Mila Turchyn pulls into a McDonald’s parking lot near the Polish-Ukrainian border. She is anxious not to trust the man she is about to meet, a people smuggler.
Turchyn found the man via a messaging app a few days ago, advertising transport services for Ukrainians stranded in Russia. They made a deal, $500 to take Turchyn’s mother and sister from Moscow to Przemysl, Poland. That’s more than most families fleeing war can afford.
She’s wondering if it worked.
Turchyn turns around and suddenly finds himself in his sister’s arms. There is a brief moment of joy, but no time to hug your mother. The smuggler wants to be paid immediately. He extorts her for more money. She pays. At this point, there is nothing more she wants than to be with her family.
The exchange is finally over and the three women are reunited in Poland. They silently and quickly embrace.
For Ukrainians who are now displaced in Russia, however, arriving safely is dangerous. Thousands of Ukrainians were forcibly deported to the country that bombed and besieged them, Ukrainian officials say.
When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February, Turchyn, a Ukrainian-American medical student living in Cleveland, Ohio, began frantically searching messaging apps, desperate to find any information about her hometown of Izium. where his mother and sister lived.
“I was trying to find scraps of information,” she explains. “We have these Viber (messaging app) groups and everyone is saying, ‘Do you know where a missile hit today? Do you know which house was destroyed today?”
His phone was flooded with images of the city, which has been at the center of a fierce struggle for weeks. The shortage of food, water and medicine has created a human catastrophe for thousands of people who live under constant air raids and bombings.
“Every day it gets worse,” Max Strelnyk, a deputy for the Izium city council office, told CNN at the end of March. “There was no break in the bombing – it started weeks ago – by the Russians. The dead are buried in the central park.”
Izium sits on the main road between Kharkiv and the Russian-backed breakaway areas of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, putting it in the crosshairs of Putin’s brutal attack.
A few days after the conflict, Turchyn lost contact with his family. Cellular networks in Izium were deliberately cut off or blocked. She feared that her mother and sister had been killed.
“Someone saw (in the message boards) that a missile actually hit my backyard, and I was crying so hard because I didn’t know if maybe they were already dead,” she recalls through tears.
Unable to help his loved ones, Turchyn decided to help others and traveled to the Poland-Ukraine border, where millions of refugees were safely crossing.
“I came to Poland to take that energy and convert it into something,” she says. “Because crying and being depressed and sitting at home wouldn’t change a thing.”
On Facebook, she found Lesko House, a disused office building turned into a refugee center by its owner Wojciech Bryndza, who spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket to provide food and shelter to dozens of fleeing families.
Turchyn decided to live and volunteer at the shelter. Every day she tried to call her family. Finally, she got a callback, but it didn’t come from Izium.
“I heard from them for the first time in a whole month, and I was so torn. I was glad they were alive. But I was terrified. They were in Russia. And I don’t know, should I be happy? Or should I be sad?” she says.
Later, Turchyn discovered that her mother and sister, desperate to escape Izium, had found a local resident willing to take them to the Russian border for a price. There was no way to go east, more to Ukraine.
“We only had one chance to get out of this hell,” Vita, Turchyn’s older sister, told CNN. “And we decided not to miss this chance. We decided to go there and find out what came next.”
Once they arrived in Moscow, the two tried to board a train to Belarus, but say they were prevented from doing so by Russian border authorities.
Turchyn was desperate to get them out. She began asking for help from groups on “Viber,” the messaging service and social network, which provided her with information during the war.
“Someone from Poland gave me a number, and that led to another number and another number,” she says of trying to find a smuggler online. “They try to keep it a secret because obviously it’s dangerous.”
Over the course of at least two days, his mother and sister traveled in a large van with several other Ukrainians through Latvia and Lithuania, heading south towards Warsaw, until they were reunited in Przemysl.
“Now they’ve briefed me on the details, it’s worse than I thought,” says Turchyn as his mother and sister share details of their weeks under Russian bombing.
“You can describe it in one word, it was hell. It was a nightmare you could never wake up from,” says Luba, his mother.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation face the same grim situation – the isolation of Ukraine even on its native soil, the only way out for the few who manage to find it is towards Putin.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
