A Ukrainian woman living in London said her friends called from Ukraine and said goodbye before enlisting to fight Russia. Yana Usherenko-Fialkova, 31, was born and grew up in Kyiv but has lived in the UK, where she works as a lawyer, for 10 years.
She said her family fled Ukraine’s capital the day before Russia invaded. “It is an overwhelming terror that you can’t shake off – that goes to the core of your very being,” Ms Usherenko-Fialkova, who lives in Poplar, east London, said.
“It feels like everything you know, everything that makes you who you are – your entire foundation is being destroyed every second of every day,” she said of the war. “Everything you know and love – you fall asleep thinking, ‘Am I going to have a home in the morning? Am I going to have parents? Am I going to have friends alive?’.”
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Ms Usherenko-Fialkova’s parents remain just outside Kyiv with her 92-year-old grandmother. “They are terrified… it’s the potential horror that scares them the most,” she said.
“And we have my grandma, who can’t leave. And if she’s not leaving, no one’s leaving.”
Ms Usherenko-Fialkova also described being worried about the safety of countless friends who are fighting in Ukraine’s military. “My friends are out there and they are fighting in the Territorial Defence,” she said.
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“Some of them called and said goodbye when they enlisted into the Territorial Defence. They’re in the streets right now… every night I go to bed reading the news of grenades and bombs being flooded over Kyiv, things being shot at and Russian army troops in the streets and I’m thinking, ‘Are they going to get to where my friends are stationed?
Ms Usherenko-Fialkova spoke of the “overwhelming sense of pride” that has swept across her home nation. “As a country, it has been absolutely wide-opening and fantastic – heart-breaking, absolutely heart-breaking, but fantastic to see what we have become in such a short space of time,” she said.
She appealed to friends in London and has already been able to provide £700 of humanitarian aid to Ukraine. “We bought sleeping bags, socks, warm clothes, hygiene products and baby food,” she said.
Ms Usherenko-Fialkova said she cannot fight in Ukraine but can do her bit from the UK to support her country. “If I have to go to the shop and buy the goods and ship them through to volunteers and trucks, I will do that,” she said.
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