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I am Veronika Mykolaivna Plakhtii, I am 16 years old. I am from the village of Rybakivka, Mykolaiv region. Our village is located on the Black Sea coast, near the Kinburn Spit, about 10-12 km from Ochakiv.

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Before the war, there were a lot of tourists, and my mum and I used to work on the beach. My dad is a fisherman himself. I always spent my free time like this: either sorting out shrimp, helping my mum, or something else, but I really enjoyed it.

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There were a lot of people on holiday, and it was very cool. We have a resort village, but now it’s not like that. A lot of recreation centres are abandoned, like Chornobyl, there is no civilisation. A lot of beaches are mined, all exits

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and entrances are blocked, and you can’t go swimming. Only some parts of the beach and the garages near the village, where there is no access to the open sea, are open. During the war, I did not leave, we always stayed until the last moment. 

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There were a lot of explosions and everything, there was even a hit. When we were at school, the air raid alert started and we started to leave, but through the window we saw something flying. We went down very quickly and literally a couple of metres from the school it hit the house.

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Thank God, it was uninhabited, there were no people living there, but we were very scared. A lot of our fellow villagers died, and a small child also died. He and his father went to pull out the military with a tractor and trailer, and they hit a mine in the field.

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The child died, but the father survived. Very often at night you can sit and listen: you can hear a convector or an air defence system. My father now works at a recreation centre as a security guard. As soon as the war started, he lost all his income

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and had to think about what to do next. I really like to distract myself at school and on various holidays. I’m a very busy person because I study at a music school, piano, classical guitar, solfege, vocals. We have a neighbouring village,

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like an urban village, Berezanka, and I go there every Saturday. I also do volleyball three times a week and English twice a week. I am devoting myself to my realisation and my future. I also do a lot of volunteering. Our first teacher is Svitlana Yosypivna,

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she is a very good and open person. We came to her as our first teacher for tea, and she said: “Here, children, there is a war, we need to help our soldiers. We can do what we know how to do. We can make some crafts, or we can do something else.”

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But we liked the idea of baking. I love to cook very much. I myself don’t go out every Tuesday afternoon. I know that I need to take flour and oil. We also had help from the school, as well as from volunteers who sent food to the soldiers. We baked at home.

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Those who have something from our village bring it to us, and we all go. We stand in the centre of our village, a couple of people from our class, one guy with a flag, we stand with a box and sell [what we baked] to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We sang Ukrainian songs,

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danced and called people, and it was very long. Someone would bring things. It seemed like such a small village, but everyone was involved. I liked it because it was a very developed village, it was like the unity of everyone.

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“This war touches me to the heart,  it stabs me in the most tender place,  and it will remain a burn for me, and we both know it well.  When we remember how children are killed, hey’ll ask for their freedom,  I know a lot of good people,

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and we are going to victory with them.  We believe and hope for the best,  It was our tears that sprinkled the ground.  We cannot find the right word.  We have to spread the wings of freedom.  We are so sorry for all our mothers,

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who wait so long for their sons, waiting for their son to warm them, and we have to endure hardships every day.  We will never give up, never, never,  I will believe in my country,  I will know that I am definitely not lazy.  We stand together for Ukraine.”

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Since 2014, we have always written, since the first grade, I think I wrote letters to the ATO. We were told to write to the soldiers, but I didn’t understand how to write to the soldiers and to whom I was writing. When the war started, I didn’t really understand what war really was.

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When the war hit us, I was very surprised: I wondered how the children were living there and how they had been living there all this time. I really want peace, we all want peace. We all want to be free. We want our children to build a future here in Ukraine.