Tamara Siabrenko, a resident of the village of Nizhylovychi in Kyiv region, says that she and her husband didn’t want to leave the village until the very last moment. The children and their families evacuated to Khmelnytskyi region in the first days, but the full-scale invasion caught Tamara while she was in the hospital.

“I was still on IV drips and was being treated on the 24th and 25th of February, and then our hospital closed. Well, and this misfortune found my husband and me at home. Around February 26, tanks started coming in. We live in the center. I look out the window – howitzers are driving down the road – one, two, three… Fuel trucks are coming, tanks… I had a meltdown! I cried all over the house,” the woman recalls. “But my husband ran inside and calmed me down: ‘Don’t cry! These are our boys!’”

“On March 4, something hit us so hard. We thought it was our last day alive. We lay on the floor until morning,” Tamara says. In the morning, they moved to the school basement, where they lived for five days. The children kept calling them, worried, insisting they evacuate. But the villagers, who had gathered into a cheerful group in that shelter that seemed safe to them, didn’t feel the full danger. “We set up a stove, cooked food, and when there were no explosions, we would go outside…,” Tamara says. But on March 9, the village elder told them: “If you don’t leave today, tomorrow will be too late.”

They returned home only on April 14. But they were grateful to those who stayed to defend the village and put out fires: grass and houses were burning from the hits. Tamara’s house was also damaged, but only slightly. Fellow villagers helped each other repair everything.