Elina Konavalyuk and her family had a relaxed if not indifferent attitude towards Russia before all of this. Some family members had even felt a little longing for the USSR over the years. But not anymore. Not after living under attack by Russian soldiers occupying the Kherson region of Ukraine at the start of the war, sleeping frightened for months in a basement and Konavalyuk, his mother and grandparents finally made a dangerous escape from their homeland .
A Ukrainian military man Petro, 32, walks into a trench at a location held by the Ukrainian army between the southern cities of Mykolaiv and Kherson on June 12, 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
(Genya Savilov / AFP via Getty Images)
“It was a struggle for survival,” she said of living under Russian occupation last winter, something she never imagined would happen to her or anyone she knew. The port city of Kherson, just north of Crimea, was the first major city to fall to the Russians in the war of 2022. “I don’t have that adrenaline right now. So all my thoughts were just standing in line. for six hours for a slice of bread. You would see the corpses of your neighbors lying outside the house. It was both mentally and physically so difficult because you needed to acquire new skills just to survive. “
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Last winter and spring, I posted some of the things Konavalyuk shared with me during his time underground, never using his name for fear of his safety. And in fact, he says that Russian border guards checked his phone and interrogated her intensely as he went out, suspicious of every Ukrainian on the run. His “Diary of Survival” memoirs read like poems with descriptions of how it feels to forget the smell of fresh laundry and the taste of jam.
A fisherman observes the rise in smoke after Russian forces launched a missile attack on a military unit in the Vyshhorod district on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine on Thursday, July 28, 2022.
(AP Photo / David Goldman)
Konavalyuk is a journalism student. Documenting what was happening in her hometown and teaching herself which explosions correspond to what kinds of weapons they fire to know when to run, how to react to the constant noise and shelling around her, she says, helped her get through the long and terrifying months. Now, in the security of Europe, he sometimes finds it difficult, he says, to see people enjoying the worry-free life of those not living in a state of war.
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And Friday was a particularly bleak day for people like Konavalyuk who hail from the Ukrainian territories that Russia has just declared its own, annexing Kherson and three other regions that together account for fifteen percent of Ukrainian territory. Formal annexation followed what have been widely called illegitimate referendums.
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
(Alexander Demyanchuk, Sputnik, photo of the Kremlin pool via AP)
“People were forced to vote under the threat of guns, gathered on the street. They came to their homes and threatened them,” Konavalyuk said. “So it is very easy to refute this referendum”. Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaking in the Kremlin’s chandeliered Georgievski Hall, whose gleaming parquet floors seemed in stark contrast to the grim government officials filling the room, said Russia would never return those territories. Konavalyuk has a different view that Ukraine will take back its land, but says that “the fact that this will now be considered an attack on Russia complicates things,” he says. “It will be more difficult for us to recover the Kherson region and the rest of the occupied territories.”
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When I ask who will fight, who will take back Kherson, she says: “Several Ukrainians from different sides are fighting for Kherson. The most amazing thing for me is that Ukraine is now more united than before. There is no difference in that. moment, whether you come from the south or the west. In other words, we are united as one people in giving back our lands. We are also one people. “
