in early February 2022, they did not pack lightly. “We were taking a bit more just in case. There was lots of information on social media about what to pack in case of war: medicine, warm clothes, valuables and documents, thermals. I was thinking we are doing this because we are panicking and that it would not really help us.”But Vereshchynska was not panicking unduly. They were meant to return from the city of Ivano-Frankivsk on 23 February.
have since returned. Millions of others have been internally displaced by devastation in cities including Kharkiv, Odesa and Mariupol.Vereshchynska worries about her mother, who lives alone in a city in central Ukraine. “My mother spends all the time during air alerts in the corridor, and has her documents and everything packed. Luckily [her area] has not been affected by bombardments,” she says.
Bozhko had been anticipating Russia’s invasion. “The night before the attack happened, I saw the intelligence report, fuelled up my car and my mum’s car and gathered stuff in case a war started. I woke up at 5.30am to explosions. My knees started shaking.” Kharkiv was under regular fire over the summer. “[In that period] the shelling would start at 11pm,” he recalls. “I would set an alarm at 10.55pm because I knew that in five minutes we would get hit.” Following “the rule of two walls” – keeping two walls between yourself and the building’s exterior – he would wait it out in the bathroom or the hallway.It was in one of these moments that Bozhko first experienced a panic attack, on the eve of his return to Ternopil.
While in Kyiv, the attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure left Brygadyr unable to cook or work remotely, and having to climb 11 flights of stairs to their flat. An outage once left the family trapped in the lift for an hour.“[My daughter] was crying at the beginning,” Brygadyr remembers. “Now she is afraid of elevators.” Her three-year-old doesn’t comprehend the significance of what is happening around her, she believes, but other older children do.