"The tank pointed its muzzle at me as if “greeting” me, and then later, some aerial bombs arrived"

Vitaliy and Svitlana from Borodianka lost their home and their small business. Russian bombs razed both the house and the cafe to the ground. Vitaliy was targeted at by tanks and snipers and twice was under airstrikes.

Svitlana is sure that the family was protected by the silver cross necklace of her grandmother, who went through the Second World War.

My name is Vitaliy, I am 47 years old, and I live here. I was born and raised here. I am Svitlana, I am 45 years old. My family moved to Borodianka when I was one year old, so you can say that I am a native too. We are a couple. We have lived in Borodianka. We opened our own café here. We rented the premises and made everything like home. For five years, we worked here and there, and we saved and collected all the funds to open our own business.

And finally on 1 February... My birthday is on 2 February – we decided to dedicate this opening to my birthday. We registered out business as an individual person-entrepreneur and opened just opposite the house, opposite the windows of our flat, in order to have it close by, near the house, and there would be no need to go anywhere, no need to go to Kyiv. I used to commute to work in Kyiv for 21 years, and it was not very convenient.

We got up at half past five in the morning. The [coffee] machine warms up for about an hour, and at 6 o’clock the first people go to work. We had to be able to give out coffee at 6 o’clock. Russian troops, the first russian troops, entered via the ring/belt highway. We saw them... We saw all this. I’ll tell you why. I kept opening our coffee shop until the very last, until it was destroyed by bombing. I left the café and saw a convoy moving. The convoy was going to Makariv.

After that convoy, there were many more of them. They were on the central street. They moved on and on and on. We saw it all. Thus, one convoy passed by. I quickly ran out, and all the guys were here. I ran out and turned on the machine. And people started coming out of the basements. They wanted to drink something hot. It was not even that they wanted to drink, they rather wanted to huddle and have some chat. It was very much needed.

Then, I did not take any money, surely. I was running out of coffee beans, so people brought cups, beans, and milk from home. I poured espresso into a 0.5 litre glass. We were supposed to pay the first taxes on 1 March. And exactly on 1 March, the cafe was razed to the ground. On 1 March, two bombs arrived at one time and struck this building, right in my flat.

You can see it. They exploded right in our bedrooms, and then a missile hit too. I don’t even know how they did it. There was a central water supply pipeline going under our cafe. It was a pipe. And they hit this pipe directly with a missile. They broke the pipe, and our cafe was above it. Well, and clearly, as I was told later, they drove through and over it either on an armoured personnel carrier or an armoured infantry fighting vehicle. These residential quarters had been built by my late father. Everything is destroyed, just everything.

The first bomb hit that house. My friend and his wife were in that house. At that moment, when the bomb fell there, I was here. My mother, my son, my brother with a little four-year-old son and his wife lived in this basement. They lived there probably for a week. I was just leaving them. There is a hole there. I was just trying to get out through that hole. And when the bomb hit there, I was thrown back... from the air, a plane, you know, that was the aerial bomb.

No one was afraid of tanks anymore, but an airplane – yes. It’s still inside me. Once I hear Ukrainian planes, I feel fear. I crouch, as this is such a feeling.

I hopped out from here on the other side and saw a pillar of dust. I knew my friend was there.

I ran there. There was also a central entrance to the basement. I rushed into the basement and realized that there was a very slim chance... I was there. I was thrown up to the third floor. I was concussed and I could not hear anything, I do not know how long. I have memory lapses. There are periods when I don’t really remember what I did and where I ran. Between this bomb and that bomb there are some... and I don’t remember this interval.

And when the bomb hit here, I was right here. I don’t know how I survived. I had a terrible fear for the children and that’s it. I didn’t think about anything else. I have two adult sons, 19 and 24 years old. My brother lives with his family in Kyiv, in Borshchagivka. We decided that it was dangerous in Kyiv and it would be better for them to come here to us. We have a dacha (an out-of-town cottage) in the forest, five kilometres from Borodianka along the Warsaw highway, in Pylypovychy village. We decided that it would be safer there.

We were not going to stay in Borodianka, but decided that it would be safer in the village house. They came, and thank God, they took our mother from that house, as the house is gone now. There were also a lot of people left under the rubble there. I gathered the men and quickly said, “Get your things ready. We only take what is most necessary and go to the country house.”

Vitaliy refused to go. He said that he still had his mother here, his brother with a family, including a small child, and that he was responsible for them. “I’m staying here.” We got into the car and my brother drove us: mum, me, and my two boys. We got there. I stayed there for some time, but my heart was breaking because Vitaliy stayed behind.

I called him and said that if he did not send a car for me now, I would come to Borodianka on foot. I said that I was not going to stay here with them. “You are there in Borodianka, and I am there.” He sent me a car and I returned to Borodianka. And that’s all. We turned out to be cut off from them. We already left here, it was already after the first of March. They left the roundabout because everything was bombed and everything was on fire.

We went... I have some friends there. And I needed to pick up Svitlana’s two kids. We split then. We knew that Kadyrov troops entered. And I had to go and meet them [the kids] in the field in order to give them a lift then. I went out, and I needed to go from there to here and go out into the field to meet them. Here, at the turn of the road, a man was turning his car and two bullets hit him right in his head. That is, it was a sniper.

When I was crossing from here, Kadyrov soldiers were watching me. I think they were Kadyrov troops because they were on “Tiger”. And I was told that only Kadyrov soldiers drove those “Tigers”. They tried to run me down. Usually, a machine gun was put on the top, but they did not have one. I slipped through this park, around the park, on my bicycle, and rushed into the shop almost on my belly.

The shop was already damaged, well, and I was expecting that they would shoot me down. I think that they were just too lazy to jump out of the vehicle and shoot. They drove by fast and that was it. I was also lucky with a sniper, as he somehow took pity on me. Then these Kadyrov soldiers... then I went out and picked up the kids. And her younger son still remembers that “uncle”. He also saw him, that man in the car who was shot dead.

Until they came, I thought I was going crazy. But then we were staying all together. This is the cross necklace of my grandmother, my father’s mother. I was her beloved granddaughter. She died three months before the war. She died in October, just before the war, and she prayed a lot for us all, especially for me. She was very worried about me, and prayed a lot. So you understand, the grandma went through the war (WWII). At home, I have many photos of her in a military uniform and a military cap. I remember that my grandfather was without one leg, on a prosthesis, after the war. He used to babysit me when I was little. And my grandmother died three months before the war…

I remember that when we came to the funeral, and she had lived at my aunt’s place (my father’s sister), she lived there until the last. So when we came, aunt Lyuba handed me the grandmother’s cross. She said that the grandmother asked her to give it to me. And in all the hard moments, when we were bombed, when it seemed that the whole world around us was collapsing, and then during the trip when we were leaving, when we were all shaking because there were rumours that cars were being shot, and when I was praying for the children, I was always holding this cross necklace in my hand.

I thought she begged for us, for our family, in her prayers.

We had a bus left, an old bus called Barkas, which did not run. It is a rarity. And if our local authorities give us go-ahead, we would like to… over there, near school no. 2... All the authorities are there now. This is the police, the village council, and Oschadbank. So we want to put this coffee shop near them. To place it inside this small bus and put a coffee machine inside it. We will scrape up some money to buy a coffee machine and will put it there to sell coffee to people.

I promise: if the authorities hear me and give my green light for all this, I promise the best and cheapest coffee. Since God spared us and left us alive, it means we have to do something, to live on for ourselves and for those who are not with us anymore. Well, what else shall we do…