To escape the war, Lyudmyla Klindukhova went to her parents who live in the village. She and her family were stuck there for two weeks under constant shellfire. When they ran out of food and essential medicines, they left the place at their own risk.
Two days before the full-scale war began, I saw a dream. In my dream, I was looking through the large floor-to-ceiling windows of my apartment and saw a huge military plane flying towards the house. And on 24 February I woke up because I really heard the roaring of the plane! Then explosions followed.
I jumped out of my bed and woke my husband immediately. Together we started flipping through the Facebook feed and realized that it started.
On the first day of the war, my husband went to work. He is a cameraman on television. At that time, I was packing just everything I saw into my backpacks. I think of it now and my hands are shaking. We had only our documents ready because we did not believe until the last moment that there would be a war. At 15:00, my husband was walking home from work, from Beresteyska to Kotsyubynske.
My parents live in Klavdiyevo-Tarasove, near Borodyanka, in Kyiv region. My first thought was to go and take them out of there, because they themselves would not be able to decide what to do in a critical situation. We came to them in the evening by one of the last suburban trains.
We were convinced that their area was safer. And we were wrong. The invaders were coming through the settlements around the village.
Kadyrovtsy (Kadyrov’s mercenaries) entered the neighbouring village of Babyntsi. People fleeing from there said that they were going berserk every day. They went from house to house looking for weapons and food.
Several times, we saw our Ukrainian aircrafts flying to destroy the enemy, I think. At that moment, everyone was just going mad because they knew it was a chance. Our opportunity.
No one cared what would happen to the village. Everyone just wanted us to be won back!
As I understand, it was impossible to establish a humanitarian corridor to our settlement. In two weeks, all local food stores and chemist’s shops ran out of everything. Besides, from the second day of the war, there was neither electricity nor water supply there.
At some point, people began to self-organize and leave the place at their own risk. In order to escape, people had to pass through several Russian checkpoints.
My mother is sick. She takes her medicines regularly. She had some drugs in stock, but we realized that they were running out.
At the same time, the food was running out too, and when we began to share one plate of porridge between four of us, we realized that we needed to break out of there.
We plucked up our spirits and drove off making a huge convoy of about 150 cars. We were very scared of passing through Russian checkpoints. We were ready to give all our valuable belongings to stay alive. Fortunately, we were not stopped there. We slowly drove past the Russian mercenaries, and they watched closely who was in the cabin of each car.
The next checkpoint was a Ukrainian checkpoint! I could not believe my eyes.
I wanted to shout to our guys, ‘I beg you, hold on, we don’t need Russia here! We just want to live in Ukraine, and raise our children on our land!’
With every next Ukrainian checkpoint, our hearts lightened a little more.
Now we are in Rivne. We were well received there. But we also stay in touch with the area we left. There are still a lot of people left there because it is not possible to leave the place without a car.
Every morning I wake up and ask God to help our guys [soldiers] win us back. I am absolutely confident now that everything will be fine. But we need to wait. Wait and do what we can. Each of us on their own front.
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