Note: The CoffeeShop, run by Olga Boiko and her husband in the Mission District since 2012, is holding a fundraiser for Ukraine. They are selling special tote and coffee bags from March 5 to 12, and all funds will be split between a Ukrainian defense fund and a Ukrainian shelter for women and children. If you’re inclined, visit their shops at 3139 Mission St. or 2761 21st St.
This week, an email from Mission Local’s freelancer in Ukraine arrived with a warning: he might not be able to update our events calendar, because he was searching for a bomb shelter.
Mike, 33, is a technical engineer and a freelance web assistant in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. He lives with his wife, his mother-in-law, and his daughter, whom Mike asked not to be named. For the time being, they have opted to stay in their apartment, about 130 miles from the front lines.
As the Russian invasion enters its second week, he spoke to us about what is happening in his city.
Thanks for speaking with us, Mike. So, you are currently living in Dnipro with your family. How old is your daughter?
She is one year old. That’s very good, because she is too young to understand what’s happening right now. She just thinks it’s a game when we are hiding, when we are sitting in a dark room. It’s just a game for her.
We’re still in our apartment. We tried to find a bomb shelter close to our apartment, one that is not very far away, but every address that we’ve been given was closed or non-functioning or even non-existent.
I don’t understand. Were they full?
They were not functioning at all. Maybe they were abandoned, or they were without any communications or any exits. They were just unable to use them for bomb shelters.
So we decided to stay at our apartment. We will just close all the doors, close all the windows and we’ll sit between two walls. They say it’s the safest place in these situations. We decided [to stay] because I don’t know what else to do. It’s quiet now. We have had only two air raid sirens today, in the morning, but yesterday it was around 12 or something like that.
To go into some distant place, with a kid on your hands and a cat on your hands, is complicated. And with all the difficulty with going to a shelter, we decided to stay in the apartment.
You mentioned air raid sirens. What is setting them off: Missiles, aircraft?
They detect something that comes to our area and they issue this air siren. They don’t know if it’s a bomb, if it’s an aircraft, if it’s a missile; we don’t know what is this. So it’s kind of like a preventive action.
It’s maybe going to another town, maybe 200 kilometers [124 miles] away, but we need to go in the shelter or hide, just in case.
There are a lot of Telegram channels nowadays, official and unofficial. And everybody’s saying that Russia is using high-precision guided missiles, but they are not so high-precision and high-accuracy. It seems to me we are lucky here, but people in Kharkiv and people in Kyiv, they’ve already experienced that. It’s not just military targets that are attacked.
We have packs ready to go, with the documents, with the valuables, with the clothes. We have packed it already. So it stays in our safe place when the sirens go.
It sounds terrifying.
It was scary the first time, the second time, and it’s … Somehow you get used to it. It’s crazy, but you get used to it.
Do you feel that you and your family are safe?
We are happy to have all this time [to prepare]. Since the 24th of February, [when there was a large explosion 6.2 miles away]. We still haven’t had any explosions near.
They have all these preparations with the army, with the volunteers. They are digging anti-tank trenches, they have welded anti-tank hedgehogs. I have seen this with my own eyes.
The state television provides Molotov cocktail recipes. And I’ve heard stories that homeless people are collecting bottles and giving them to the territory defense units to make these cocktails. That’s crazy, but that’s our reality now.
Have you considered joining the armed volunteers?
[Mike leans forward conspiratorially] My wife wouldn’t let me do this [He laughs]. I would rather volunteer in something like health or transportation or something like that.
Being a man between 18 and 60, you’re not allowed to leave the country. But has your family talked about leaving?
We have discussed this just earlier today. The way we were proposed to leave the country was to go to Germany. But my wife said ‘No, we won’t leave you here alone.’ So if we go, we all go.
We’ll try to do the best we can do here.
If the front line advances to Dnipro, what will you do?
It won’t happen. It won’t happen. I have faith in our military. I have faith in our volunteers. I have faith in all the actions that were taken to not let this happen.
Again, I thank God that we had so much time for all this preparation from the city administration, from the government. Because Kharkiv, which is near the Russian border, didn’t have such time. They didn’t have such opportunities to prepare the defense. And now you see what is happening there.
I’m glad to hear such optimism from someone on the ground.
We don’t have much to do. Optimism is our weapon.
Are there any problems with power, food, or other resources in Dnipro at the moment?
Not many problems at all. We still have electricity, we still have water, and everything is still working fine, except the Internet is kind of slow sometimes. It gets overloaded and even voice calls are sometimes not available.
We have been in a privileged position. We are quite far from all the actions that are around. As I say, the closest explosion was something like 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] away, and it was the only explosion that we heard.
They attacked Dnipro International Airport. I don’t know why, because it’s a civil airport and it has been a civil airport for something like 50 years or so.
Do you have other family or friends caught up in the invasion?
Yes. I have a few friends that live in Kyiv. We studied together at university and we still have contact once in a while. And some of them, they left Kyiv to go to more quiet places, such as Kropyvnytskyi, where my parents live.
But some of them stayed in Kyiv. And I asked today, ‘Would you like to come to us to hide for some time?’ And they said, ‘No, we got used to it.’ So maybe we are masochists!
They are also quite optimistic that it’s not for long and that this invasion will end in some days.
What are your thoughts on President Zelenskyy?
That’s a great question, because personally, when the election happened, I didn’t like him. I didn’t vote for him. He was a comedian person; he was not a politician at all.
But from his inauguration to this day, he changed everything. If you look up the graphs of appreciation of Ukrainian people, you can see that everything changed quite drastically. Almost 90 percent of people or something like that support him. Now we all support him because, to stand in such a situation. … You should have some huge balls.
Even people who hated him or disliked him for the past two years or so, they cannot say the same right now. We have not had anyone else do so much for the unity of the people. All these different political parties, different views, and so on … It’s not relevant right now. It’s all about only this one aim: That we have to win this war.
What do you think of the sanctions and other responses from the West?
Two words: Not enough. They should at least close the airspace over Ukraine. Maybe some fighter jets or maybe something to hit missiles in flight. All these humanitarian goods, all these armored vehicles and fighter jets, it is great, but we still do not have enough.
—
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
If you are able to help the people of Ukraine, the Red Cross is collecting donations for humanitarian aid, and NPR has put together a list of foundations and charities responding to the crisis.