On the first day of war Iryna woke up at 5:25, when her phone made a sound of an incoming message.  “I will take a different route…”, it read. It was a friend who was normally giving her a lift to one of her places of work. “OK, I will go to another job today”, Iryna thought as she was heading towards her kitchen to make a breakfast. Then, she heard a loud boom somewhere nearby, which sounded like an explosion. Her windows were facing the courtyard, so she could not really see what was going on on the other side. She carried on making breakfast, then opened her phone…

So, it was an explosion! She went into the corridor to see what was happening on the street. There was a huge queue in front of the cash machine. Also, a lot of people were rushing home with plastic bags full of bulk foods. There was a palpable panic in the air. Iryna did not need to go the shop, she had a well-stocked fridge, so she decided to sit tight.

She called her best friend Oksana who lived in Hostomel, an affluent town on the outskirts of Kyiv, and found out that she was OK, and staying in Kyiv with her son.  Oksana had bought her flat in Hostomel only a couple of months before. It was only one mile from a military airport.  Two hours after their conversation Iryna found out that the airport was attacked… Her friend got lucky on that day.

The situation was getting more tense. A low-flying formation of airplanes appeared from nowhere and passed overhead. “The airspace is closed; they cannot be civilian planes. Are they Russian? Are they about to drop bombs on us?”. Sounds of explosions followed, although more distant that time. Iryna remembers an overwhelming sense of panic. In order to distract herself, to cling on to some remnants of her disappearing normality, she did some laundry, tidied up her flat, and decided to cook some soup, so that she would have had some hot food, which were easy to heat up later on. Then she remembered that she needed bread. She went down to the shop, and there were far less people there than there had been in the morning. There was no bread on the shelves, however. Disappointed, Iryna turned around and decided to go back when a woman carrying loaves of fresh warm bread seemed to appear from nowhere. Iryna still remembers the smell, the warmth, the feel of that loaf in her hands. It was perfect. She suddenly thought that it might be the last loaf of bread in her rapidly changing life.

When she got home, her telephone would not stop ringing – her many friends from all over Europe were calling her, making sure she was OK, offering their homes, and any help with getting out of Ukraine, which was becoming less and less likely by the minute. She was overwhelmed with their kindness. She sat down and started crying.

View from the balcony in the first week of the war.

Those were the strongest emotions of her first day of war – the initial news that she could not believe in, the explosions, the low-flying planes, the panic in the streets, the telephone call to her friend, and her lucky escape, the warm loaf of bread in her hands, the kindness of friends…

In the following days Iryna learned how to survive in her new reality. The city is traversed by the great Dnipro, one of the major rivers of Europe, which originates in Russia, before flowing through Belarus and Ukraine to the Black Sea. It divides Kyiv in two halves – the right bank, where the old city, the city centre, and generally people’s places of work are; and the left bank, with its Soviet-built boxy blocks of flats, as well as more modern ant houses where people go to sleep. The opposite banks are connected by several bridges, which get very busy during rush hours. There is an underground, which goes overground as it approaches Dnipro on both sides, but it also gets overcrowded as people go to work in the morning, and back to their ant houses in the evening.

Iryna lived on the left bank, and like many people was cut out from some of her places of work in the first days of war. There was a real risk that Russians would bomb the bridges, and any traffic through them was severely restricted. Iryna had to go online, this time for a different reason.

Iryna with interns anaesthetists in the theatre.

She worked as a paediatric anaesthetist, but also an assistant professor at an Anaesthetic Department of a University Hospital, and was actively involved in teaching medical students, as well as interns. During the pandemic, she had worked hard to create an online teaching platform that allowed to maintain the existing standards, as well as explore new opportunities offered by the virtual environment. She is extremely tech savvy and has created this website among other things. I have known her for 8 years since the war in the East had broken out in 2014. She had been one of the founders of the British-Ukrainian Symposium (BUS), having overseen both its technical support and programming. Throughout those years I have spoken at the BUS, as well as different other training seminars, which we have set up for my Ukrainian colleagues, and Iryna was always doing a stellar job ensuring that everything ran without a glitch.

Her scientific work was awarded a prize at one of the international meetings.

One of our classes with Ukrainian colleagues in Kyiv in 2018, Irina is recording a video of my lecture

In those first few days of the war Iryna had to adapt very quickly. It became very clear that she was stuck on the left bank of Dnipro river. The hospital she worked at was closed on the second day, patients and stuff were evacuated to another hospital. Doctors and nurses who had been on call at the hospitals when the war started, just stayed and carried on working, and living there; those who had been at home – were staying at home. Iryna set up her “office” at the basement of the house, a nine-story Soviet-built block of flats. There was a small community of people, who like Iryna had not had an opportunity to escape from the city on the first day of war. The basement was their bomb shelter, and the place where they were now spending most of their time at as air raid sirens were virtually constant then. They tidied, and cosied place up, making sure that there were enough supplies to last for a while, they were taking care of each other. Iryna had a quiet room all to herself, where she was recording lectures, and seminars for students and interns, as well as putting up some online content which would have been relevant to her colleagues treating ballistic trauma in children.

Then on day five, ballistic missiles flew by their house… Iryna was at her flat when she first heard an explosion. It was louder and more powerful than the ones they had gotten used to by then and there were no air sirens preceding it. Then there was this sound, which reminded Iryna of black-and-white Soviet war movies, which had been constantly showing on the state TV when she was a child. It sounded almost exactly like low-flying German bombers about to start dropping bombs, or that was what she had been pre-conditioned to fear as a child growing up in the USSR. I remember this too – all Soviet children knew those sounds and were scared of them. Our endocrine systems, fight or flight reflexes, adrenaline release were all pre-conditioned to respond to those sounds. Then many years later Iryna had a chance to hear it again, only that time it was not a Soviet black-and-white movie; it was a full out Russian invasion in colour, and 3D sound, and you did not need a pair of IMAX goggles to be absorbed by it…

Iryna ran downstairs, into the basement while the house was shaking as sounds of powerful explosions were being heard. Still no air raid sirens… As she was about to enter their “bomb shelter” she was struck by how ridiculous that name sounded in relation to what it really was – a basement just a short flight of stairs underneath an old block of flats with walls made of cardboard – it would have become their shallow grave if that house of cards had collapsed. She stood in front of the basement, thinking about what she should do next. Then, she realised that she was not alone – a woman and a boy were standing next to her.

“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” – asked Iryna.
“Yes, we don’t stand a chance if we stay in the basement. Let’s go up and try to find a space between two solid walls” – said the woman.

That was the official advice to follow during bombings – either go to a nearest bomb shelter or stay between two solid walls. They ran back upstairs. Unfortunately, the hostel-type building did not have many – there were too many flats along the main corridors, which all have small rooms with rather thin walls and windows on the opposite side. After a frantic search, they finally found a suitable place. They all lay on the floor face down listening to more explosions and feeling the ground shake underneath. Iryna remembers feeling an urge to let somebody know what was happening, anybody. There was no point writing to anybody who was in Kyiv. So, she wrote a text message to her Russian friends in Saint Petersburg, who had expressed their support for Ukraine previously. “Pray for us” – that was all she was capable of writing, but it somehow did have some calming effect on her.

After about 40 minutes, the air raid sirens finally went off. Everything went eerily quiet afterwards. Then a door opened, and a young guy, one of Iryna’s former students casually stepped out into the corridor.

“Have you heard the explosions? Where did you hide?”
“Yes, I have. Our teacups all fell on the floor, and broke. No, I did not hide. What is the point?”

Shaken, the women decided to go to the basement to check if the others were there. Natasha, the other woman offered Iryna to have a shot of whiskey. Iryna, an almost teetotaller remembers using a 15-ml Paracetamol measuring cup to fill her shot glass with exactly 45 millilitres, which she decided would be her therapeutic dose. They were finally able to have a “small talk” with each other:

“Did you see the sky lighting up like it was an erupting volcano?”
“No. But did you hear the roars of explosions?”
“No, I did not notice them.”

They later realised that their windows were facing the opposite sides of the building, which explained the difference in their perception of the same event. Also, light travels faster than sound, so there was that too. The sensory processor in their brains seemed to have been overwhelmed by one dominant sensory experience (sight, or sound of the explosion) to the point that they were not able to either see, or hear the other one.

When they reached the basement, they were met by their neighbours – some had been there from the beginning, others like them were just joining in. There were some kids, and a pregnant woman there. Everyone started checking for news and updates on their phones. It looked like Russians had launched a missile attack at a military base not far from where they were. It seemed like they had not missed…

Scrolling through the news feed, Iryna realised that a maternity hospital located at a small town near Kyiv had been bombed. One of her good friends was supposed to be on call there at the time. His phone was not answering. She called his wife, and she said that he was OK, and that it was not that bad. She also said that there was no electricity, or hot water in their town as its infrastructure had been destroyed by Russians previously. As the war dragged on, this was revealed as a typical Russian modus operandi that they used for capturing smaller towns, and villages – destroy their infrastructure first, then bomb the hell out of them, then move in and restore some infrastructure and pose for their propagandist TV channels as “liberators from the Nazis” in front of “grateful” natives.

The attack was over. Everyone was OK, for now… It was the scariest nightmare that Iryna experienced during the war. She was deeply affected by it. Later, when in Krakow waiting for her British Visa to be processed, she could not make herself go outside. She stayed inside her hotel being afraid that had a plane passed overhead, then it would have triggered that feared fight-or-flight response, which she had first experienced as a little girl watching low-flying German bombers in Soviet black-and-white films.

The auntie.

Iryna, an ethnic Russian came to Ukraine with her parents, also Russians when she was four years old. The family settled in Kyiv, a largely Russian-speaking city up until recently. Iryna considers it to be her mother tongue. She has never experienced any problems speaking it either at work, or at any social situations. Even after the start of the war she has carried on speaking Russian, although now being more conscious about it.

As many other Ukrainians with friends and relatives living in Russia, she has had to deal with the tragedy of witnessing the effects of Russian propaganda on their loved ones. I myself know how awful it is to see a human being you care about turn into a zombie in front of your eyes. My own mother, an ethnic Ukrainian who had lived in Moscow since the age of twelve, died in 2014 six months after the Russian occupation of Crimea, and the start of the war in the East being convinced, and trying to convince me that Russians were liberating Ukraine from “Nazis”. Up until the day she died, she had been spurting propaganda lines completely impenetrable to any reasonable argument that I was trying to present to her. It really felt like she was dying of rabies, rather than cancer. Or maybe it was a kind of cancer that also eats your soul…

Iryna’s aunt is infected with the same contagion. It is difficult for Westerners to comprehend how this is possible, but you must realise that it has not happened overnight. It has taken over 20 years to build a parallel reality that most Russians live in. Also, it has taken that much time to get rid of (often physically) all the significant opposition leaders, to stop any public debates about any issues that the regime considers controversial.

Iryna’s aunt started sending her emails from Day One of the war. They contained “updates” from the Dark Side, as well as some practical advice about imminent bombings of the city by “Nazis”, of course! Curiously, a lot of those “predictions” turned out to be accurate – the Russian propaganda channels are known to mix the truth with lies to make them look real. I have read her “updates”, and it made me feel literally sick – as if I had my brain transplanted, and it is now being rejected by my immune system, which has somehow survived intact, as it has not been suppressed by years of aggressive Russian propaganda.

Iryna started writing her war diaries from Day One and sending it to her friends. In fact, the accounts of Day One, and Five above are rough translations of her diary entries on those days. She initially started sending it to her aunt as well in the hope that that would make her think, or even re-consider some of her godawful opinions about the “special operation”. Her response was:

“Well done! As far as I understand, you are now employed as a freelance journalist by your Western masters! You are writing the stuff you are being paid for. You do not want to listen to me because I am not the one paying you!”

The level of intellectual, and moral degradation is astounding. There are contradictory statements, outright lies, projections, as well as attempts at deeper geopolitical analysis. “The Western Nazis can’t forgive Russia for killing Hitler, so they are supporting Ukrainian Nazis in their fight to eradicate pure Slavs (?Russians)”. There are constant pleas to Iryna to get out of the country using one of “the green corridors”, which were periodically opened by Russians. Iryna knew full well what happened to people using them – the best-case scenario being a separation of families, and their forced repatriation into remote Russian regions. It was an all too familiar Russian tactic – occupation of a territory, forceful repatriation of its native inhabitants, and bringing in ethnic Russians who have no connection to the land, and its history (russification)  – vote for the occupiers as liberators! It is happening right now in the Ukraine’s occupied territories.

I cannot translate all the garbage that I have read in full – it is too personal, too emotional to me. I will let Iryna speak about this:

“I can’t put my pain into words. I am sorry to send this in full, I do not know if a healthy human being is able to tolerate reading through this trash. This is war as seen by the people zombified by the Russian State TV.

This is not for public use, but more for the specialist psychiatrists, and psychologists who could make the right diagnosis of that disease. On the other hand, what Putin’s regime has done to, and with Russian people is a crime. The interference into their intellectual sphere, the manipulation of their ability to think independently are not simply propaganda. They should amount to assault and battery, and even rape at an industrial scale. Those alone are enough to sentence those responsible to life in prison, and that is before we even start considering the war crimes… Of course, there are “reasonable people”, who can tell the truth from lies, and this is their responsibility too, but propaganda is a blunt tool, and dulls the sharpest of intellects. It is a blatant interference into a person’s very ability to think.

My aunt had been a “normal person” before 2014. We had always been close. She had been coming to Ukraine regularly, every Summer, but in the last 8 years she has turned into a nationalist zombie.  I can’t see what has become of her, and I really do not know how to stop it”.

Iryna’s pain is made worse by the fact that her aunt is the only relative that she has left. Both of her parents are dead, and there are no other surviving family members besides her.

For Iryna, this is a story of Russia’s occupation of Ukraine as she sees it, but also a more personal tragedy, a zombification of her Russian aunt, a war at a smaller scale within her family. Both wars left her devastated. It has taken time, but she is now on the road to recovery.

After spending 9 days under “house arrest”, and when things eased off a little, she was able to join her friends at a large tertiary hospital where she was given a room to stay. She was able to set up a proper office with high-quality electronic gear, and continued her teaching activities online, as well as in person as there were a few interns working there.

We even recorded a few training sessions together, as well as a Q&A session on major trauma issues. I remember air raid sirens going off in the middle of it. It was late here in the UK, and even later in Kyiv. I could not see anybody on their side, as they were in full dark mode. There were just their voices, and the air raid sirens.

Q&A session on major trauma issues, which Irina and I recorded and posted on her educational YouTube channel for fellow anaesthetists.

“You should probably go down to the bomb shelter”
“Nah, we’ll stay!”

I should have insisted, but I knew they would have ignored me. I knew those people well by then… Iryna was one of them.

She stayed at the hospital for a while until she finally decided to leave the country, at least for a while. She needed a break from the war. She also wanted to carry on working on, and developing various online educational projects, and needed a more peaceful environment to realise her plans. She has managed to make it out of the country safely and is now staying with an old friend in London.

This has been the most difficult story for me to write because:

• Iryna is a friend, I know her better than the heroes of my other stories.
• As a fellow Russian, I do share her emotions, and had similar experiences with the members of my own family, who are thankfully all dead now (a horrible thing to say, but better properly dead than carrying on as zombies!).

We hope that this story will shed some light on the situation, and public opinion within Russia. It is not just Putin, but the “collective Putin” by now. It is worth remembering that there was still quite a significant support for Hitler in Germany long after the war…