These are the words of an articulate and steadfast family man young enough to be drafted
into the Ukrainian army, who decided to escape. Interview by Sam Burcher
“It’s difficult for me to hate people for no reason basically. I understand that maybe, maybe someone could blame me for not staying and fighting.”
What was Ukraine like before the war?
So before the war started Ukraine was quite a peaceful country. We actually had a little war in 2014, because we had a coup when we had just thrown out our former President Yanukovych. And we decided to build the country from scratch. We changed police, we changed government and completely changed the political system. And then Russia decided to invade, but they relatively peacefully took Crimea away without even any shots or any dead people, without any war. We were in a very shaky position, you know, with our new government, everything was in a little bit of chaos and we decided not to fight, and ok, let’s give them Crimea.
Kieve in 18th Century
The Great Gate of Kiev by Paula Arciniega
But it was not enough for Putin. He decided to invade the Donbas region and Donetsk and a small portion of land around Donetsk and Luhansk. Then somehow he communicated with President Poroshenko and made a futile and very unstable peace deal and war didn’t continue.
Then we thought that everything would be fine and In 2016, we decided to get rid of all this Soviet heritage and Soviet names and began renaming our cities. We started to build our country, we had a lot of new businesses and we had money from the West, probably not for good, because Western governments had decided to fund our government to perhaps have some benefits or, I don’t know, to make Russia angry, maybe.
What happened when Zelensky became President?
In 2019 we had a new election and Zelensky came to power. He sighs deeply in frustration. We knew he was not a professional, that he is an actor, that basically he is just a clown. But he acted like, I don’t know who, he was so confident, maybe a bit like a Boris Johnson. He made a lot of promises about the good life, about rebuilding our country and about peaceful negotiations with Russia.
In 2020 and 2021 until the beginning of 2022 everything was fine. But at the end of 2021 the US and UK Governments told us that Russia will invade and start a new war. Nobody believed it, no-one. We thought, why, why? They don’t have enough power, they don’t have enough money to do this. This warning came around 5-6 months before the war started.
Zelensky basically did nothing to prepare. He was thinking he has a good relationship with Putin and with Russia because he had a lot of businesses in Russia. Perhaps he was thinking that maybe Western governments would want to somehow get some gains from this panic or to control something and he decided not to do anything until the last day.
What did you do when it started?
The war started on 24th February 2022. I remember I went out at night because I heard several explosions, it was the first explosions in our city and aimed into the local airport. I heard explosions around 4am and 5am. I was thinking like maybe somebody is celebrating something. Then I got up at 7am and checked the news and realised it had started.
Everyone was in a huge panic. We started to quickly run around doing something. When you don’t know what to do you just start running around. We thought we needed to put everything into our car and go straight to the border and then we saw on the news the huge, huge queues standing still in the middle of nowhere just to get to the border and leave. So we decided we needed to wait a little bit for several days. Then we bought a lot of food, some medical stuff, pills, because no-one knew what would happen next.
Then we saw how the Russians got into Kiev region. They started to kill civilians and then they started to burn houses and cars. They came almost very close to Kiev. The military started to give out weapons to everyone in Kiev who wanted to fight. I remember the video when a huge lorry came into the middle of the street and military guys start to throw handguns to everyone and automatic rifles. So anyone who wanted to fight could get a weapon. We thought that it will not last long because we had two options: either we will win quickly, or they will destroy us quickly. Nobody could imagine that it will last five years, almost.
What decisions did you make for your family?
In a month I told my family that it will probably last longer than we expected so you need to run, basically, you need to go to another country as refugees. My wife did not want to do this she said, “No, no, everything will be fine, the war will be over soon.” And some peace negotiations started after two months and they almost settled everything. The language situation, the situation with NATO, the situation with Western troops in the country.
So basically everything was settled and then we heard this story that Boris Johnson came to Ukraine and said, “No guys, you have to fight. We will give you weapons, we will give you money, we will give you supplies, but you have to fight against Russia.” And our government decided yeah, we have to fight. I don’t know why. But they decided they can win with the help of Western money and weaponry, and all this stuff. And they dismissed all the negotiations and so we started to have a real war with rockets, bombs and Shaheds, which are these huge drones almost every day.
I insisted that my teenage daughter and wife should go. We also have two cats and we quickly got all the jabs for the cats and made them animals passports. I brought tickets and I sent them to Spain. Because we had been there before and our older son was a student there at that time. He knew the country, he knew the city and so yes ,he could meet them. So we packed a lot of things in our luggage. We brought special backpacks for the cats with transparent sides, so you can see your cat, he laughs.
I remember that day, I had arranged everything, and they are ready to leave. And I remember I had this thought in my mind that maybe I will never see them anymore. And basically I started to cry. I hadn’t done that for a long time before this moment. They were not alone because our neighbour has a wife and child too, so they decided to go together. They have a guinea pig and they brought a small transparent container for the guinea pig and this company travelled together.
It was a really hard day for me, he exhales hard at the memory. But everything went well, they arrived in Spain and my son met them and the local people gave them a room to live in. Then they met a good family, a good Russian family actually, who gave them separate rooms in their big house, and they lived there for almost two years until I came.
You have mixed Russian and Ukrainian ancestry. Can you tell me about your grandparents on both sides of your family?
Yes, my mother’s grandparents were all from Russia, from Moscow region. If we go further back my great grandfather was born near to the Belarus border, and at the beginning of the 20th century he had a small factory that produced woollen shoes, like slippers and winter shoes, very simple not aristocratic. He was the owner and had two guys that helped him. Then Revolution struck and everything went into chaos. And around 1930, one of his workers told the local KGB agency that my great grandfather was exploiting them. The KGB arrested him because it was not allowed to have a private business at all in the Soviet Union at that time.You either worked for the government or you didn’t work at all.
And my great grandfather was sent to the Gulag camp in the far, far north east in the forest somewhere. It was around 1933-1934, yes. He spent five or six years in captivity and finally he managed in around 1940 to escape from Gulag and he came back to his family, to my great grandmother. They moved to other places in Russia because the security services and the KGB was searching for him. They moved to some very abandoned cities, they lived in barracks somewhere where there were no toilets, just a hole in the middle of the ground. It was a difficult time. And then the Second World War started in 1939 in Poland and 1941 in the Soviet Union.
My great grandfather decided to voluntarily join the army and go to fight, because somehow he loved his country anyway. He hated government and communists and the KGB, but he hated Fascists more, so he joined the army and died somewhere and no-one has ever found his body since then.
Then my grandmother met her husband. At that time she lived in Siberia and they decided to go to Ukraine because the KGB started to chase my grandmother because her father was an ‘enemy of the State,’ so called. And you have to co-operate with the KGB so they leave you alone.
This man had died for his country and the authorities were persecuting his daughter?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, just because he managed to escape. So they decided to move to Ukraine from Russia and in Ukraine my grandparents worked as engineers in a local factory. My mother was born in the early 1960’s, and that was quite a peaceful time.
So up until this point your family is pure Russian?
Yes, on my mother’s side. But on my father’s side his family was from North Ukraine. My paternal grandmother was relatively well educated, but not wealthy. Well, it would have been considered to be wealthy at that time. Her father was a principal and they were not peasants and lived a pretty normal life and had a house.
But during WW2 they were in Occupation under the Nazis from 1941-43 until the Liberation. They managed to survive somehow, because my grandmother had some relatives from Jewish ancestry, and it was God’s blessing that nobody from the Nazis knew about this and they survived. My grandmother from my father’s side was a doctor in a hospital until she was 75, and she stopped working only when the Soviet Union collapsed.
You told me about your paternal grandparents acquiring a form of Stockholm Syndrome and becoming friendly with their Nazi captors.
Yes, yes, they befriended one of the German guys and he also survived, somehow. And after Soviet Union collapsed they started to send letters to each other and I remember at the beginning of the 1990’s we had a lot of parcels with German chocolate, with German cookies and all this stuff. So they wrote each other and they even wanted me to meet the German guy’s grand daughter.
He giggles at the idea of something positive coming from the struggles that his grandparents faced. Struggles that are now being inflicted upon the generations that follow in both Ukraine and Russia.
What about your father’s side?
And my father, he was born in the early 1960’s and my parents went into the same school and they met there and they fell in love. Obviously they had love there, he laughs, and got married and I was born. It was a very peaceful time. When I was young I didn’t know anything about politics or the bad situation in the economy in the Soviet Union at that time. Because from 1979-1989 when the Soviets got into the Afghanistan War the economy couldn’t sustain all these expenses and the Soviet Union eventually collapsed in 1990.
My dad became a psychiatrist. Why? Because one day he found my mother who had decided to commit suicide. He took her down from the hook and she survived. I was in like 10th grade or 11th grade. Following that he trained to become a psychiatrist because he wanted to help people on the brink of suicide. After completing medical school he helped a lot of people. My father got a big salary and some additional presents from his patients and we lived a normal, very good life at that time for Soviets. We had two cars, and we had a flat and both sets of grandparents had flats, and everything was fine.
When the Soviet Union collapsed my parents had to quit their jobs because their pay became shit, and there was chaos and inflation. My mother switched careers, she was formerly an engineer in the space industry. She still works, but is a pensioner now. She has also left Ukraine and can work remotely helping young people doing internships.
How has the propaganda of this war effected you?
Suddenly I got into this space where propaganda was everywhere from both sides. One propaganda tells you that you should hate Russians, you should kill them, you are not allowed to speak Russian anymore, you’ll be fined if you speak Russian. But my native language is Russian, because of my grandparents and parents. I didn’t speak Ukrainian until I got into school, because we were all speaking Russian.
And from other side basically the same thing, it’s all hate, you should kill Ukrainians, you should hate them. Negativity from all sides and many people just fell into this and some of them starting to hate each other just for speaking Russian on our streets. And for watching Russian movies for example, or even going to Russian Church.
Breaking down society in effect
Yeah. Breaking down society completely. I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t want to hate anyone. I understand from some point of view I should protect my country, maybe.
I also understand that this war is absolutely useless. We had several opportunities to stop the war with Russia. It would have been like Finland when they decided to give some land to the Soviet Union to make a peace deal in 1940 during the awful Winter War of 1939-1940, when the Finns realised that they will lose.
The Finnish General Carl Mannerheim knew he had only 6 million people against the Soviet Union, which had 200,000 million people at that time. The Russians had grabbed Ukraine, they grabbed Kazakhstan, they grabbed Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, and that’s why they had so many people.
Mannerhein decided Finland could not continue to fight because they would all be dead. So he decided to make peace with the Soviets by giving them some land, and the war was over within a year. We had several chances to do the same, even at the beginning of this war, but Zelensky said, No, we will fight until the end, everyone should fight; everyone, no matter what, even if you are ill or mentally deranged, you will fight.
What happens at the army recruitment centres?
In the recruiting centres there is a process that even if you are a cripple, one legged, one eyed, they will sign you up. They don’t care, they have a plan somewhere from Government that you should mobilise like a thousand people per month for one unit. And they bring in bums, cripples and drunks who are basically useless in a war. It’s just numbers, they have to beat the number.
If not, they will be sent to war?
Yeah, because if they do not mobilise a certain amount of people then they will be sent themselves to the trenches and die there. We have thousands of people in our internal security service, thousands of people in the police and thousands of people in the military recruiting service and no-one from there wants to go to the trenches.
These are the prepared people, he says clasping his hands together in despair, who know how to deal with conflict. But no they are protecting government. They are not going to trenches no, no, no, they will send you to trenches.
Now it’s a war of attrition because nobody is moving too much and both sides use drones and it’s a 10km kill zone where if you go there you will be killed by drones.
Guaranteed total warfare
Yeah, guaranteed, it’s not like a bullet and you miss, it’s a drone and they search for you and they just kill you instantly. These military recruiters have a salary, he laughs sadly, for sending people to trenches
And, because of their policies that everyone should serve and everyone should die for Ukraine, the authorities started to kidnap men from streets. Basically the military recruiters kidnap and forcibly put men into buses and send them to the trenches. Now all the medical checks or documents mean nothing, it’s just a formality.
They continue to grab guys from streets. We work remotely and everyone works from home. Recently my friend got into that situation. He went to buy groceries and military recruiters grabbed him from behind just near the shop. They started to beat him immediately without asking for any documents or who is he? They took him and threw him into the bus where a policeman was sitting and the policeman didn’t say anything, he was just watching how he was beaten.
Now all military recruiters wear masks now so that nobody will recognise them. They started to wear masks because people want revenge.
What is the age range of the men they take?
From 25-60. I don’t know why from 25, maybe they want to save younger population and kill everyone else. But what they did, they allowed the younger guys who are 18-23 to leave the country and of course, this part of the population they left, almost everyone. We have no kids in 10th grade or 11th grade because almost every guy who is 17 they left. They relied on local support to help them leave.
How has Ukraine’s population changed?
In 1991 when Ukraine got its independence we had a population of around 51-52 millions. At the beginning of the war with Russia in 2022 we had around 40 million people, and now we have around 26-28 million people. We basically have almost halved our population. Extinction is coming for us, and I don’t how to stop it, and no-one knows except government. Russia has oil money, gas money, all the resources and Ukraine has nothing. Only with the help of Western money can Ukraine withstand Russia.
I don’t know what the Government calculations are because we are losing people every day. Of course many people decided to leave like me and many became refugees in countries around the world. Mostly in the European Union, some in the US, some in Britain, and in Ireland. Many people who couldn’t get into the EU, they went to Turkey and Asian countries like Kazakstan, like Georgia, Armenia, so we are everywhere now, he laughs again. Ten million people living in other countries.
You can compare, we had 40 million people before the war started, and Russia has 140 million people. So we can’t win with just meat, fodder meat basically. Russia can lose thousands they don’t care because they have even more. And Russia doesn’t have forceful mobilisation, they pay contracts men willing to fight, just for signing contract $20,00, around one million rubles.
I think United States and Western countries they keep Ukraine as a shield against Russia. They want, with the help of Ukraine, to make Russia weaker, weaker and weaker. Basically, they want to weaken Russia and we are expendables. He looks sad, resigned at the fate of his country.
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