Natalia Ivanova did not believe until the last that a full-scale war began. The town of Irpin was under shellfire from the first days but she and her family could not leave there. The reason was that the family had rare birds living at their home, namely two African gray parrots. For their sake, the Ivanovs remained at home until the last.
When the shelling became incessant, the family left, just by some miracle. They had to leave the parrots behind but thanks to a brave and unindifferednt man and a special rescue operation, both birds are alive.
The first thing we saw through the window was how russian aircrafts were flying. We could see them clearly right there. They were approaching from that side and were flying to bomb Hostomel.
My mother told me, “You won’t go anywhere because the war has started.” I started to cry out of fear. We ordered a taxi for our grandma to come to us and she did. That’s it. We were very scared. I was afraid that the rockets could…, well, just through Hostomel and to the institute. I was very scared because it was close to our home. We went to the bathroom and were staying there. I was very scared. When we heard a plane or a missile flying, we asked her to go to the bathroom and stay there because... I could... I could stay in the bathroom for an hour or two hours because the missiles didn’t end. There was constant shelling, yes. In addition, in that direction, if you look in the direction of Bucha town, there is BKZ district and the houses there were completely destroyed. There are simply gone. Starting with the fact that there are almost no windows left intact in our flat. Look, these are some fragments from russian shells that damaged our flat.
Certainly, there are not so many of them now because before we came, our neighbours did some cleaning up. Well, they swept the yard, but this is what I found. I think that those are far not all of them and some got stuck in the ceiling. I am going to show you our parrots that had been staying here in Irpin for about a month on their own, before they were evacuated. This is Laura.
– Laura, come here, come to me, my girl. My dear, do not be afraid, don’t be afraid. This is Jacques. He is a bit…, you see. Because of the russian aggression, he has pecked himself, pecked his plumage. That is stress-related. He had a nervous breakdown. In such birds, it may be due to a certain situation. Like long separation from their owner or some other reasons. People call it “stressed out”. For him the reason was in those explosions and the fact that he was staying alone. So he pecked himself, his feathers. He was completely bald but it has grown over again for now. We give him some medicine that helps.
It was a real Armageddon here, if I can put it like that. Airplanes flew here and on the third or fourth day of the war, we had a situation when the new Irpinski Lypky residential block was bombed for the first time. We saw a plane flying, and we did not understand what it was going to do... Whether it was going to drop a bomb on us or it had already dropped a bomb from here. We heard some explosions somewhere and we lay down on the floor. Well, the time when we heard that a rocket or a plane was flying was enough just to run out into the corridor and get down on the floor near the door. So we ran out or I also told our daughter, “Run to the bathroom, run to the bathroom, then sit down this way and remain there.” That was it. Well, we were also reading the Lord’s Prayer. I would say, in terms of speed, I don’t know, it was in a few seconds.
. You just sit and pray. In our prayers, we asked for it to fly somewhere further there, away from us. And when we heard that humming or roaring sound, which meant that it flew further, we took a sigh of relief... It was a relief for us – phew!
On 24 February, at around 4 o’clock in the morning, my husband woke up by himself, that is, without any... but we understood, and he told me that there would be a war, while everyone made fun of him for that. He told me, he told me about two months ago, “Let’s sell our flats, considering the prices on the real estate market now, and will go to live in Sri Lanka.” I said, “Maksym, what do you mean to live in Sri Lanka? You and I are both lawyers, after all.” However, no one believed it. He bought some stock of food, some stewed and canned meat, that is, items with long shelf life. So, at 4 o’clock in the morning, he woke up and after doing this and that, after drinking his coffee... he heard some explosions.
From our window, here, you can see Lukyanivka. If you take... we have binoculars too. We saw it then. We had a look around. We heard those explosions and saw some helicopters that flew to Hostomel. Then he called his mother at 6 o’clock in the morning and said, “Mum, the war has started. Come on, leave there.”
We saw some airplanes flying by; we saw military aircrafts flying by. It was a russian military air fleet.
There is an unfinished house over there and they were throwing those heat flares. They dropped them and flew on to bomb Hostomel. All this happened… Well, they just flew so low. Well, so that our forces could not shoot them down. And it was all covered in black smoke. The first evacuations by trains started then. We could go from our Irpin train station and would get to the railway station in Kyiv. Well, and then in various directions and by various means of transport. As for me, at first, we all firmly believed that Irpin would be bypassed because our military blew up the bridges. We thought that they would not go across the field and across the river. We thought that it would be a suicide for them, that they would not pass. Basically, that’s how it happened, that they didn’t pass. We thought, “Why do they need Irpin while there is the Zhytomyr highway and they could bypass our town. In addition, everything is blown up here.
There are no military facilities in our town. We have none of those at all, except for a military hospital.” We stayed on here until they began to bomb non-stop. I said to my husband, “What are we waiting for?” “Well, when they break our windows.” I said, “Do you find it funny? Don’t you understand that we have to leave?” He said, “I will not leave the birds and I will not leave my mother.” Because my husband’s mother came to us, and the problem was that she could not move quickly.
Therefore, we all made the decision that our daughter and I would leave. On the morning of 5 March, I left for the railway station. He took us to the railway station, put us on the train, and that’s it. We came there...
I will never forget that station. You go down there and it is just crowded out, as all the people are scared of shelling, as shells are flying. That evacuation was taking place under shelling.
It’s not that they made some ceasefire – no, there was no such thing. And we all waited in the cold for an hour and a half. They let us go out to the railway track, to the platform, but there was no train; the train was not coming... Two hours passed but there was no train. My husband called me and said that there was some information in a Telegram channel that the railway track was blown up and the train derailed. There would be no evacuation. We tried to go down, tried to make our way through that big crowd of people. The number of people who were there…, well, the place was fully packed. So my husband, our daughter and I started running home. We were not walking; we were literally running because some machine-gun fire bursts already started. So we were running along this Eighth of March Street and heard some machine-gun fire. The gunfire was incessant and a drone was flying above us.
It was flying here, and some shells too, and it all was exploding. You just run away with a small suitcase.
When we reached home, we took a short rest. Well, because it was rather stressful. It was stressful for the child and for us too. He said, “I’m going to call somebody now, who could take you out of here.” Then a message appeared in our group chat, our group chat of the house. It was a message from our neighbour saying that they could urgently pick up two more people and take them to Romanivskyi Bridge. I wrote back, “We are going downstairs. We’re going with you.” He took us to the damaged Romanivskyi Bridge and then the military helped us very much there.
They helped us cross the river. Well, not only us, they helped everyone to go across the river. You know, although they had their own work to do, they were about to be engaged, but they still were helping to evacuate civilians. I kept saying it all the time that in my opinion, our mayor showed himself from another side, and I am not saying it for any publicity. For me, he proved to be a real man because he was engaged in evacuations every day. People came to us from Vorzel, Bucha, and Hostomel. You can imagine what distance they walked to Romanivskyi Bridge to be evacuated. They did it at their own peril and risk, and on 6 March, some people came under fire. It was quite difficult because you go but you don’t know. We did not understand where we were going.
When the military took us across the river through the temporary crossing, there was an old “Gazelle” vehicle there and he just pushed us into that old vehicle and took us to the point where the Irpin highway started. There were evacuation buses there that carried the evacuees further. That is, we did not have to walk, and it was simply a miracle.
He just appeared out of nowhere and said, “Well, you need to go. Take your child and let’s go there quickly.”
We came to the railway station and I realized that we had to move further on; we had to continue our journey. However, that turned out to be a challenge because we were not the only ones who wanted to leave. So many people were leaving Kyiv, leaving other cities and towns, and we just stood there, Kyiv-Lviv train, and saw that there were many people on the platform, there was not an inch of room, and the train was already closed. They did not let people in anymore. And another train was standing there without any number on it and without any announcement via the station loudspeaker. Where was it going? Just some train was standing there. We knocked on one of the carriages and I asked a car attendant, “Where are you going?” He said, “We will depart only at five o’clock.” It was at around two o’clock in the afternoon. Only at five o’clock…, and it was Kyiv-Solotvino train. It was a Romanian... a town on the border with Romania. I asked, “Does the train pass through Lviv?” He said, “Yes.” Why in Lviv? Because we planned to go to Krakow, to a friend of mine. She would shelter us there and we would be there as long as we need. He... I said
“Please, let us in because the child is cold. We are cold, she is freezing.” He looked at us and let us into that train car.
He said, “But you will have to wait.” At that time, while the train was just standing parked there, I opened our group chat and saw some photos of the tanks that entered Irpin. I had a fit of hysterics. My body started to shake like this. I knew that my husband and his mother were there. I thought then, “I hope they have left already.” I wrote him a message; I started typing something. I found some evacuation contacts. I told him, “Let somebody take you out in some way.” He called me back in five minutes and said, “We’ve left.” Tanks began to enter and shot at Universytetska Street. They were on their way to Soborna Street, and at that time my husband and his mother were walking right here. This is the central street to Novus store. My husband said, “I nearly threw it away.” She had a bag, just an ordinary women’s handbag. It was difficult for her to walk that far. He suggested that he should put her on a handcart, which is used in construction usually. So then, they barely made it to Novus store. His mother said, “I can’t do it anymore.” She stopped and raised her hand, and then a car appeared. It stops and asked, “Are you going to Romanivskyi Bridge?”
She said, “Yes.” As she said, “Natasha, this was just a guardian angel.” So they got to the bridge, walked down under the bridge and the shelling began. The russian troops started shelling our positions, and so the military took them to that cover.
When they were given the chance to run away, our armed forces went on the offensive. They covered them, the civilians, and they were the last to leave that day.
We got off at the Lviv railway station and I realized, “So here we are but what’s next? A large number of… It was at three o’clock in the morning. A large number of people were at the railway station. We could not enter the building of the station because we just... There were so many people that we just could not make our way inside the station. To warm up – there were some barrels with…, you know, some smelly kerosene or something. Well, it was very... Some rags were burning in that barrel. I took out my phone and started searching for a place to spend the night, at least some place rented out hourly, but I could not find it. There was no accommodation for any money, and my daughter started crying. She cried for the first time for this whole situation, during this whole war. First time. I came up to the volunteers and explained our situation to them. That we were in need of a place where to sleep. In addition, my daughter’s eye swelled really badly while on the train, and she got a sty in her eye. That is, the swollen eye. The volunteer looked at her and said
“Let’s go to my home. My wife is there. She will feed you. You will stay at our place for a while, as long as you need, and then decide what to do next.”
I said, “I need to go to the border. To let my daughter have a couple of hours of sleep and then to go to the border.” He looked at me and said, “Come on. You will take some rest and then you’ll decide where you need to go.” These are incredible people. Andriy, his name was Andriy, and his wife Natalia. They took us [to their home], just strangers. Picked us from the station, you know, to their home. When we came in... Well, those people were just so sincerely kind to us.
Then, when my husband and I met, we felt really elated knowing that everyone was alive. It did not last long though. For about a day. And then I realized that there were two living souls left, and he said that at that moment we were... I ordered food for them from a woman who was a breeder of these parrots, and I had about five kilograms of it then. There were some nuts too and he scattered them all around the flat. I doubt they could fly into the bathroom, although it was open. It was hardly possible.
We still had a hope that they were left alive. I cried for them every day, every single day. I cried when cooking some food, I cried once I woke up. My husband said, “Don’t tear my heart in two.” He cried too, “I can’t live in this, you know. You cry for them all the time.”
I said, “I can’t control it.” You know, I have never seen a man cry but when I called him, his mother said, “I had such a dream… I didn’t want to tell you, but… Well, in that dream Jacques was gone.” He is his friend. They have lived together for 12 years, and this is his bird. He loves him and acknowledges only him. Laura has been with us almost for two years now. It will be one and a half years in the winter, a year and a half. I bought her because I wanted to... It was kind of unfair because Jacques was bought for me but he chose my husband. I bought Laura for myself.
I travelled all the way to Cherkasy to pick her up. My father drove me there in the winter. She was already an adult, a grown-up bird then, when I picked her up. However, she still felt some kind of attraction to me then. You see, she is my bird. This is my bird, and for us they are part of our family. I met Roman Mohylianets, who is the head of the condominium in one of our buildings, and I learned that he made trips to Irpin. It was some kind of a shock for me to know that no one made any visits here but he did. I saw that he travelled here. He collected some humanitarian aid in Lviv and brought it here. When I gave him the keys to our flat, it was on or around 12 or 15 March… Well, he then picked up some humanitarian aid and headed off there, going through the checkpoints. It was difficult to travel here and it took him about a day, if not more. The military did not let him come here.
On 31 March, he phoned me and said, “Natasha, I’m in your flat now.” A military man accompanied him because he himself was not allowed to be there on his own. And this is the story... He persuaded the military to come here under the pretext that an old man was here, as otherwise, they would not have come here only for the sake of the pets.
He came inside and said, “One is sitting in the cage and the other one is missing.” I asked, “How come?” While all the windows were broken. Well, you understand why he was missing. He could simply fly outside at any moment, and that’s it.
From any explosion, from anything. I said, “Please, look around there, look around”. And he found him. Well, it was not him who found the parrot but the military man. The bird was sitting huddled in the corner under his cage. He was sitting very quietly, although he obviously saw some strangers. He was scared and was sitting quietly but they found him. They put him in a box, they put both of them. Then there was a checkpoint and at the checkpoint, he had to show what he had with him. He said, “I have got birds in there.” A military said, “No, show me what’s in there.” And as he opened the box to show them, one parrot flew out and sat on a tree.
He was sitting on a tree some three meters away, and there was the Irpin Forest and the Irpin-Kyiv highway further on there. Roman climbed that tree. His phone fell out and Jacques bit his hands but he still managed to take him off. Finally, we were in Lviv all together, and when we came back home, the parrots were very happy. They were staying inside their cages and did not even go out, while normally they hang around freely.
Ukraine will definitely win. We do not consider any other scenarios. This is our state.
When we lived in Lviv, the greatest fear was that we would have to flee further, to Poland or somewhere else. I don’t want to, this is our land, our country. We live here and we grew up here. Why should we be there under russian rule? No. We are fully... I want to say that since the beginning of the war our state... This courage. Well, I think that no one from other countries expected that we would be… and that our president would behave like this. I don’t know. For me, it’s... I cannot choose the right words. I believe in our victory. The only question is when, but it will be in any case. For sure, all this will be rebuilt. I don’t know if you happened to be in Irpin before that, but I think that you can see how life is getting better here. Regarding the victory and whether there will be another attack on Kyiv region or not. I look out the window. My neighbours replace their windows – that’s all, a peaceful life is back here, you see.
People already argue in the chat [a group chat of housing tenants] about who comes out to take part in a clean-up and who doesn’t come out. This is how peaceful life looks like. People did not expect that it would be like this. They survived this horror and I hope that only victory will follow. To work for the good of our country. Only the best, only going forward, so that everything is fine with us and so that our state wins. We just... We know it will happen. We don’t just believe, we know it. It cannot be otherwise. Otherwise, it would have been three days, as russia said, and they would be marching here, but this will not happen. We all know that.
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