Olha Svyripa woke up at 5:30 a.m. on February 24 to what she described as “the warmest hug I have ever received from my husband.”
“He said ‘please wake up, it’s started’.”
Two hours later, she was bundled into a small van with her husband, best friend and four strangers to begin what became an 18-hour drive from Kiev to the relative safety of Rivne in western Ukraine.
“We packed the most important things: documents, laptops, chargers. My husband filled my backpack with books and said, ‘It may be heavy, but it will protect you in case of a bombardment.'”
- Hear more from tech workers in Ukraine at this week’s Tech Tent
- Also in the program we discussed whether Russia is going to disconnect from the Internet.
- Also, how much of the conflict is playing out in real time on social media.
- And how one man is running a massive email campaign to counter disinformation about the conflict.
Olha’s laptop was important because she, like many Ukrainians, wanted to continue working despite the total turmoil of her life and the dire circumstances she found herself in.
By doing so, he told the BBC, he stops thinking about “the endless stream of news and the constant anxiety” for his friends in cities that are being heavily bombed.
She works for the software firm Intellias, and many of her colleagues tell the same story.
Oleksandr Bilyk lived in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, and he knew that a war was coming.
“Even in my worst case scenario, I couldn’t imagine we’d wake up at 4:30 a.m. to explosions. But we did.”
They gathered all the members of their family, including their two-year-old son, and in the two family cars they embarked on a three-day journey west to Ivano-Frankivsk,
“The road was horrible, hundreds of people were leaving the city. At some point my wife had to breastfeed and she did it without stopping the car.”
Co-workers and friends helped them in the two towns they stopped at along the way, and the local Intellias team helped them find an apartment when they arrived. The following Monday, Oleksandr went back to work.
“Every day I go to the office and try to close urgent tasks while my beautiful city is destroyed.”
He also makes daily phone calls to his remaining friends in Kharkiv: “I just hope they answer the call.”
The company, like many others, has tried to relocate its employees to western Ukraine or to Krakow in neighboring Poland.
Andrew Pavliv is the CEO of the N-iX software firm, one of the largest in Ukraine. Since the conflict began, many of its employees have moved to Lviv, where it is based. He even moved out of his house to accommodate some employees.
He told the BBC that his company is operating at around 80% of its usual capacity, serving a variety of clients around the world: “We think it’s an important part of the war to put people to work and still pay taxes. . People like to work,” he told the BBC.
He said the Covid pandemic “has helped” because it meant people had gotten used to working remotely.
But the scale of the invasion took him by surprise: “We expected something to happen and we were ready for the escalation of the conflict in the east. The scale is much larger than we expected, but we reorganized quickly.”
“Our company works with the military and we are helping with the connectivity of government institutions and, in cyber security, our professionals are helping special forces.”
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