Anastasiya and Vladyslav spent more than a month under occupation on their farm near Hostomel. Together with the young milker Ilya, they were saving their livestock of goats and poultry.

Forty-one days without electricity, communications and gas... under incessant shelling. The fighting was so intense and so close that the animals went deaf and died of stroke. The farm owners and their assistant will remember for the rest of their lives how they survived in that constant cold, scouted for water under shelling and buried their animals almost every day.

The film crew of the Kyiv TV channel was told about the experience.

Our farm is six months old. We bought an abandoned old kindergarten and dreamed of turning it into a petting zoo first. However, it so happened that we received an offer to save a livestock of goats, which was in a very miserable condition. They were kept in an abandoned metal depot. We went there and bought those 17 goats. Thus, we gave up the idea of ​​​​making a petting zoo, but rather planned to make a large family farm for the production of milk, as milk is about health. My goats produce the healthiest and tastiest milk, the drink of the gods, as people say.

Yet on 24 February, things went not the way we expected. We were under occupation from the very first day. On 24 February, when we came to the farm, we saw 37 helicopters.

We stood there counting them, and together with our milker Ilya, we even shouted that those were probably our [Ukrainian] air forces flying. We did not expect that our area could be seized so quickly.

Then the horror began. We heard the shooting then. At that time, my husband just left to collect some hay for the goats and he filmed on his phone how the Hostomel airfield was blown up [attacked]. We came here in complete horror, as the place where we live... our house is four kilometres from here. No one lived on the farm except the animals then.

The farm was absolutely not suitable for living. However, we have been living here throughout the wartime and accommodating ourselves to it as best as we can. When we came home, we saw some planes flying very low and we decided to flee to the farm, save ourselves there and save our animals. We were afraid that our goats might just run away because of such a noise. We ended up under the occupation here. On 25 February, we were cut off from electricity, water and gas. All our utility systems were completely turned off and we survived here as best as we could. We did not have food.

The worst thing was that the goats needed water constantly. We have a pretty large livestock. Before the war, we had more than 150 head. Forty-seven goats died during the war. The animals died from stroke. Some pregnant goats, in the last stages of pregnancy, died because russists [the invaders] set up their mortars and machine guns, those on tripods, literally 500 meters from here and fired at Huta-Mezhyhirska every night, from half past four in the morning. We heard all that.

Аnd every morning, when I came to see the goats, I collected several dead bodies. Some goat kids froze to death.

We have a land plot of 9,000 square metres where both a hardware store and our farm are located, the latter being separated by the fence. They [the invaders] came in and ransacked the store three times. They did not get to the farm just because they were not smart enough to understand that there was a farm here. The animals were in complete silence. They did not make any sounds because they were scared. We also have the second dividing fence that separates the two territories. This is where we hid in the basement, which we had arranged, and we also lived in our nice kindergarten. The house was hit on 1 March, if I am not mistaken. First, the house was hit by a shell. It hit in the corner of the house and blew out all the windows – on the ground floor and the first floor. Only the windows on the second floor remained intact.

And then they stole everything, all the clothes and all the equipment/appliances. When I came to see our dog, we even saw the shoes that they left behind.

Later, when our [Ukrainian] forces re-took the area, we came there again and saw that they [the invaders] took even their shoes. That is, they finished off their own “orcs” (derogatory reference to russian soldiers) [when retreating]. We did not have anything prepared in advance. We had to make a decision – we save either the house or the farm. We decided to save the farm because Lord God spared our house. The roof is still there.

The most important thing is that the house did not burn down. We will be able to restore everything. Cars, which were near the house, were damaged. They chopped them with an axe. Car batteries were stolen and all the gasoline from the car fuel tanks was drained. The houses were damaged. They even kicked the interior doors off. This is where we lived. This is our room. An iron sheet and then we put this metal reinforcement. We put this trestle and then placed those wooden things, those wooden sleepers. We covered with them, then with the iron sheet and with the reinforcement on top.

It was very cold, scary and dark. So the three of us lived in that tiny room for 41 days.

Come over and we will show you this nice place. Here it is. The conditions are not very good but we survived. This is the most important thing. It was just terribly cold and dark here. It is an old kindergarten. The building structure is quite rigid, but the place is very cold. The temperature here was almost like outside. Well, maybe some five degrees higher. So it was one degree below zero here. There was high condensation everywhere.

We went around our neighbours, those houses where they had power generators, and asked them to give us some water. But since we needed 150 litres of water a day, they gave us water not very willingly. We traded our milk for water and tried to find some way out as best as we could. We were lucky that before the war... Well, we are thrifty farmers. That is why we had goats. We bought a ton of goats and had some hay in stock too, which was not of a very good quality though. That was also a reason why our goat kids died, but we could not identify it and could not find a replacement.

The most terrible thing was that we did not have communications, no Internet access, and no medicines. There were almost no medicines for people, and even more so for the goats.

It was impossible to get them somewhere. We even have a goat cemetery. Later, when people began to come to us and asked for food, on or around the 25th day, we gave some of the dying goats to those people who had dogs, as we had to somehow help save other animals too. Therefore, we had to do that... We had a situation when we were hungry and had no food.

And when our goat was dying, and we saw that it was dying, when the seventh goat died of a stroke, we waited for it to die and then ate it ourselves. It was horrible and disgusting; I will never do it again. At first, there was no evacuation yet. For the first 20 days, we did not have any evacuation at all. So people asked us to share some foodstuff with them. They asked not for the animal fat, but for milk. They asked for milk and they also asked for eggs, as we also keep fancy hens.

However, even the hens, although we hid them indoors, they did not lay eggs. They felt those shots; they heard it. A dozen of them died too.

Our hens stopped laying eggs and our milk yields dropped insanely. The goats almost went off milk. That is why we distributed to people the part that was still left, about 506 litres per day. [Breastfeeding] mothers who went off milk because of the explosions came to us in tears and we gave them milk until they were evacuated on the 20th day. We have everything mined now. The entire neighbourhood is mined and for now, we have big problems with grazing.

In financial terms, we are in a rather poor condition because the hay is running out. Volunteers help us and we are very thankful to all volunteers in Ukraine. You are the best. We did not expect that you are such a powerful force. She does not bite. She is very friendly. Her name is Dakota. This is a she-donkey that we gave to our daughter as a gift. We have a four-year-old daughter. We were very lucky that she did not stay with us but managed to leave with her grandmother. And since there was no telephone connection for a very long time, we could not get through to them. They went to Portugal and stayed at our relatives’ place there. On the 20th day, when we…

We could not reach her by phone for twenty days, and when we were de-occupied on the 41st day, the first thing my daughter asked was, “Mummy, is Dakota alive?” And this was just the most [moving]... We just burst into tears. It was such an emotional moment. We were saving her [the donkey] too, we did our best. Because she is her friend, and every day she... Now the telephone connection is back and every time we call her, she asks us to show her Dakota. They really want to go back home and we hope that this stage will finally end and our daughter will be able to ride her beloved pet animal. So, dear friends, I wish peace to all of us! We are looking forward to it.