“Let’s Stay Here and Fight”: Women Refusing to Leave Ukraine

In her first resting moments since running away from home, Lilya Solodovnik watches her 6-year-old daughter Lena, with her hair in two braids and dangling on a blue plastic pony. Kharkiv’s hometown was attacked by Russian forces and now her friends and family are hiding in bomb shelters.

Solodovnik and dozens of other women and children from Ukraine’s besieged cities have found a safe haven in a former orphanage-turned-shelter in Solotvyno, a village nestled in the Carpathian Mountains near the Romanian border. Here, they are literally weathering the last mile out of the country.

“I don’t want to leave my husband alone in Ukraine,” Solodovnik says of her partner, who worked as a driver until three weeks ago. He left his family here and came back to fight. “This, here, is still Ukraine. It’s my home,” she told CNN.

More than 2.8 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24. Even in the sleepy town of Solotvyno, one of Ukraine’s smallest crossings, thousands came to walk across the narrow wooden bridge that spans the tranquil Tisza River to Romania, a member state of the European Union and NATO.

Most have backpacks or carts that used to be used for shopping and now carry the few belongings they can carry as they cross the border.

“When we arrived, the volunteers showed us the border,” says Nina, a retired kindergarten teacher in a Kiev suburb who is staying in Solotvyno with her daughter and granddaughter. She is very very afraid to give her last name. “But then ideas were spinning in our heads: ‘Why should we go? We are at home in Ukraine’”.

Now these women are trapped in what has become a no-man’s land – they haven’t fled their country, but they’re equally not at home with their loved ones, who are facing attacks from Russia.

In the first two weeks of the invasion, the population here doubled, says Timur Averin, head of Tyachiv’s district administration, during a visit to Solotvyno’s municipal offices. In this bucolic village, some farmers still cultivate the land on horseback and with carts.

Across the street, ATM lines are getting longer and gasoline is being rationed. But people still manage to cut their hair and attend church on Sundays.

“It’s the safest, the closest to Europe, the closest to NATO, the closest to security,” says Averin, speaking of the wider region around Solotvyno.

Even as Russian forces began attacking towns in the west, the closest bombing raids were about 180 kilometers away, in Ivano-Frankivsk, on the slopes of the mountains.

Ukrainian refugees cross the bridge over the Tisza River, which connects Ukraine with Romania / Denise Hruby/CNN There are two large swaths of Ukraine without dots and crosses: one borders Putin’s ally Belarus, she notes. “And the other is us”.

Although Averin believes that Ukraine will win the war in two or three weeks, for now, he is preparing for his district’s population to triple, mostly with women and children. “There’s a lot of patriotism among women,” which keeps them stuck in Ukraine, he says.

They also became vital to the war effort. Women and children here cut donated T-shirts and pants into strips, then weave them into camouflage nets.

On the muddy path to the shelter, local volunteers and football players, who joined Solotvyno’s first competitive team just a month ago, raise donations sent in from Romania. Inside, the women repack the canned food, flour and baby milk powder, then ship them to the besieged cities.

“We’re getting a lot of support from Romania,” says Angela Biletska, a local nurse who works 14 hours a day to oversee medical donations. Her shins are full of bruises and box cuts from lifting boxes.

‘I like that there are no bombs’

As Europe grapples with the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II, its leaders are responding with a lot of help. Within a day, the donated items began to flow out of the shelter’s spare rooms into the hallways, and now pile up against the facade of the three-story building.

They are sorely needed. Getting supplies to eastern Ukraine has become increasingly difficult – and dangerous. “It’s constant, every minute,” says Solotovnik of the bombings at his home in Kharkiv, one of the worst-hit cities. His friends and family are still trapped there, in bomb shelters. “They have nothing, not food, nothing,” she says.

Nina and her family were also hiding in the basement of their building, always dressed and ready to flee. “We were waiting until the last moment,” says the 62-year-old. On the eighth day of the break-in, she flagged down the only car she saw driving past her building and asked the driver to drive them out of Kiev. “We had five minutes to pack,” says Nina. Their Chihuahua, named Rave after the musical style, has fallen behind with his son-in-law.

Nina’s daughter says she is too traumatized to speak, as is her granddaughter. When the volunteers knocked on the door to invite them to dinner, they were startled, and are left with the sudden noises after living for days under bombardment.

In the arts and crafts room, Magdalena Myhailivna tries to distract the children from the war. “It’s important to do normal things with them,” says Myhailivna, an art teacher for over 50 years.

She is teaching the children to paint trees and tulips with watercolors and on International Women’s Day, took them to a local park to pick flowers for their mothers. “I like that there are no bombs,” says Sofia, a girl from Kharkiv who wears a unicorn sweater and wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up.

Anastasia, an 8-year-old girl who is staying here with her mother, recites a verse by one of Ukraine’s leading writers, Lesia Ukrainka, an anti-Russian feminist and imperialist.

“They asked me, ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m fine’, I would reply.

My pride would then assert itself,

I laughed so I wouldn’t cry.”

The poem was written in Ukrainian, at a time when it was banned by Imperial Russia in an act of resistance.

A similar spirit can be found in the women who stay in Solotvyno. One of them is Elena Sierosa, the shelter’s coordinator, who makes sure the beds are put together to accommodate as many people as possible. As the war progresses, there will be many more.

“Here is the border – we believe it will not be bombed or affected,” she told CNN. If it is, says Sierosa, they will carry their children down Solotvyno’s main street and across the wooden bridge to Romania. “Children can be saved across the border,” she says, “but we’re staying here. Let’s fight”.