“I suddenly felt very, very alone,”: The plight of Ukrainians staying behind to fight against Russia

Last Friday we told the story of Sasha Bubnovska, who fled Ukraine with her daughters after a harrowing ordeal, but today David Cohen speaks to the husband she left behind

(AFP/Getty)

“I suddenly felt very, very alone,” said Dima Bubnovskyi, as he recalled the gut-wrenching moment last Thursday as he watched his wife Sasha and their daughters Sofia, 6, and Mia, 2, disappear down the road towards the Polish border.

They had a few kilometres to walk to safety, but he had to turn round and drive back towards danger. “All my instincts as a father were to go with them but martial law meant otherwise,” he said.

“We had spent this intense week together, fleeing the bombs and sleeping on the floor of safe houses, and before that eight days hiding in the basement of our home in Irpin which was under fire from day one – and now we were forced to say goodbye to each other.

“It is hard to put my feelings into words, but it was like somebody took away all the important things in my life. I told my girls I loved them, that it would not be long before we were together, but inside I felt empty. I feared that maybe I will never see them again, though I was desperately trying to hold onto hope.”

Dima, a 29-year-old computer science graduate, could not risk going back to Irpin, so he drove to Truskavets, a town 90km from the border in western Ukraine, where the 80-year-old mother of a friend put him up in her spare room – and where he is currently staying.

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Like all young Ukrainian men, Dima faced immediate potential conscription into the army, but it has not happened yet.

“I admit that the thought of fighting on the frontline is very scary,” he said. “Of course, I can put a weapon in my arms and go fight and just die – but I worry about the future of my family. There are lots of young men who really want to fight the Russians and there are not enough weapons even for them. In the meantime, I feel I can be more useful to my country by helping to keep the economy going. Even our government says those who can work should because we have got to support our economy and pay taxes and so there are currently lots of men in western Ukraine who are working just as I am.”

Dima and Sasha, with their children Sofia 6 and Mia 2 (being held): ‘The last picture taken of us happy and together’ (Provided)

But Dima, an IT expert, has found it difficult to focus. He admitted: “I really miss my wife and children and I am struggling to concentrate. Last night I had a call with Sasha who told me that Mia was crying a lot and really missing me and cannot understand why I can’t join them. It broke my heart.”

He worries, too, about their house and the pets they left behind.

“The last thing I heard was six days ago when Sasha’s father escaped Irpin and went to live somewhere in the centre of Ukraine. At that point, two of the houses in our street had been hit. We have a black Labrador called Clode and a cat Lolita who we couldn’t bring with us because there was no room in the car, but Sasha’s father left keys with a neighbour and I hope that he has been able to feed them. We are very house proud, but we don’t know if our beautiful house is still standing and if our precious pets Claude and Lolita are alive or dead.”

Dima’s parents are divorced but live in Odessa, as do his grandparents, and for now they are all staying put. Western Ukraine still feels relatively safe, he said, though air-raid sirens go off “around four times a day”.

Dima has hardly been out since he arrived in Truskavets, apart from going to the shop once to stock up with food.

He said friends had seen the article we published, which they had circulated widely and he was grateful for it because it was a way to tell what had happened to them and show they were safe.

Sasha with her daughters Sofia and Mia crossing the border into Poland (Lucy Young)

I told Dima how I had met Sasha and his brave girls just a few hours after he left them. They were taking a moment’s respite from the freezing cold in a mother and child tent manned by the Red Cross and Caritas charity at the Kroscienko border crossing.

I said, too, that we had started an appeal Refugees Welcome to raise money for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Ukrainian Humanitarian Appeal, which is supporting 13 UK aid charities, including the Red Cross, and that together with our sister title, the Evening Standard, we had so far raised over £300,000.

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Sasha, he was glad to report, was safe and trying to settle the girls into some sort of routine, having travelled via Krakow to Koblentz in Germany where she has found a place to stay via a relative.

“The west, and especially the Polish and the Germans, have been amazingly generous to us,” he said. “We will be grateful to them forever.”

Dima with daughters Sofia and Mia (Provided)

He still thinks back to the shock they all felt on the day the war started. “It was the 19^th birthday of Sasha’s sister, Anastasia, and we had baked her a wonderful cake. We had to cut the cake on the floor of the bomb shelter and outside you could hear shells and bombs. It was such a sad and terrifying way to start her 20^th year.”

He added: “It’s only 21 days since the start of the war and our morale is high and that of the Russian soldiers is low, so we believe that there will be a successful negotiation within the next two months to end the war.

Meantime I look at the catastrophe for people stuck in Mariupol where 2,500 have died and it puts my personal situation in perspective. My family feel far away but at least they are safe. Every night we have a video call. I can’t wait to catch up, though, on the same sofa. It’s so incredibly lonely without them.”

The Independent has a proud history of campaigning for the rights of the most vulnerable, and we first ran our Refugees Welcome campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and launch this petition in the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we are calling on the government to go further and faster to ensure help is delivered. To find out more about our Refugees Welcome campaign, click here. To sign the petition click here. If you would like to donate then please click here for our GoFundMe page.