Inna Sovsun works non-stop. She is sitting on her laptop in a house near Kyiv, talking to reporters. He continues to speak even as Russian troops advance into the Ukrainian capital, with fierce battles raging around suburbs such as Irpin, bullets raining down and bombs falling from the sky.
Sometimes, he says, he keeps talking even when he hears the air raid siren.
Discussion is her mission now
Sovsun, a Ukrainian politician, gives interviews from morning till night. He speaks fluent English. studied in Sweden and has lived in the United States. She is now explaining the war in her country to the media around the western world – and is making an urgent appeal for help.
“[The sanctions] “so far they are not hard enough,” he says. “We need sanctions that will crush the Russian economy. They do not have to have the money to buy weapons. “We want a complete and absolute trade embargo.” He wants countries to completely boycott all Russian oil, gas and coal.
Inna Sovsun represents the liberal, pro-European Golos Zmin party in the Ukrainian parliament. Speaking to DW at Zoom, she looks tired. He sleeps almost no more than three hours every night for the last two weeks. She is currently staying with friends who have a solid internet connection and basement.
Her apartment in Kyiv does not have. Sovsun does not know how many times she had to find shelter in the basement. stopped counting. The alarm goes off every few hours, he says.
When DW arrives, it is Tuesday, March 8, the 13th day of the war. Inna Sovsun has not seen her 9-year-old son since the Russian offensive began. As a precaution he took him away from Kyiv. is with his father in the west of the country, where he is currently safer.
There was no question of him leaving the capital, he says. Right now, her place is here. Also – even especially – for her son. When she spoke to him on the phone for the first time since their separation, he asked, “Mom, when will I see you?” All he could do was cry.
Escape from Kharkov – and return again
For Victor, it’s his middle daughter who worries the most. The 12-year-old is sometimes hysterical out of fear. Her older sister is very calm outside, she says, and the younger, who is only 6 years old, still does not understand what is happening.
DW has been in contact with Victor since early March. He sends short WhatsApp messages every day, whenever he dares to go up or out in his yard, where he can receive a mobile phone.
Victor is an IT specialist. He and his family lived with their dog and two cats in a private home in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city in the northeast. Kharkiv has been under heavy bombardment for days.
At 8 a.m. on March 1, a cruise missile destroyed the regional administration building in Kharkiv’s central Freedom Square. Less than 10 minutes later, a second explosion shook the heart of the city. Victor and his family could hear and feel the impact. their house is only about four kilometers away.
The day after the attack, Victor wrote that things were still relatively quiet in their neighborhood. But he was consumed by the fear that they might be hit at any moment. “We are constantly re-evaluating the situation and continuing to balance the risks between moving and staying,” he writes. “I love my family and so far we feel safer in our basement than on the street.”
Victor and his wife tried to give their children a sense of normal life. They made the basement as comfortable as possible. The children had books with them and could play games they had downloaded on their phones, tablets and laptops. “We even had sweets to distract [them]”, Says Victor.
But the constant explosions wore them out. The following Monday, March 7, the family finally decided to leave Kharkiv to escape the bombing. They became refugees in their own country, traveling by bus to the city of Poltava, almost 150 kilometers away. Here they managed to find temporary accommodation in an apartment. But Victor stayed just one night before taking the train back to Kharkov: “I will leave my family there and return to Kharkov to help the volunteers,” he wrote.
The separation from his wife and three daughters was hard, he says. “But we firmly believe that we will see each other soon.”
Victor wants to help his besieged city and wants to deliver water and food to the residents who are still in Kharkov and need help. He wants to clean the ruins. When asked if he was scared, all Victor said was “no.”
Leaving the mountains
Jurii also left Kharkov with his wife and 17-year-old daughter. He says he was on the road with their car for several days. Their house in Kharkov is still standing although many buildings in the surrounding area, including the neighboring house, have been destroyed. He was beaten shortly after they left the city.
The family headed to a small town in the Carpathians where Jurii’s employer had rented a hotel room for them. “We have arrived. There are no bombs here,” Jurii wrote on March 7. For the first time since the outbreak of war, he managed to sleep through the night.
“We were lucky to be able to leave Kharkiv unharmed. And my employer paid for the room for two weeks,” he said. The hotel owner has made a generous offer to the family as soon as two weeks have passed.
“He has suggested we move to his private home in a village at the foot of the mountains,” Jurii writes. The owner has not asked for money. “Of course we said yes.”
Jury really wanted to return to Kharkov. “Only time will tell if this is possible,” he said, adding that he could not imagine leaving his country altogether. “I love Ukraine.”
Jurii and Victor could not leave the country at this time: All men between the ages of 18 and 60 must remain to support the armed forces and take up arms to defend their country.
Jurii is anxious about the fact that his city is increasingly being destroyed and reduced to rubble. But, he says, he can not understand that so many Ukrainians are frustrated by NATO’s refusal to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, something President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has consistently demanded. “I know this is not your war. Every government must first and foremost take care of its own citizens,” he said.
He says there is a huge wave of support from all over the world. “We will win. We will do it with our own forces.”
Disappointed with the West
Back in Kharkov, Victor writes: “We are standing.” Unlike Jurii, he is deeply disappointed with the West, which believes it is abandoning Ukraine to its fate: “NATO’s inability to impose a no-fly zone or at least supply us with modern anti-aircraft weapons is outrageous.”
Inna Sovsun’s frustration is also evident in this issue. “In 1994, Ukraine abandoned our nuclear weapons[s]”Because we have been given assurances by the West that the West will provide us with security assurances.” “It simply came to our notice then. But we do not. “Now we just have excuses why this can not be done, while the Russians continue to drop bombs on our heads.”
Observers agree that Russia plans to enter and attack the capital in the coming days. At the very least, Ukraine needs to be equipped with fighter jets, says MP Inna Sovsun. “We need these jets to make sure they do not encircle the city of Kiev. If we have the jets, we can bomb them from the air.”
Sovsun reiterates its demand several times. Kyiv can only be defended with the help of jets, he says. is the only way to avoid many civilian deaths. “What they did in Irpin is what they plan to do in Kyiv,” he says. “They were ordered to shoot civilians. And that is what they will do here.”
The Russian side insists on its official account. It claims that its army only attacks military targets. However, there are clear indications that citizens’ targets, such as residential areas and hospitals, are being repeatedly hit.
The World Health Organization has published a list of damaged hospitals on its website. It includes hospitals in the Kharkiv and Kiev regions – where Victor, Jurii and Inna lived peacefully until just two weeks ago.
This article was originally written in German
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