It is dark and the summer nights in central Ukraine are beginning to take on an autumnal chill. Two men and two women get off the bus with large plastic bags holding their only possessions.
Their home is just 70 kilometers away, in the village of Petrivka in the Donetsk Oblast of Eastern Ukraine. But the four travel for about 17 hours because shelling along the route prevented them from taking a direct route.
We were in possession for half a year and now we have no strength to stay any longer.- Valeriy Baluta
“It was very dangerous… as soon as we got to this place,” Sofia says through a translator. “The road is very dangerous. We were almost completely bombed. It was a horror.”
Sofia is just one of many internally displaced people in Ukraine who are just now leaving, more than six months after the Russian invasion began. Many people in Ukraine stuck it out for these months, hoping to stay in their homes. But as Ukrainian forces try to gain ground in the southern regions of the country, shelling has intensified and many feel they have no choice but to flee.
Sophia spoke to CBC, wanting to share her story but not comfortable giving her full name. The rest of her family is too distraught to be interviewed.
Fears of death drove them to flee
As Sophia enters a city shelter, she nearly stumbles, weak from exhaustion and stress. The shelter manager asks for a chair and water right away. He takes long swigs from the bottle. She says she is relieved but still panicking. A Ukrainian soldier takes a selfie as an artillery system fires on the front line in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Saturday. (Kostiantyn Liberov/The Associated Press) She describes the last few weeks in her village as “three times worse than before”, with constant shelling. She says she and the others on the bus were the only ones stuck, but if they had stayed there any longer, “we would have died.” “When we saw the first one [Ukrainian] tank, my eyes popped out of my head,” says Sophia. “I can’t express the happiness I felt when we ‘crossed the line,’” he adds, thanking the Ukrainian soldiers who helped them get out safely. On September 3, the Institute for the Study of War said several Russian sources reported that Ukraine had tried to advance on some villages in northern Kherson, including the Sofia village of Petrivka. “We were occupied for half a year and now we have no strength to stay any longer,” says Valeriy, with his wife Viktoria and their youngest son, Mykhail, through a translator. (Melissa Mancini/CBC) Sofia says her family was one of the last to leave the village she has lived in all her life. She says that after months of living in her basement, eating canned goods, her house was destroyed. “We were raising money, raising money, building [our] home and in an instant everything was gone.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that two villages in the south had been recaptured. A photo circulated on social media shows a soldier raising a Ukrainian flag in Vysokopilia in the southern Kherson region. “Ukrainian flags are returning to the places where they should be,” Zelensky said, adding that two settlements had been liberated, without naming them. The regional capital of Kryvyi Rih has received large numbers of people fleeing increased fighting in Kherson. The city houses 70,000 people from other areas. about half of them are from the Kherson region. Along with providing shelter to those who need it, the city is giving them three meals a day, says the head of the military command in Kryvyi Rih. “The Russians behave like barbarians, like terrorists. They regularly bomb peaceful villages, hamlets and small towns,” says Oleksandr Vilkul. In the past two weeks, there has been an increase in the number of people leaving nearby villages, he says. “We’re evacuating people from the front line and areas near the front line. We’re sending our buses, our ambulances, trying to get people to move away. At least 10 or 30 percent remained [in the] occupied territories”. Vilkul says the city needs help feeding the newly arrived and help with school equipment for the 18,000 new students they will teach.
Families also fleeing Russian-occupied territories
It is not only people in Kherson who are leaving. Families are trying to evict southern territories from Russia, such as Melitopol, in the Zaporizhzhia region.
WATCHES | The mother of a captured veteran in Ukraine fears she may never see her son again:
Family of captured Ukrainian soldiers fear the worst for their loved ones
There are growing fears in Ukraine that some of its veterans captured from the battle of Mariupol will be subjected to Russian demonstration tests. Susan Ormiston speaks to the mother of a prisoner who fears she may never see her son again. “We were in possession for half a year and now we have no strength to stay any longer,” says Valeriy Baluta through a translator. Baluta and his wife Victoria Baluta made a push for safer ground on August 30 with their sons, eight-year-old Konstantin, five-year-old Oleksandr and 11-month-old Mikhail. Like Sofia, their trip to Zaporizhia was halted by shelling. “The explosions started immediately on the field,” says Viktoria. “So where do we hide? So they pushed us into the car.” The Baluta family, who fled Russian-held Melitopol for safer ground in Ukraine on August 30, were relieved to see Ukrainian soldiers as they passed a checkpoint in this parking lot welcoming them back into the country. (Melissa Mancini/CBC) The couple said the move was much worse than they had read through accounts of other people fleeing Melitopolis on social media and news sites. “Oh, you can’t imagine – it raised my adrenaline level,” he says. “I was shocked. When you hear about it, it doesn’t compare to seeing the burnt military equipment, the holes in the asphalt. The mines are on both sides. Horror, horror.” It was a relief to see Ukrainian soldiers as they passed through a checkpoint that welcomed them back onto the country’s soil. “My impression was that even the sky is bluer here,” says Viktoria, whose family hopes to eventually end up in Poland. “It’s a normal feeling; it’s even easier to breathe.”
