‘God knows if we’ll ever get to safety’
As 120,000 displaced women and children flee Ukraine in just 48 hours, a haunting dispatch from the border with Poland that reveals the agony of families torn apart amid a sea of human misery and desperation
AWEARY Ukrainian border guard raises her arm to block the path of a man in his 20s, and he responds with an animal cry. He has already held his wife and baby tight and said his goodbyes. Now, disappearing before his eyes, they cross into Poland without him. Lunging forward a final time was an instinctive but futile act, and the man knows it. He lets out another cry, this time more in anger, and appears to crumple.
At first the guard is stern but then, as she hustles him out of passport control, she wrinkles her eyes and winces as if acknowledging his torment.
Safe passage out of this sad, fearful country is beyond the hope of men aged 18 to 60 who must stay and repel Russian invaders.
Here at the Medyka border crossing, similar scenes of wartime partings – of families rent asunder – unfold with metronomic regularity. Tens of thousands of women and children carrying the flotsam of their lives wait in the shivering cold – some for 24 hours and more – and the queue stretches from passport control atop a hill, down a narrow slope, broadening to 30 thick as it curls around a corner then down through a village of roadside currency exchanges and gaudy dutyfree shops and beyond.
On Friday night, an incongruous accent, a West Country burr, rose above the Slavic hubbub and cries of children.
Turned away at the final hurdle, having queued all day, a man from Dorset – his Ukrainian wife and two under-fives in tow – is loudly complaining. Once becalmed, Bak Jazro, 38, who runs an off licence in Weymouth, says his family were visiting his wife’s mother in Kyiv when, at the first rumble of ordnance, they ‘got the hell out of town’.
Like everyone, his journey to the border was tortuous. ‘We came in a hire car and then dumped it, but now we’ve got to sleep in it,’ he says. ‘Who knows when we’ll
‘One woman begged a driver to take her baby’
get across. In fact, make that if.’ Further on, as the light dies, a woman tells of an air-raid scare a few hours earlier. ‘Everyone was told to run away in case there was an explosion,’ she says.
‘One woman on foot begged the driver of a packed car to drive away with her baby.’
Disbelief is everywhere. How could it possibly have come to this?
Nowhere was this sense more apparent than on Platform 1 of the Mostyska railway station 8kms away. Hundreds of women clutching babies, infants playing at their feet, await specially chartered night trains to Poland.
But for a few Ukrainian soldiers and a couple of officials, there’s not a man in sight.
Built in the Stalin era, the harsh
lights of its waiting room expose the tears of more women who cluster around multi-coloured cases waiting for their turn to be summoned outside.
On the platform a 27-year-old
woman named Lena stands under a lamp wearing a beret and a stylish fawn overcoat. There is something about her appearance that recalls the 1940s. Indeed, this whole rescue operation – trains carrying women
and children, powering through darkness across war-ravaged lands – is redolent of the Second World War, as is the case with so much of this tragedy. The route out of the village of Mostyska follows the line of the once famous Austro-Hungarian railway linking Lviv in western Ukraine to Krakow in Poland.
Olga Zdebaska, 28, from Lviv, is on the platform. Though the warm waiting room is enticing, she is reluctant to surrender her spot.
Clutching her blanket-swaddled son Davyd, two, she tells of saying goodbye to her husband Volodia, a
builder, hours earlier. ‘He’s going off to fight,’ she says. ‘One minute I was looking forward to our anniversary meal – that reminds me… I’ve forgotten to cancel a hairdresser’s appointment – and then our family gets ripped apart.’
It is midnight and the temperature has plunged. Tears streak Olga’s cheeks and her nose runs because of the cold, but so tightly is she wrapped around Davyd she can do nothing about either.
Nearby her other children Arte, six, and Diana, eight, skip merrily up and down the platform steps. ‘It was heartbreaking leaving
Volodia behind and, of course, we don’t know when we will be together. For now we are going to stay with his sister in Poland. What happens next? Who knows?’
She is told that a train is minutes away and her mood brightens. Later, through the windows of another train – heading in the
opposite direction – an chain of red and yellow lights appears in the distance: the 50km jam of cars heading for the border.
Arriving in Lviv, we find hundreds more women and children crowding platforms and waiting rooms. The next day brings more still and, all over the city, families preparing to evacuate stuff their cars with belongings.
Back at the border, the queue has grown overnight. Anastasiia Pampukha, 33, a Kyiv lawyer originally from Horlivka in the part of Ukraine occupied by Russianbacked forces in 2014, said: ‘I am a
Ukrainian patriot who grew up speaking Russian. People in Britain and America need to understand the truth that Putin is lying when says he is liberating Russian speakers in Ukraine. I am a Russian speaker from Ukraine and I’ve no desire for Russia or Putin.
‘Those maps showing the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine do not reflect support for Putin from people like me. I want Donbas and Crimea to return to Ukraine. I want the clock to go back to 2012.
‘We believe in Europe and the West, and not Putin’s mad ideas about restoring the Soviet Union.’
‘Putin’s mad ideas about restoring Soviet Union’