Olga and Sasha are two Ukrainian sisters. The first is 34 years old and is a wine merchant in Paris, where she has lived for seven years. The second, aged 32, lives in kyiv. At the start of the war, she moved in with her mother, her companion Viktor, her dog and her friend Y., in a building with an underground car park. At the rate of alerts, everyone goes back and forth between the apartment and the basement. The two sisters have agreed since the beginning of the conflict to keep their logbook to M. In kyiv, Sasha cooks for the fighters and sorts tons of products from abroad; in France, Olga suffers from not being able to convince her mother and sister to leave the city.
Tuesday, March 8
Olga: Yesterday I went to my singing lesson. I didn’t want to but I went. I was afraid my teacher wouldn’t support Ukraine. But he was full of compassion and understanding. I even laughed for the first time in twelve days because at one point I sang very very out of tune. I think the main thing is to keep busy so that you don’t think about the horrible things and the worst. For the first time since the beginning of the war, my mother sent me a message saying that she understood that I was suffering here, as much or even more than they were there. She had never told me that. Her other messages were informational, she repeated: “It’s okay, it’s okay. » It felt so good to see that mom understands that I feel the same things as them, that I look at the same images as them. Even if I’m far away, here, all alone. With all my heart, I would like to be with them.
Sasha: it snows all the time, we are always cold. Our daily life already seems ordinary to us: four of us sleep in a room, we prepare meals for the soldiers of the army and those of the territorial defense, we spend hours in the parking lot during the sirens of air attacks. Yesterday evening, we still played cards – bridge – and we drank the cognac we had left to forget everything we had seen and known during the day.
I started looking for work. There are Telegram channels that relay teleworking offers from national and foreign companies. We’re trying to plan for the future, it seems. The images of war become more brutal. The Russian army carves out the villages and towns to the east and south-east. Closer to us, the region northwest of Kyiv [Kiev, M respecte le choix orthographique d’Olga et de Sasha] is completely blocked and destroyed. People try to use the humanitarian corridors, but the Russians kill them in the streets. We see the photos, the bodies of people and children with their suitcases and their bags next to them. This is the Russian war.
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