Some say they thought they were safe. They were wrong.
I have clear memories of standing behind my mother in clothes stores when I was a kid, waiting for her to finish finding me the right size in a sweater, or the right color in a t-shirt. I’m guessing you have too.
I remember the sound of her scraping the hangers back one by one on metal rails, quickly inspecting and then discarding each item. I would stand, mostly quite bored, waiting for this task to be completed on my behalf. I didn’t know how lucky I was. The classic steely determination of a mother getting stuff done.
Those memories came back to me this morning at an evacuation point in Kharkiv, as I came across Olena and her 12-year-old son Maxim.He was standing obediently by with a lollipop in his mouth, watching our camera with interest. They were not in a warm department store with the promise of a home to go back to. Olena was instead rifling through boxes of donated clothes and shoes, asking her relatively unbothered son if he liked this shoe or that shirt.
The tragedy here is that these towns and villages had already been liberated by the earlier Russian advance. Ukraine had pushed them out. They blame this reversal of fortunes on the lack of weaponry needed to keep this region protected. Like so many Ukrainians we meet, Olena describes her hardship and then shrugs, returning to her task. She has found a sneaker that fits Maxim but must now find its pair.
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