Our sponsors in England could not have been kinder. But when the app on my phone buzzes, I know the Russians are attacking back home
My family and I didn’t expect to end up in the UK. We spent the first several months of the war in Ukraine in our home town of Boyarka, a small town near Kyiv. Many people we know left, but I’ve always lived in Ukraine – my whole life to that point had been there. Our two girls, Kseniia and Polina, are 12 and nine, and they’ve never known anywhere else either. My husband worked in IT before the war, and then he worked defending against Russian cyber-attacks and propaganda for the resistance. Life was in Ukraine, so we stayed.
It was the girls who convinced us to leave. October was particularly hard. Boyarka is on the way to Irpin and Bucha, cities everyone has now heard of. The missile attacks are one thing – they sound like high-flying planes – but the Iranian drones are much worse. They fly very low to the ground, you can see them pass overhead. In the autumn there were massive attacks on critical infrastructure, so many drones were flying by. People were killed and everything stopped working. Power went out, the internet, and the girls were rarely going to school. You would go out on the street in the evening and there were no lights in any windows – it was a terrible feeling.
