Despite living as refugees in a school, wearing clothes that are not their own, feeding themselves with food distributed by volunteers and not having certainty about their future, Serguei and Iúlia feel that they have rarely been so happy. “We are free,” says Iúlia, dressed in military shorts and a pink T-shirt with a unicorn printed on the middle. “How could I explain it? We are at home. This is our home,” adds Serguei, her 39-year-old husband, who until the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on June 6 had rarely seen the sun. Just like his four children.
Since Russian troops advanced to take control of these towns in the Kherson region, Sergei has been holed up at his home in Oleishki, 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 the military in our city”, explains Iúlia. The fear of what might happen to him became even greater after Russian forces, as a result of Ukrainian pressure, withdrew from Kherson in November.
The Russians quickly took up positions on the other side of the river, from where they began to mercilessly attack Kherson. And they also became even more paranoid about the idea of ??informants or pro-Ukrainian partisans. “I didn’t let my husband leave the house. The children didn’t go out either. I was the only one who could do the shopping”, says Iúlia, sitting on a bench outside the school that hosts them, next to her four children.
“We lived on what our relatives and friends could send us”, he says. “We thought many times about leaving, but we couldn’t leave Serguei behind.”
Neither the invasion, nor the presence of Russian forces in the vicinity of their home, nor the threat of Sergei being discovered, nor the artillery attacks caused them as much fear these past sixteen months as the destruction of the dam . Even so, this catastrophe led them to freedom. “If it wasn’t for the flood, we probably would have stayed in Oleixki”, says Iúlia. In the morning of June 7, the water already covered two meters. They sought refuge on the second floor until volunteers ferried them to the mainland, in Russian-controlled territory. Or at least in theory.
Sergey and Iulia had seen how the Russian soldiers in bermuda shorts, with bulletproof vests and rucksacks on their backs fled the area. Even so, the Russian artillery, located kilometers further back, continued to attack with intensity, especially the boats of volunteers who dared to cross the river to rescue the inhabitants of Oleishki. “It was the only option”, explains Iúlia. “We sent the children first in a boat with other children thinking that way they would not be attacked”, he says. When they were safely in Ukrainian-controlled territory, the boat returned to look for them. “When the Russians withdrew from Kherson, we realized that it was unlikely that the boys would be able to save us quickly.”
Then Iulia had a concern that grew bigger with the passing of the days: her children. “The Russians threatened to take the children away if they didn’t go to school,” says Iúlia; in recent months their nightmare was that their children would be taken from them and taken to a camp in Crimea or Russian territory. “It was a big risk that someone would betray us, but we refused. We had discovered that they needed children in schools to be able to hide there and avoid being attacked by our army”, he says. “That’s why I didn’t take them to school, and I also didn’t come forward to claim any kind of financial aid to support them”, explains the woman, who states that once a family accepted the subsidy they were left at the mercy of the orders of the occupying authorities. Many children were taken to so-called holiday camps and never returned. “This made our life more difficult,” he says. But he feared that his children would meet 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 seven buses with children protected by armed soldiers and a single adult arrive in Olehki on one of the ferries crossing the Dnieper. “These children were taken to Crimea. And then, I don’t know, in Krasnodar, they distributed them all over the Russian Federation.” The Government of Ukraine estimates that 16,000 children have been brought to Russia from the occupied Ukrainian territories.
He heard the story that impacted him the most in April, when he met a woman who kept crying. He had received financial help from the Russians who had offered to take his children to Eupatória (Crimea) for a holiday. “He asked me if I knew anyone in Crimea and I asked him what happened. She told me 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,” explains Iúlia.
Iulia was born in Russia and lived in Crimea from the age of four. He left the peninsula and his family in 2014 after the invasion. However, he often sent his children there to visit their grandparents, especially in the summer. It all ended with last year’s invasion, when he not only stopped sending them there, but hid them as much as he could. For a while they were able to attend virtual classes, but then the internet started 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 Psicóloges en Guerra, an organization dedicated to providing psychological support to children who have lived through the Russian invasion.
Iúlia and her husband have decided that they will send the three eldest to Kyiv to spend the summer with their maternal aunt. In the meantime, they will decide where to locate themselves and start a new life that will not be easy. “But in freedom”, says Serguei.
One final question.
“What happened to the mother who cried for her children?”.
“He did what I told him. She went to look for them and the children are with her in Europe”.
