Mila Turchyn enters a McDonald’s near the Polish-Ukrainian border. She worries. No one she meets can be trusted. He smuggles.
An Ukrainian stranded in Russia, Turchyn found him via a messaging app. So they agreed to drive Turchyn’s mother and sister from Moscow to Przemysl. It’s more than most war refugees can afford.
If it worked, she wonders.
Turchyn turns and falls into her sister’s arms. There is joy, but no time to hug her mother. Pay the smuggler now. He demands more money. No. She simply wants to be with her family at this point.
Finally, the three women are reunited in Poland. They hug quietly and quickly.
In Poland, Mila Turchyn (centre) was reunited with her mother Luba (right) and sister Vita (left).
Getting to safety for Ukrainians displaced in Russia is risky. Thousands of Ukrainians were forcibly deported into the country that bombed and besieged them. Turchyn, a Ukrainian-American medical student living in Cleveland, Ohio, began searching through messaging apps for information on her hometown Izium, where her mother and sister lived.
“I was looking for crumbs,” she says. “‘Do you know where a missile hit today?’ everyone asks on Viber groups. How do I find out?'”
Her phone was flooded with images of the city, which has been embroiled in conflict for weeks. Thousands of people living under constant airstrikes and shelling are starving.
“Every day it gets worse,” Max Strelnyk, a council deputy in Izium, told CNN in late March. “The Russians haven’t stopped bombing for weeks. There are graves in Central Park.”
In eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk, Izium is on the main road between Kharkiv and the Russian-backed separatist areas.
Turchyn lost contact with her family after a few days. Izium’s cell networks were cut or jammed. Mom and sister were presumed dead.
I was crying because I didn’t know if they were already dead,” she recalls, her voice cracking with emotion. Unable to help her family, Turchyn travelled to the Poland-Ukraine border, where millions of refugees were seeking refuge.
Finally, she got a call back, but not from Izium. “After a month, I finally heard from them, and I was devastated. I was glad they lived. But I screamed. It was Russia. And should I be happy? Or should I cry? “”
Turchyn later learned that her mother and sister had hired a local resident to drive them to the Russian border. No way east, into Ukraine.”We only had one chance,” Vita, Turchyn’s older sister, tells CNN. “And we didn’t want to miss it. We decided to go and figure it out later.”
When they arrived in Moscow, they tried to take a train to Belarus, but were stopped by Russian border guards. Turchyn needed them out. She started asking for help on the Viber groups that had helped her during the war.
A smuggler she found online “was given to me by a Polish person,” she says. “They try to keep it hidden because it’s risky.” Her mother and sister spent two days in a large van with other Ukrainians, crossing Latvia and Lithuania on their way to Przemysl.
“It’s worse than I thought,” Turchyn says as her mother and sister describe their weeks under Russian bombardment.
“In one word, it was hell. It was a nightmare you couldn’t escape “Luba, her mother. Not only are tens of thousands of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation cut off from their homeland, but the only way out is towards Putin.
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