humanstory
There was nothing extraordinary about the mission until combat medic Olena found herself frozen in fear. The situation wasn’t particularly dangerous, but she couldn’t bring herself to do her job as her fellow soldiers were getting wounded. "I found myself trapped in the dugout corner, trembling like a frightened mouse," Olena told the Kyiv Independent. "Even as my comrades fell wounded, I begged someone else to bring them to me." "It felt as though I'd never regain my composure... When you’re in danger, you either fight or run. Yet, there I stood, paralyzed... powerless to act." Just before, O...
Kyiv Independent
In his battle for Ukraine, Pavlo Petrychenko used not only weapons but also his voice. A renowned Kyiv activist, he fought for the prosecution of corrupt Ukrainian officials, demanding justice for his fellow activists, including Kateryna Handziuk, who was murdered in 2018. As a team member of the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation, Petrychenko helped establish a volunteer center in Kyiv to support the military until he decided to join the Armed Forces himself two months into the full-scale war. Petrychenko was among the troops who had liberated part of southern Kherson Oblast in the fall of 202...
Kyiv Independent
Eleven-year-old Oleksandr Reshetniak from Kharkiv Oblast still vividly remembers holding the stump of his torn-off leg, trying to stop the bleeding. On Jan. 17, Oleksandr and his 13-year-old cousin Alina were heading to a grocery store in his native village of Malyi Burluk, near Kupiansk, in the east of Kharkiv Oblast, to get some after-lunch treats. Then Russian troops began shelling the area. A shell landed near the children. Alina suffered severe injuries and died in a coma 10 days later. Oleksandr survived the attack but lost part of his right leg. Shortly after the attack occurred, Ukrain...
Kyiv Independent
Editor's Note: The Kyiv Independent spoke with children under the permission of one of their surviving parents. At the age of 11, Arina Pervunina saw Russian troops killing her father. She and her younger brother were caught behind enemy lines at their grandparents’ house in Kherson Oblast shortly after the full-scale invasion started, while their parents were at home in Odesa. In the early weeks of the invasion, Arina’s father came to rescue his children and the girl’s two cousins from the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast. They were in their car when Russian soldiers began firing at th...
Kyiv Independent
KYIV – "Masha is safe. And we now have a terrace," Andrii Petrus, a barista, said while pouring coffee into a paper cup. The coffee shop he was working in had its window frames blown out by the explosion following yet another Russian missile attack on Kyiv — a third over the past week. Petrus' colleague, Mariia (Masha) Yevstafieva, was on the shift during the attack. She miraculously went unharmed in a "now open-air" coffee shop filled with shattered glass. "I wanted to change my hoodie to a t-shirt (moments prior). I do not know how it could have ended if I had done so," she told the Kyiv Ind...
Kyiv Independent
KYIV – Viktor Syrotyn was sleeping in his apartment near central Kyiv when the first powerful explosion rang out. He immediately woke up, ran into his children’s room, and covered his daughter with his body. The next moment, he heard another explosion, even more powerful, with windows getting blown out of their frames into the room. "That’s how our morning started," Syrotyn, 39, told the Kyiv Independent in a tired voice, showing the damage that the overnight Russian missile attack inflicted on his home. In the small two-story building, built in the early 20th century, around half of the windo...
Kyiv Independent
Five Ukrainian children were sleeping peacefully in their beds on March 2 when Russia launched the overnight drone attack against their hometown of Odesa that took their lives. Some came from different families but lived in the same apartment building in the southern Ukrainian port city. Instead of waking up in the morning as usual and continuing their lives in war-torn Ukraine, it was March 3 before their five little bodies were retrieved from under the rubble of their homes. In the early hours of March 2, Russia attacked Odesa with drones, hitting a multi-storied apartment building in one of...
Kyiv Independent
Editor’s Note: This story contains descriptions of graphic scenes. Yuliia Solomko couldn’t fall asleep late on the night of Feb. 9. Kharkiv, her hometown, was under yet another heavy Russian attack. Worse, she could hear explosions coming from the neighborhood where her best friend and her family lived. "It's very loud here," reads a text she received from her friend, Olha Putiatina. "But the kids are asleep," Putiatina wrote soon, reassuring Solomko that they were all right. It was the very last time Solomko heard from her. Just a couple of minutes later, a Russian drone attack struck a gas s...
Kyiv Independent
Olha Pankova, 39, had hoped to spend the rest of her life in Avdiivka. She had built a lovely home for herself and her children and wanted to grow old in the small Donetsk Oblast town, once home to almost 30,000 residents. But that was before Russia turned her dreams into ashes and her hometown into a smoldering pile of rubble. "I know our home is gone now," Pankova told the Kyiv Independent. Single mother Pankova and her three kids – Roman, 7, Serhii, 15, and 19-year-old Nadiia – were finally forced to flee Avdiivka in late October, just as Russia intensified the offensive it had launched to ...
Kyiv Independent
Editor’s Note: The young people featured in this article are either quoted by first name at their family’s request for privacy reasons or, in the case of service members active on the front line, for their safety. “The past two years have flown by. It’s hard to keep up with everything that has happened, so I haven’t been able to process how much I miss home yet,” Larysa, an 18 year-old Ukrainian who has been living in Vienna since the start of Russia's all-out war, told the Kyiv Independent. The full-scale invasion has forced Ukrainians between the ages of 18-25 to make difficult, sometimes li...
Kyiv Independent
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