If We Cut Arts What Are We Fighting for?
'We will stay here. Nosotros will fight'
Updated 1136 GMT (1936 HKT) March 15, 2022
Solotvyno, Ukraine (CNN)In the offset moments of respite since fleeing her dwelling, Lilya Solodovnik watches her pigtailed six-twelvemonth-old, Lena, rocking on a blue plastic pony. Their dwelling city of Kharkiv has been pummeled by Russian forces, and her friends and family are now hiding in bomb shelters.
Solodovnik, and dozens of other women and children from Ukraine's besieged cities, have found a rubber haven in a old orphanage-turned-shelter in Solotvyno, a hamlet nestled in the Carpathian mountains near the Romanian border. Here, they are resisting the literal last mile out of the country.
"I don't want to get out my husband alone in Ukraine," says Solodovnik of her partner, who worked as a driver until three weeks ago. He dropped off his family unit hither and turned back around to fight. "This, here, is however Ukraine. Information technology'southward my home," she tells CNN.
More than than 2.8 million refugees accept fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24. Even in sleepy Solotvyno, one of Ukraine'south smallest border crossings, thousands have come to walk the narrow, wooden bridge spanning the tranquil Tisza river to Romania, a member of the European Union and NATO.
Most have backpacks or schlep trolleys with the few property they can carry every bit they cross.
"When we arrived, the volunteers showed us the edge," says Nina, a retired kindergarten teacher from a suburb of Kyiv, who is staying in Solotvyno with her daughter and granddaughter. She is likewise scared to give her concluding name. "But then the gears were turning in our head: 'Why should we go? We are at abode, in Ukraine.'"
Now, these women are stuck in what has get a no-homo's land of the heart -- they oasis't fled their country, but as, they're not at abode with their loved ones, who are facing Russia's attacks.
Inside the first ii weeks of the invasion, the population here has doubled, says Timur Averin, head of assistants for Tyachiv district, during a visit to Solotvyno'southward municipal offices. In this bucolic village, some farmers still work the country by horse and cart.
Across the street, the lines at the ATM are getting longer and gasoline is being rationed. But people are still getting haircuts and attention church on Sundays.
"It is the safest, the closest to Europe, the closest to NATO, the closest to security," says Averin, speaking of the wider region around Solotvyno.
Even as Russian forces began striking cities in the w, the closest bombardments were about 110 miles (180 kilometers) away, in Ivano-Frankivsk, at the foot of the mountains.
At the shelter, Vivian, a volunteer who declined to give her last proper name out of fright for her rubber, pulls upwardly a map tracking the fighting on her telephone. In that location are ii big swaths of Ukraine devoid of dots and crosses: 1 borders Putin-allied Belarus, she notes. "And the other 1 is us."
Though Averin believes Ukraine will have won the state of war in ii or three weeks, for now, he is preparing for his commune's population to triple, mostly with women and children. "There is a lot of patriotism amidst the women," which keeps them tethered to Ukraine, he says.
They've also become vital to the war attempt. Women and children here cutting donated T-shirts and pants into strips, then knot them into camouflage nets.
On the muddy driveway to the shelter, local volunteers and footballers who joined Solotvyno's commencement competitive team but i calendar month ago heave donations sent from Romania. Inside, the women repackage the canned food, flour and baby formula milk, then ship them to the besieged cities.
"We are getting a lot of back up from Romania," says Angela Biletska, a local nurse who has been working xiv-hour days to oversee medical donations. Her shins are covered in bruises and cuts from lifting boxes.
'I similar that there are no bombs'
As Europe experiences its fastest-growing refugee crisis since Globe War II, it is responding with an outpouring of aid. Inside a day, the donated items began spilling out of the shelter's spare rooms and into the hallways, and now stack loftier against the facade of the three-story building.
They're sorely needed. Getting supplies into eastern Ukraine has go increasingly difficult -- and unsafe. "It'southward constant, every minute," Solotovnik says of the bombings in her home in Kharkiv, one of the hardest-hit cities. Her friends and family are all the same trapped there in bomb shelters. "They have nothing -- no food -- zilch," she says.
Nina and her family, too, were holed up in the basement of their flat building, ever dressed and ready to run. "Nosotros were waiting until the last moment," the 62-year-old says. On the eighth day of the invasion, she flagged downwards the sole car she spotted driving past her apartment building, and asked the driver to take them out of Kyiv. "We had 5 minutes to pack," Nina says. Their Chihuahua, named Rave after the music, stayed behind with her son-in-law.
Nina'south girl says she's also traumatized to speak, as is Nina's granddaughter. When volunteers knocked on their door to phone call them to dinner, they are jolted, jumpy from sudden noises after living for days nether bombardment.
In the arts and crafts room, Magdalena Myhailivna is trying to have the children's minds off the war. "It'south important to do normal things with them," says Myhailivna, an arts teacher for more than than 50 years.
She is teaching them to paint trees and tulips with h2o colors and for International Women's Day they went to a local park to choice flowers for their mothers. "I like that there are no bombs," says Sofia, a daughter from Kharkiv, who wears a unicorn sweater and wants to be a veterinary when she grows up.
Anastasia, an 8-twelvemonth-old who is staying here with her female parent, recites a verse by i of Ukraine'due south foremost writers, Lesia Ukrainka, a feminist and anti-Russian imperialist.
"They asked me: 'Did yous hurt yourself?'
'I am all right,' I would reply.
My pride would then assert itself,
I laughed in order not to cry."
The verse form was written in Ukrainian, at a time when it was banned by Regal Russia, in an act of defiance.
A similar spirit tin be constitute in the women staying in Solotvyno. I of them is Elena Sierosa, a coordinator at the shelter, who makes sure that beds are pushed shut together to accommodate as many people equally possible. As the state of war wears on, there'll be many more than.
"Correct hither is the border -- nosotros believe it won't be bombed or shelled," she tells CNN. If it is, Sierosa says, they will send their children down Solotvyno's main street and over the wooden bridge into Romania. "The children can be saved across the border," she says, "but we will stay here. We will fight."
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/14/europe/ukraine-women-children-romania-eu-cmd-intl/index.html