‘We just need to know we are not alone’
Life was golden for Iryna Artomova and Roman Dubinin before the invasion.
The couple lived in the eastern Ukraine town of Kramatorsk and owned a business that was also a passion — running an aquarium with thousands of exotic fishes and marine animals, which wowed visitors, especially children on school excursions.
The doors shut after Kramatorsk came under heavy attack from Russian forces when the invasion began in February.
Roman joined the territorial defence unit and learned how to “cook” Molotov cocktails.
A missile strike on the local railway station killed dozens of people, including children, who were waiting for evacuation trains. The hundreds injured included an 11-yearold whose legs were amputated after being shredded by the blast.
Around town, windows were covered with plywood, traffic lights and elevators stopped working, and a curfew began at 7pm.
Pharmacies ran out of medicine, food was hard to find and news reports warned the city was close to being encircled. Air raid sirens cut through the gloom of winter for hours on end.
“Sometimes when the siren was off you could still hear it in your ears. It was just devastating and intimidating,” Iryna says.
A missile landed just 150m from their flat, and a relative in a nearby city died after the electrical substation he worked at was struck by the Russians. He was alive in the rubble but wasn’t rescued in time.
Iryna sent her aunt, who lives across the border in Russia, videos and news of the destruction but was told, “No, it’s your bombs, it’s not Russian bombs” — a denial of reality informed by the propaganda of Russian State TV and news services.
“I answered, ‘What are your military doing here?’ She could never answer in a rational way. Our contact deteriorated and we don’t speak anymore.”
On April 24, Iryna and the couple’s 14-year-old daughter, Mariia, fled to Lviv, a city far from the fighting in Ukraine’s west. Huge numbers were leaving Kramatorsk, and many dropped off their pets to Roman — the aquarium population grew by 250 fish, a newt and a turtle.
He spent his days looking after the aquarium — securing a generator that proved critical when power was cut for two days, wrangling supplies of fish food — and at night worked for the defence unit.
Often he’d get just a couple of hours’ sleep and one meal a day, and in the following weeks he became exhausted and lost 10kg.
Finally, he reluctantly agreed to leave for Lviv and escaped last month, after training others on how to maintain the aquarium in his absence. He also picked up Iryna’s 66-year-old diabetic father from his home near the Russian border.
Keeping the aquarium running isn’t cheap, and while Iryna has found work as an accountant with an NGO in Lviv, Smart Medical Aid, the family rely on supporters making donations and buying tickets to be used whenever possible in the future.
Kramatorsk remains in Ukrainian control but is near the front, and civilians are regularly killed by Russian shelling. Much of the town is in ruins.
Roman’s 23-year-old son, a police officer, has stayed in the east and survived close calls including being hunted by a Russian drone.
The immense stress and sadness of the war is written on the couple’s faces and in their body language. They’re desperate to go home but know that could be years from now.
“There are millions of broken lives,” Roman says of Russia’s invasion that’s now approaching its seventh month.
“People have lost their lives, others have lost their relatives and their homes. And all for no reason.
“We are strong and we do our best to protect ourselves. Every Ukrainian does a little bit to contribute to it.
“We just need to know we are not alone in this.”