By Laura McKillip Wood
“I planned to leave when the war started,” Marina says, “but I decided to stay with my friend and her mom.” For 40 days, Marina lived in a southern Ukrainian village occupied by Russian troops. For a week, she and her friend hid with her friend’s elderly mother in the basement of their home, not even daring to go upstairs to use the bathroom.
“In the beginning, Russian soldiers would shoot into houses randomly,” Marina says. The house had electricity, gas, and water, but in some areas of town they had none.
Marina and her friend combined their food. They had enough for one week and decided to eat only once a day. Marina’s two small dogs shared her rations. Eventually, it became evident her friend’s mother needed to eat more. The two younger women gave her some of their food.
After that week of hiding, neighbors told them stores were open again. They ventured outside and saw that others were also walking around, some of them carrying bags with bread or other food. The women found a store and waited four hours to get bread and a few potatoes. Over the next two weeks, they regularly went out searching for food and waited in lines. Sometimes people waited for seven hours only to be turned away in the end because the store ran out of food.
Russian soldiers treated the people brutally. They found military records and looked up the names of men in the town who served in the Ukrainian military. Mobs of Russian soldiers went to their homes and kidnapped the men. Sometimes Russian soldiers dressed in Ukrainian uniforms and shot people, then told Russian media that Ukrainians were killing their own people. Russian soldiers killed people who tried to leave town, even when the cars had signs that said children were inside. Marina saw burned cars with bodies inside. No one dared try to bury the bodies.
When Russians started to loosen control of the village, Marina began thinking about leaving. She found someone to take her and her dogs. She was part of a convoy that drove quickly to get away. Occasionally, when bombs exploded nearby, the vehicles emptied and everyone lay on the ground. The convoy took back roads to try to avoid meeting Russian military. When they did encounter Russians, the soldiers sometimes hassled them, refusing to move aside. In one instance, Russians damaged two Ukrainian cars, and the people had to consolidate into the still-drivable vehicles.
Marina’s convoy went through 12 Russian checkpoints. At each one, soldiers checked cell phones for pictures of Ukrainian flags or other signs of patriotism, so people in the convoy deleted everything on their phones. The Russians checked the people for tattoos, pins, and patriotic items. When they found something, they yelled, “We found a Ukrainian nazi!” hoping people would bribe them with food, alcohol, and cigarettes.
After about 14 hours, Marina’s convoy made it to western Ukraine. A makeshift monument made of burnt metal topped with a Ukrainian flag greeted them.
“When we saw the flag, we burst into tears,” she says. “People started sharing food with the [Ukrainian] soldiers, hugging them, and crying.”
After this happy arrival, Marina and the other refugees drove to the place they would shelter for the night, where they were finally able to relax.
Marina worries about her friend and that friend’s mother who decided to stay behind. Marina now is staying with her sister, who does humanitarian relief with the Tavriski Christian Institute staff in western Ukraine. Marina soon will go to Poland to see her son and grandson. From there, she does not know where she will go.
Contributions to Tavriski Christian Institute, whose staff is doing relief work inside Ukraine, may be made through Mountainview Christian Church.
Laura McKillip Wood, former missionary to Ukraine, lives in Papillion, Nebraska, and writes about missions for Christian Standard.
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