open and I felt a despair so deep that I felt like shouting it out over all of Vasylkivka.

In 10 minutes, Vlad returned. I came back to life…in those 600 seconds I had managed to die of fright several times over. He saw my look, but did not say anything in reply. I knew he was also scared. I knew that my brusque, grown-up, bearded husband was also afraid.

A few more minutes and we were now passing the inspection hut at the check point. Vlad opened the window and gave the soldiers a block of cigarettes, for which he had driven into Vasylivka. This was the tax for being allowed to leave.

We had no right to relax now. The FSB was still ahead. I was afraid of this more than anything in my life, and I had prepared for this every day during the occupation. I had deleted all photos from my phone which in any way hinted at me being a journalist. Instead, I spent 8 months collecting photos of flowers, cats and food. The numbers for police, the military, and officials in my contact list had turned into numbers for waiters and drivers.

I had thought my legend through carefully. I was a wedding planner. I had prepared an Instagram profile with the appropriate photos and posts way in advance. In Kherson I had heard that the “Feissy” (that’s what we called them) had a program which could renew deleted data and conversations. If they were to do this to my phone, I would be finished. There were chats with our special forces, to whom I had supplied enemy locations, and conversations from work, and hundreds of other reasons to “take us in”.

I took Vlad’s hand just before the check point:

“Now we’ll either make it through, or we won’t.”

This was so simple but so painful.

I had heard stories of people, who had tried to leave, but the FSB had written “Home” on their car with markers and they wouldn’t let them out. For no reason, simply because they felt like it.

            The seconds of waiting felt like an eternity. The squeaky marker left a big fat black mark on our windscreen. It was a number! A number! They let us through!

Vlad started the car and moved the car forward.

I was afraid to smile, in case they see me and change their minds.

Inside I was in turmoil.

Freedom. Previously I had thought that this was an abstract concept, a huge idea, and something that everybody had. Except that it was taken away from us. It lived there, beyond the “grey zone”, beyond the road of death, where the blue and yellow flag was fluttering, where I could freely say: “I am a journalist! I am Ukrainian!”

There were only a few kilometres left to Freedom…