REPORTAGE – With the Russian invasion, the refugees are faced with the same question for the second time: will we ever be able to return?
Special envoy to Lviv
Ksénia Dudko is only 24 years old, yet she has already had to flee the war twice. In 2014, this Ukrainian had just finished high school in Amvrosiivka, a town 25 km from the Russian border, in the Donetsk region. In the spring of 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and as Russia supported pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine, Russian soldiers entered his town. “They came to the school to see the young girls, to take pictures with them and with weapons. Ksénia was only 16 years old, she said to me: “Mom, I want to leave here””, says his mother Svetlana, by telephone from Germany where she found refuge with acquaintances.
This 51-year-old radiologist doctor at the time took her daughter near Poltava, a city in central Ukraine, “with people I didn’t know, because we don’t have family in the rest of the country”. The line of cars in which they leave, via a humanitarian corridor, finds itself under the bombardments…