A woman comes running: 'Girls, our guys are coming! '

For 4–5 days, our forces were actively bombing the military base. In the city, the pro-Russian people had attitudes like: “Ha ha ha, they won’t succeed.” But on September 7, we came out, and a woman we’d been living with was running toward us: “Girls, our guys are coming!”

We all went outside — columns of our military equipment were rolling in, our boys. We started hugging them. You know that feeling — you cry and you can’t breathe. We began to understand that we hadn’t been forgotten and that we were under protection now.

Before that, we were afraid every day that someone would kill us, that we wouldn’t be liked by someone. And if you were a young woman, you shouldn’t have gone out at all, because you could be raped.

When the war started in the Donbas, our city was involved because they repaired tanks here. The feeling of panic from 2014 has never left me.

From the first day of the full-scale war, we were being bombed. There’s a military base in our city — one of the largest military arsenals in Europe.

Within 6 to 8 days, Russian troops moved in. At first, they didn’t bother anyone — we all continued working; they didn’t interact much with us. They immediately focused on the military base and the repair plant (Balakliia Repair Plant — S.P.).

Then a lot of buses full of DPR fighters rolled into our city, and they completely sealed it off — no way in, no way out. They needed a human shield; they needed people to stay, especially children.

I couldn’t leave right away — I kept thinking it would all be over any minute. Then there was no longer the chance. You couldn’t even go from one village to another. They banned crossing bridges. Most likely, so that people wouldn’t set markers for our military.

They started going door to door, finding out who lived where. Then people started disappearing. In large numbers. First, two young guys who worked at a funeral service vanished — they’re still looking for them. Then they had leads on certain cars, that they’d been cooperating with Ukraine. Those people started disappearing too.

In our city, like any city, there’s a district police station. It has a basement with bars, like a prison. In that basement, they held people. They beat them, stripped all the women and men naked. Didn’t feed them.

Many of my close ones ended up there — people who’d been volunteering, delivering food, medicine. They were tortured. All the women had bleeding — because they’d been raped.

After people came out of that basement, they either didn’t talk to anyone at all, or they actively promoted the “Russian world”: that we’d be better off, how great our life was going to be. It was mass terror — the message that we should be for Russia.

A close acquaintance of mine was in that basement. She didn’t talk about it while we were still in Balakliia. Then we left, and she told me that what they do there — no one will ever be able to forget.

They knew everything about everyone. Someone was collaborating with the occupiers. Telling them whose wife was where, who worked where, who had left and who hadn’t. I know they were looking for me personally, because my husband serves in the military and holds a rank.

I wasn’t living in my own apartment — I was hiding. I reached out to people I trusted. There were four families of us, 8 children. We were either in the house or hiding in the basement, and only one person went outside.

We planted a garden, we had our own potatoes. That’s how we ate. There were some stockpiles, and they handed out humanitarian aid. That was mostly for the children. And in exchange for that aid: “You’ll vote for us, right? You’ll take part in the referendum? Look how well we feed you.”

My children are 8 and 10 — a girl and a boy. I talked to them a lot; staying silent wasn’t an option, because they’d shut down. They don’t understand why all of this is happening, why someone wants to kill us. I don’t have enough words to explain to a child what’s going on. But they drew strength from me, and I drew strength from them.

They jammed communications. There were only two spots in the city where you could get a signal — you had to go to the square. They monitored who went there to make calls, and then periodically those people would collectively end up in the basements. There were interrogations: “Who are you calling? What are you talking about? What are they telling you?”

Nobody went outside with phones. We all wiped our phones clean. Deleted all messengers. When we went out with the children, they knew they had to be quiet, not attract attention, not talk loudly.

The Russians went into every house and took whatever they wanted, as if it all belonged to them. A friend of mine had a private house with barred windows. They drove up, ripped out the bars with a vehicle in broad daylight, and carried out everything they needed.

They did whatever they wanted, without any fear that a local would report anything. Or perhaps they understood they’d just destroy us all in the end anyway.

At first, they wouldn’t let people from the villages come in — people who could bring produce to the market. Then they made a goodwill gesture: they opened access for people from the villages to the markets, let buses through.

Prices were astronomical. The market was open, but there was no electricity everywhere, so you couldn’t buy much. We’d buy meat and can it — make stewed meat, canned tomatoes too.

It was hard to get cash. Collaborators were making money off it. ATMs weren’t working — you’d withdraw 1,000 hryvnias through these people and get 500. A 50% commission.

They forced all businesses to go to Kupiansk and re-register their documents as private enterprises of the Russian Federation. To get to Kupiansk, you had to drive to the settlement of Naftianykiv, leave your vehicle with them. The vehicle was the price of doing business.

I had my own business, but I immediately stopped working because I didn’t want to cooperate with them. If you went to work for them, you were required to change your passport.

Many people felt that Ukraine had forgotten about us. They’d say: “You can see — there’s nothing about us even on social media.” People talked about Izium, but about Balakliia — nothing. Our authorities stayed silent as much as possible, but now we understand why they were silent: they were preparing a surprise strike.

When our military came in, they told us: stay home for one more day. There was fighting in the city. You could constantly hear automatic weapons fire inside the city — this wasn’t heavy equipment anymore, it was people against people. It didn’t last long — 80% of the occupiers just fled, abandoning everything.

The locals helped our Armed Forces of Ukraine enormously. They passed along markers, shared geolocations of where they were hiding. As of now, the city is clean — it took our forces three days to fully clear the city.

When things calmed down, I went to our soldiers and said I wanted to leave, I wanted to start breathing again.

They helped me get to Kharkiv on September 8.

We’ll go further. I want the children to forget all of this at least a little bit. I want them to get distracted, to go to school. I want to go to work — not because I want to earn money. I just want to start living again. I want to feel like a human being once more. I hope that in a couple of days my husband will come to see us — he hasn’t seen the children in so long.