“I don’t want to leave my husband alone in Ukraine,” says his partner, K. Solodovnik, who worked as a driver until three weeks ago. He left his family here and returned to fight. “This, here, is still Ukraine. This is my home,” she tells CNN.
More than 2.8 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24. Even in sleepy Solotvino, one of Ukraine’s shortest border crossings, thousands of people have come to walk the narrow, wooden bridge that stretches from the quiet Tisza River to Romania, a member of which Is. European Union and NATO.
Most have backpacks or scallop trolleys with some items they can carry when crossing.
“When we arrived, volunteers showed us the border,” says Nina, a retired kindergarten teacher from a suburb of Kyiv who lives in Solotvino with her daughter and granddaughter. She is too afraid to give her last name. “But then the gears were spinning in our heads: ‘Why should we go? We’re at home, in Ukraine.'”
Now, these women are trapped in what has become the land of a man’s heart – they have not fled their country, but equally, they are not at home with their loved ones, who are facing Russian attacks. are doing.
Within the first two weeks of the invasion, the population here doubled, says Timur Averin, the head of the Tychev district’s administration, during a visit to Solotvino’s municipal offices. Even today in the village of this village some farmers work on the land by horse and cart.
Lines are getting longer at ATMs across the road and petrol is being rationed. But people are still getting haircuts and going to church on Sundays.
“It is the safest, closest to Europe, closest to NATO, closest to security,” says Averin, referring to the wider region around Solotvino.
Even as Russian forces began attacking cities to the west, the closest bombardment was at the foot of the mountains, in Ivano-Frankivsk, about 110 miles (180 km) away.
At the shelter, a volunteer, Vivian, who declined to give her last name for fear of her safety, draws a map tracking the fight on her phone. Two large regions of Ukraine are devoid of dots and crosses: one bordering Putin-ally Belarus, she notes. “And the other is us.”
Although Averin believes that Ukraine will have won the war in two or three weeks, for now, he is preparing to triple the population of his district, with mostly women and children. “There is a lot of patriotism among the women,” he says, which binds him to Ukraine.
They have also become vital to the war effort. Here women and children cut donated T-shirts and pants into strips, then tied them in camouflage nets.
On the muddy road to the shelter, local volunteers and football players who had just a month earlier joined Solotvino’s first competitive team pile up donations sent from Romania. Inside, women repackage canned food, flour and baby formula milk, then ship them to besieged cities.
“We are getting a lot of support from Romania,” says Angela Biletska, a local nurse who has been working 14 hours a day to oversee the medical charity. Her shins are covered with bruises and cuts from lifting boxes.
‘I prefer there are no bombs’
As Europe experiences its fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II, it is responding with aid. Within a day, donated items began to spill out of the shelter’s spare rooms and into the hallways, and are now stacked atop the front of the three-story building.
They are in dire need. Getting supplies into eastern Ukraine has become difficult and dangerous. “It’s constant, every minute,” Solotovnik says of the bombings at his home in Kharkiv, one of the hardest-hit cities. His friends and family are still trapped in the bomb shelters there. “They have nothing—no food—nothing,” she says.
Nina and her family, too, were hiding in the basement of their apartment building, always dressed and ready to run. “We waited until the last moment,” says the 62-year-old. On the eighth day of the attack, he flagged off the only car he had seen driving near his apartment building, and asked the driver to drive them out of Kyiv. “We had five minutes to pack,” says Nina. His Chihuahua, a rave in the name of music, was left behind with his son-in-law.
Neena’s daughter says that like Neena’s granddaughter she is too hurt to speak. When volunteers knocked on their door to invite them over for dinner, they suddenly burst into noise after being bombarded for several days.
In the Arts and Crafts room, Magdalena Myhelievna is trying to take the minds of children away from war. “It’s important to do normal things with them,” says Myhalievna, an art teacher for more than 50 years.
She is teaching them to paint trees and tulips with watercolors and for International Women’s Day they went to a local park to pick flowers for their mothers. “I prefer there are no bombs,” says Sofia, a girl from Kharkiv who wears a unicorn sweater and wants to be a vet when she grows up.
Anastasia, 8, who lives here with her mother, recites a poem by one of Ukraine’s leading writers, Lesya Ukrainka, a feminist and anti-Russian imperialist.
“He asked me: ‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘I’m fine,’ I would answer.
My pride will then assert itself,
I laughed because I didn’t cry.”
The poem was written in Ukrainian, at a time when it was banned by Imperial Russia in an act of defiance.
A similar feeling can be found among the women who live in Solotvino. One of them is Elena Sirosa, a coordinator at the shelter, who makes sure the beds are pushed closer together to accommodate as many people as possible. As the war progresses, there will be more.
“Here’s the border — we’re confident it won’t be bombed or shelled,” she tells CNN. If that’s the case, Serosa says, they’ll send their kids to Romania over the main street of Solotvino and over a wooden bridge. “The children across the border can be saved, but we will stay here,” she says. We will fight.”