One day, Russian soldiers burst into Polina's house. They were looking for deserters. After that, the occupiers visited the family several times with interrogations and searches. Her grandmother and father did not send the girls to a Russian school. When the Russians started deporting children from the occupied village to Russia and Crimea, the sisters were hiding. Once, during a search, the Russians found a link to a Ukrainian school online on their grandmother's phone. It was one of the most frightening moments for Polina. The girl was afraid that her sisters would be taken away from the family, and her father was seriously ill. But later they managed to get out of the occupied territory.
Polina told her story during the recreation shift at Blogger Camp, organised by the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation in cooperation with the Office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights.