‘A nightmare for us.’ Videos show fear and danger faced by civilians in Ukraine

Nowhere in Ukraine seems to be safe, survivors say and videos show.

The echo of exploding ordnance is a reminder that there are few places bombs and missiles can’t reach, be they military targets or highrise apartment buildings.

On Monday morning, Feb. 28, a 6-year-old girl in the city of Mariupol was killed by Russian shelling, the Associated Press reported.

She arrived in an ambulance along with her wounded father and was shuttled into the hospital on a gurney where a team of doctors and nurses quickly surrounded her, trying and failing to save her, the outlet reported. A nurse wept and a doctor gently closed the child’s eyes, marking another civilian fatality among an uncertain but growing number.

At least 352 Ukrainians have been killed in the attacks as of Feb. 28, officials said, McClatchy News reported. How many of those are civilians isn’t clear.

The United Nations believes the true number of deaths to be significantly higher.

‘A nightmare for us’

“I don’t think I will be a great warrior,” Andriy Voytsekhovskyy told Al Jazeera. “The first time in my life holding a gun. We will just be cannon fodder.”

Sheltering in an underground church with fellow residents of Mariupol, the 28-year-old fought back tears as he thought about his wife, Viktorii, and their 4-year-old son, Leon.

“I just don’t want my son to grow up without a father,” Voytsekhovskyy told the outlet.

Earlier in the day he was nearly killed while walking the dog, when a missile struck the first floor of an apartment building 50 feet from where he stood, according to the outlet.

“If I had gone outside with my dog one minute later, I would be exactly in the place where the strike hit and it changed my mind. Before, we were thinking to stay at home but now, I feel like there is no safe space,” he said.

To protect their son they invented a game, Al Jazeera reported, and a villain called the “Evil King.” He shouldn’t fear the Evil King, his parents tell him, but when he’s near and his bombs are thundering all around, everyone must hide.

“Life is a fairytale for him and a nightmare for us,” Voytsekhovskyy said.

Newlyweds, new recruits

Yaryna Arieva tied the knot as sirens wailed throughout Kyiv, and while it’s not how she imagined her wedding day, she’s not letting a Russian invasion stop her, CNN reported.

She met her husband, Sviatoslav Fursin, at a protest in 2019, she told the outlet. They planned to get married on May 6, but the pair pushed up that plan and said their I do’s at St. Michael’s monastery on Feb. 25, the day Russian president Vladimir Putin launched the invasion.

“The situation is hard. We are going to fight for our land,” Arieva said. “We maybe can die, and we just wanted to be together before all of that.”

After the wedding, they started preparing to join the Ukrainian military, they told CNN. Whether they will serve on the front lines, she doesn’t know, but it’s something she must do.

“I just hope that everything will go normal and we will have our land, we will have our country safe and happy without any Russians in it,” Arieva said.

‘Feel the ground shake’

Tom Sanchez, a lawyer from Texas, was in Kyiv when the fighting broke out, WFAA reported.

He did what many in the capital city and across Ukraine have done, hopped on a train heading away from the front.

He climbed aboard a train bound for Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, he told the outlet. There was only room to stand during the 17-hour trip, and as they chugged along, the sounds of battle seemed to follow.

“You could hear a lot of automatic weapons going off,” Sanchez said, adding that the conductor would switch off the lights in the train when passing through these areas. “There were a lot of explosions, and they were coming closer and closer.”

After arriving in Lviv, Sanchez found a place to stay thanks to the kindness of local strangers, he told the TV station. That night he slept in a loft above a restaurant, provided by the owner.

“The restaurant owners here are illegally letting people sleep in their restaurant when it closes,” Sanchez said. “I guess I’m lucky to have this.”

In Lviv, the war is out of earshot, he told WFAA, at least for now.

“You can just feel the ground shake,” Sanchez said, it’s a sensation that wakes him like an alarm clock. “You don’t really hear them as much as you feel the ground shake underneath you.”

‘We’re scared about our husbands’

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have fled the country, crossing borders into neighboring European nations – often leaving family who have chosen to fight or stay behind for other reasons.

Iryna Kyrychenko, her husband and their two daughters went to bed Feb. 24 thinking they would spend the next day visiting grandparents, she told Reuters. Instead they woke up to a war.

The 37-year-old made her way to Romania with the girls, ages 7 and 11, Kyrychenko told the outlet.

“It was really dangerous ... the kids right now are scared of airplanes here and if somewhere in the street there is a big noise, they are scared,” she said.

Kyrychenko is scared too, she told Reuters.

Though they’ve reached relative safety, she worries for her husband, who is of age for military conscription and who stayed behind in Ukraine.

He dropped her and the girls off near the border checkpoint, she said, and that’s the last time she saw him.

“We’re scared about our husbands, our brothers and other men who stay [in Ukraine],” she said. “Life in Kyiv before was very simple, very nice … Kyiv is very beautiful, very ancient city, I’m scared that they destroy it. We don’t know how to go back.”

This story was originally published March 1, 2022 at 8:22 AM with the headline "‘A nightmare for us.’ Videos show fear and danger faced by civilians in Ukraine."