Viktoria Braichenko thought she was watching a second World War movie when she looked out the window of her 20th-storey apartment in Kyiv as the Russians began bombing.
The mother of three, sitting in the Dublin kitchen of her sister-in-law Olga Sych after a five-day journey from Ukraine, struggles to absorb how her normal life was "crushed" in just one week.
When the bombs started landing, she thought: “It is a nightmare. It is unbelievable. It is like a scary movie. It cannot be the 21st century. It cannot be in my peaceful city. What is this?”
Over three days and three nights, Vika, as her family knows her, drove with her husband, prominent Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Sych, her mother-in-law Luidmila and her eight-year-old twins, Anna and Peter, across Ukraine to its western border in order to flee the country.
"It was physically very tough but emotionally we knew we had to keep it together because we knew we had a very long journey. We were focused on getting to the border"
A military base they passed on their journey was bombed by the Russians 30 minutes later.
“It was very, very scary,” says Luidmila, speaking through Olga as translator.
The most stressful part was the traffic gridlock on the packed roads and not knowing where they might next refuel their car, she says.
“It was physically very tough but emotionally we knew we had to keep it together because we knew we had a very long journey. We were focused on getting to the border,” says Luidmila.
The family didn't know where they would be able to cross the border. The way into Poland was too congested so they drove south to Slovakia. There, they travelled to Kosice and on to Bratislava before flying to Dublin to the sanctuary of Olga's family home in Mount Merrion.
“Now we have a chance to cry,” says Luidmila, as the tears flow around Olga’s kitchen table.
“You keep it together for a while. When you get that relief of them being in safety, you start to cry,” says an emotional Olga after days of frantic texts and calls to get her family to safety.
Kindness of strangers
The depravity of Russia’s actions against its democratic neighbour stands in stark contrast with the humanity Olga and her family have witnessed in the kindness of strangers.
The Google employee circulated an email to her colleagues in Slovakia, asking if anyone could pick her family up at the border. A complete stranger in the company dispatched their sixtysomething father to drive for hours to pick up two women and two children he had never met.
“You can count on me,” the stranger, Maria, texted Olga.
Today, the family’s thoughts are never far from Vika’s 26-year-old daughter, who remains in Ukraine, and Vika’s husband – and Luidmila’s son – Vitaly, who could not leave because of the Ukrainian government’s ban on men aged 18-60 from leaving the country.
"Some men are fighting in the street. Some men are fighting the information war"
As chief editor of NV (New Times), a Ukrainian media outlet that employs 200 people and runs a news website, weekly magazine and talk radio station, Vitaly knows he will be a target of the Russians if they manage to occupy his homeland and try to suppress any opposition.
“I must be somewhere on those lists,” Sych says on a call from Lviv, referring to the lists of Ukrainian politicians, journalists and activists Moscow has reportedly compiled.
His job now, as he sees it, is to continue NV’s reporting and to try to circumvent Moscow’s news blockade to inform ordinary Russians about what their country is really doing in Ukraine.
Back in Dublin, concerned but proud mother Luidmila knows her son has a duty to fulfil: “Some men are fighting in the street,” she says. “Some men are fighting the information war.”
