On February 24, 12-year-old Denys from Kherson woke up to explosions. The boy remembers how scary it was to live under occupation – how they tried to avoid russian soldiers because there were cases of civilians being killed, how expensive food was. In the summer of 2022, Denys’s family tried to leave the city, but his mother was taken for interrogation for nine hours. The russians did not let them out because the woman called them occupiers in her phone correspondence. The hope for the liberation of the city was fading, they were afraid to leave, so they just tried to live on somehow.

The de-occupation of Kherson was a real holiday! People cried and celebrated until 3 a.m. But after that, the city suffered from russian shelling every day, so they decided to leave their home. Now Denys lives in Odesa and dreams of the end of the war.