For the first time since the war began, the Stanislavchuk family was together again.
Yehor was leading his parents, Natasha and Sasha, his sister, Tasya, and his grandmother, Lyudmila, on a tour of Bucha, the quaint suburb of Kyiv that has become synonymous with Russian savagery.
Here was the school where Yehor had hid for two weeks as Russian troops bombed and murdered their way through the town. There, at the entrance to the school basement, was where a Russian soldier had shot a woman in the head just because he could. And over there, on top of the yellow crane, was where the sniper sat, picking off civilians as they scrounged for food and water.
Yehor, 28, spoke calmly, and no one expressed surprise. These stories are well known now in Ukraine.
The last time I saw the Stanislavchuks was on March 11. At the time, Yehor was trapped in Bucha, listening to the footsteps of Russian soldiers on the floor above the basement where he was hiding. He was plotting his escape, but no one knew if it was safe for him to leave.
A couple Yehor knew had tried to get out of Bucha a few days earlier. Only the wife came back, shot through the leg. Her husband had been killed.
I was with the rest of the Stanislavchuks in Mykolaiv, the southern Ukrainian port city where the family is from. We spent that March day awaiting news of Yehor’s progress. Natasha prepared a meal of mashed potatoes and stewed beef that we washed down with shots of vodka. She had an Orthodox icon of the Virgin Mary with her, along with a holy book opened to a prayer about children. Occasionally we rushed to the basement to hide from incoming artillery.
When the war began, they had been in Bucha, less than an hour from Kyiv, putting the finishing touches on a new showroom for their interior design business. Their main store in Mykolaiv had been doing well, and the family hoped to expand. Yehor had moved to Bucha shortly after college and the family fell in love with the town’s pine forests and colourful modern buildings that made it look as if it could be a suburb of Oslo, Norway.
The first rockets hit the Hostomel airport near Bucha about 5 am on February 24, shaking the family awake. Sasha and Natasha’s first thought was to get home to Mykolaiv, where Tasya, 11, was staying with her grandmother. Only when they were stuck in traffic along with everyone else trying to flee Kyiv and its environs, did they wonder whether they should have taken Yehor with them.
“To be honest, for a long time I could not come to terms with the fact that on the 24th we were here, and we did not bring him with us,” Natasha told me. “I thought about consulting a psychologist. How could I do that? I had the feeling that we just abandoned him.”
Their business shut down and their son trapped by Russian forces nearly 400 miles away, Sasha and Natasha threw themselves into volunteer work in Mykolaiv, driving around the city in their white SUV delivering food and medicine to neighbours too infirm or scared to leave their homes. Although Bucha and the towns around Kyiv were bearing the brunt of the Russian onslaught at the time, life in Mykolaiv was not easy. Air raid sirens sounded constantly, and each day brought new missile attacks on homes and businesses as Russian forces lay siege. - New York Times
Michael Schwirtz
The writer is an investigative reporter with NYT
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