When the explosions – and with them the idea of imminent death – got too close in the Ukrainian town of Irpin near kyiv, 72-year-old Tamara Osypchuk went back to writing poetry.
“The explosions were very loud, like the eruption of a volcano, like the Earth itself was exploding,” she said, sitting in a chair at an evacuation center in the suburbs of kyiv, dressed in a a long black fur coat, beige scarf and red woolen cap.
“I write poems and when there are outbursts, I feel great inspiration,” says Tamara Osypchuk.
She found herself, almost reluctantly, among the twenty civilians who were able to leave the devastated town of Irpin on Saturday.
The fighting demolished part of the building where she lived on the ninth floor. But the old lady left her apartment only because a relative had her send ambulances in charge, since the beginning of the fighting, of evacuating the inhabitants.
“I thought I was going to die here, that I wouldn’t leave Ukraine,” she says, having asked to speak to her daughter who lives in Great Britain.
“I love Ukraine very much. I have traveled a lot around the world but nowhere else, neither in England, nor in the Czech Republic, in Poland or in Italy, have I felt what I feel here”, she confides.
– “The dogs are fine” –
Russia announced Friday its decision to focus on “the liberation of Donbass”, in eastern Ukraine, stronghold of pro-Russian separatists, seeming to revise its war objectives downwards.
US President Joe Biden, however, said in Warsaw on Saturday that he was “not sure” the announcement meant a change in Russian strategy.
Around kyiv, the fighting continues to “repel the enemy offensive”, according to the Ukrainian staff, specifying that the front line has not moved.
Life has become impossible in Irpin with intense fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces.
A quiet suburb of kyiv, its strategic location in the attempt to encircle the capital by Russian forces turned it into a theater of fierce fighting.
Most of its inhabitants had left it by taking the remains of a destroyed bridge and now its last occupants are abandoning it.
In the reception center, other refugees are crowding. An old lady, her head bandaged, is transported in a stretcher.
A visibly distressed ten-year-old girl stands next to her mother, who is drinking tea from a plastic cup and crying.
These latest families to leave Irpin almost all seem to have pets. They preferred to wait for help rather than abandon it.
Volunteers made several round trips under fire, transporting the animals and their owners in pick-up trucks.
Svitlana Rogutska was able to leave Irpin with ten dogs and a cat after a long wait for these volunteers. “The dogs, she said, are fine.”