Despite living as refugees in a school, wearing clothes that are not theirs, feeding themselves with food distributed by volunteers, and not being certain about their future, Sergei and Julia state that they have rarely been so happy. “We are free,” says Julia, dressed in army bermuda shorts and a pink T-shirt with a unicorn printed in the middle of it. “How can I explain it? We are at home. This is our home, ”adds Sergei, her 39-year-old husband, who until the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on June 6 had rarely seen the sun. Like his four children.
Since Russian troops advanced to take control of these towns in the Kherson region, Sergei remained in hiding at his home in Oleshki, east of the Dnieper River. They knew that those with a military past, as was their case, would be the first targets of the occupiers. “When the Russians came in, the collaborators gave them the lists of our city's soldiers,” Julia explains. The fear of what might happen to him grew even greater after Russian forces, under Ukrainian pressure, withdrew from Kherson in November.
The Russians quickly took up a position on the other side of the river, from where they began to mercilessly attack Kherson. And they also became even more paranoid at the idea of pro-Ukrainian informers or partisans. “I did not let my husband leave the house. The children did not go out either. I was the only one who could go shopping, ”says Julia sitting on a bench outside the school that welcomes them, along with her four children.
"We lived on what our family and friends could send us," he says. "We thought many times about leaving, but we couldn't leave Sergei behind."
Neither the invasion, nor the presence of Russian forces in the vicinity of their home, nor the threat that Sergei would be discovered, nor the artillery attacks caused them as much fear in these last 16 months as the destruction of the dam. Still, this catastrophe led them to freedom. “If it weren't for the flood, we probably would have stayed in Oleshki,” says Julia. At dawn on June 7, the water already covered two meters. They sought refuge on the second floor until volunteers transported them by boat to the mainland, in Russian-controlled territory. Or, at least, in theory.
Sergei and Julia had seen how the Russian soldiers in Bermuda shorts, with bulletproof vests and backpacks on their backs, were fleeing the area. Even so, the Russian artillery, located kilometers further back, continued to attack with intensity, especially the volunteer boats that dared to cross the river to rescue the inhabitants of Oleshki.
“It was the only option,” Julia clarifies. “We first sent the children on a boat with other children thinking that this way they would not be attacked,” she says. When they were safely in Ukrainian-controlled territory, the boat came back for them. "When the Russians withdrew from Kherson, we realized that our guys were unlikely to be able to save us quickly."
By then Julia had a bigger concern as the days went by: her children. “The Russians threatened to take the children if they didn't go to school,” says Julia, whose nightmare in recent months was having her children taken from her and taken to a camp in Crimea or Russian territory. “It was a great risk that someone would give us away, but we refused. We had discovered that they needed children in the schools so that they could hide there and avoid being attacked by our army”, she says. "That's why I didn't take them to school, and I didn't go to claim any kind of financial help to support them," says the woman, who says that once a family accepted the subsidy, it was left at the mercy of the orders of the occupying authorities. Many children were taken to so-called holiday camps and never returned. “That made our life more difficult,” she says. But she feared that her children would have the same fate as other children in Kherson and the rest of the regions occupied by Moscow.
Days before the Russian troops withdrew from Kherson, on November 11, he saw arriving at Oleshki, on one of the ferries that crossed the Dnieper, seven buses with children protected by armed soldiers and a single adult. “These children were taken to the Crimea. And then, I don't know, to Krasnodar, they were distributed throughout the Russian Federation”. The Government of Ukraine estimates that 16,000 children have been brought to Russia from the occupied Ukrainian territories.
The story that most impacted him was heard in April, when he met a woman who would not stop crying. She had received financial help from Russians who had offered to take her children to Eupatoria (Crimea) for a vacation. “He asked me if I knew anyone in the Crimea and I asked him what happened. She told me that she couldn't get her children back. I told her that the only thing I could advise her was to go to that camp herself and get them out of there, ”Julia says.
Julia was born in Russia and from the age of four she lived in the Crimea. She left the peninsula and her family in 2014 after the invasion. Even so, she often sent her children to visit the grandparents, especially in the summer. It all ended with the invasion last year, when she not only stopped sending them, but she hid them as much as she could. For some time they were able to attend virtual classes, but then the internet began to malfunction.
“These children will have to have psychological support for a long time. The traumas will become more evident”, explained Valentina, a member of Psicólogos en Guerra, an NGO dedicated to providing psychological support to children who have lived under the Russian invasion.
Julia and her husband have decided that they will send the three oldest to Kyiv to spend the summer with their maternal aunt. Meanwhile, they will decide where to settle and start a new life that will not be easy. "But free," says Sergei.
One final question.
"What happened to the mother who cried for her children?"
“He did what I told him. It was for hers children from her and the children are with her in Europe ”.
