Illustration by Dasha Klochko
“A tank drove past us. It was incredibly scary. We could already hear shots right behind our house. We were about to be picked up by acquaintances, but they still weren’t coming: 10 minutes of waiting felt like a few hours. I dropped my suitcase, told my son to hide, but he was dragging it and saying, ‘Mom, we forgot the suitcase! Let me help!’ And he continued to drag it… But the suitcase still had to be dropped. I completely forgot that I had put the hard drive with all of our photos and papers in it. All our memories were there,” said Inessa Balabanova, 25, who fled the city of Irpin with her family because of the Russian occupiers.
Before the war, Inessa had been on maternity leave: “My son is almost three years old, we planned to send him to kindergarten in September, and I wanted to look for a job.”
It is difficult for the woman to say what she has been through: “When I think back, it hits me again and again. I can’t describe exactly how I feel. Honestly, I feel nothing. Pain, fear, resentment, anger—all of the feelings have shattered, and I try to somehow put them back together. It’s very difficult.”
Sometime around 4 a.m. on February 24, Inessa’s husband called her from work: “Inessa, dress the little one, dress yourself, and pack the essentials. The war has begun.” The woman was trembling with shock, she was confused. “I told my husband, ‘Are you kidding?’” She went into the kitchen, came up to the window and heard the first shots.
“In the evening there were Grads (Russian multiple-launch rocket systems). They were falling one by one. My heart was pounding, but we got our bearings quickly. We locked the apartment and ran outside right to the sound of explosions.”
Inessa and her family spent seven days in a shelter in the basement of a nearby university. “My husband would go outside for work (he works for a security company) and in search of food. There were only sweets and alcohol on the shelves. Sometimes there were cereals, but we had no way to cook them.”
The family wanted to leave the city several times, but it was difficult to get out without having their own car. “On the seventh day, my husband received a phone call from work and he was told, ‘Save yourself as best as you can. Irpin has been occupied.’ The call came a couple of hours before it was reported on the news. That’s why it saved our lives: because it gave us the opportunity to leave the city earlier.”
Now Inessa and her son are staying with their relatives in the Lviv Region, and it took them a few days with a stop in Vinnytsia to get there.
Inessa worries for her husband and is afraid of war.
“I don’t want this to happen again, I don’t want to look for a shelter again. Also, I don’t want to be forced to flee abroad. My husband will not leave Ukraine, he will not run away. And I want to stay here, too.”
Irpin, where Inessa was raising her young son, has been occupied and destroyed. There are no clinics, houses, or kindergartens. The bodies of killed people who wanted to flee from the occupiers are lying in the streets there. “I wake up every day with gratitude to God. I’m at a quiet place. I’m not in the street and not in a basement. If my husband was around, it would be even easier. I try to keep myself together. But I haven’t fully grasped everything that has happened yet. I haven’t felt it yet.”
