War in Ukraine: ‘We knew that if we stayed, we would probably not survive’

Like many of the more than 10 million Ukrainians displaced by the war, Olena Biletska, a 52-year-old maths teacher, has the photographs stored in her smartphone to remind her of past happiness.

Biletska fled Mariupol on March 15th with her mother and two children. She sends me a selfie with her husband Viktor in January, weeks before the war started and shortly after they celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. The couple are grinning, bundled up against the cold. That world is gone now.

Biletska's face lights up when she tells me how she first met Viktor on a street in Mariupol. "He asked if he could talk to me. My heart went like this." I see her fingers flutter on the computer screen. She is in Lviv, western Ukraine, and we talk via video link.

“For our first date, we walked around Mariupol,” Biletska continues. The couple settled in the Livoberezhnyi district, on the left bank of the Kalmius River, where the fighting started on February 24th.

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Woken by the sound of an explosion at 5am, they assumed it was routine fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces. “We lived very close to the disputed border, so we heard explosions for the past eight years,” she explains. “But I quickly received news of attacks across Ukraine. When I saw soldiers and armoured vehicles in the street, I knew the big war had started.”

Biletska sends me an image from the city’s website of the apartment building where she and her family lived. It is charred black, with gaping shell holes.

On February 24th Biletska grabbed a few documents and some medicine and took her and Viktor’s 15-year-old son, Dmytro, to the apartment of Daria (29), her daughter from her first marriage, in central Mariupol. She thought it would be safer there. Biletska’s 81-year-old mother ,Yaroslava, joined them.

Viktor refused to leave. “He thought it was just another routine escalation. He thought it would be resolved quickly,” Olena says. The fighting worsened and Viktor moved to a friend’s home. Then the telephone network went dead. Olena and Viktor lost contact on February 28th.

‘We all cried’

During a lull in fighting on March 4th, Biletska, her mother, two children and her daughter’s partner made a dash for a restaurant called Amadeus, where Daria worked as a manager before the war.

The restaurant was on the ground floor of a luxury condominium. The family sheltered with dozens of other people in the cellar. They found candles and battery-powered Christmas lights in the well-stocked restaurant and cooked the frozen food that had thawed for lack of electricity. They felt fortunate to have one meal each day, and shared food with displaced people in other shelters and with soldiers from a nearby unit of the Azov Regiment.

“We all became friends in the bomb shelter,” Biletska says. “If someone started to cry, the others tried to comfort them. We all cried; men, women and children. At various times, we heard tanks and aircraft overhead. It was very frightening...We were also confused, because we didn’t know why we were being bombarded and we had no information. We were afraid to go outside. We would open the door slightly to see a sliver of daylight.”

On March 14th explosions continued from 10pm until morning. “We were sitting ducks. Several shells hit the building. We knew that if we stayed, we would probably not survive,” Biletska recounts.

Someone managed to find an internet connection and learned that refugees were making it out through Berdyansk to the relative safety of Zaporizhzhia. Residents of the condominium formed a 20-car convoy from vehicles in the underground car park, and agreed to take those without cars, including Biletska and her family.

Biletska dared not look at the burned-out cars and ambulances that littered the escape route, for fear of seeing corpses. In the suburb of Manhush she saw Russian soldiers distributing humanitarian aid. “They did not offer it to us, and in any case, we would not have taken it,” Biketska says. “I hate them, because these people are trying to kill me and my family and friends.” She believes the Russians are determined to destroy Mariupol “for those eight years of resistance”.

Russian checkpoints

Biletska’s convoy passed through six Russian checkpoints where men were searched for any sign of military affiliation, including tattoos. The Russian soldiers “made a show of being polite, of wishing us good luck. It was not sincere. We were afraid, because they were armed, and we knew what they could do to us”.

Press reports say the Russians now control 80 per cent of Mariupol. Resistance centres in the Azovstal metal factory on the seafront, where Viktor used to work. Biletska confirms that the Azov Regiment, which is defending the city, uses the network of tunnels beneath the factory to move freely under bombardment.

“Mariupol may fall eventually, because the Ukrainians are outnumbered,” Bietska says. “But Azov is a very strong battalion. They will fight to the end. They will not surrender.”

Biletska's family made it safely to Zaporizhzhia, then Dnipro and finally to Lviv, where she found a job in an orphanage. Children from Chernihiv, Sumy and Luhansk are particularly traumatised by the war, she says.

And she worries about her own family. Her son, Dmytro, cried for a week when he had to abandon his pet cat, Bonya. “I am trying to find someone to help Dmytro,” she says. “These events made him grow up very fast. During the bombardments, he closed in upon himself. As his mother, I sensed he was feeling a lot of pain, but he hides his pain to show he is manly.”

Many of those who sheltered in the restaurant cellar in Mariupol fell ill from sleeping on the cold, hard floor with only a blanket. Biletska’s mother Yaroslava has been feverish for weeks, and antibiotics do not seem to help her.

Biletska spends her spare time looking for her husband. "I search through all the available internet sources, for example, chat groups. Sometimes lists of people evacuated are posted. I monitor lists of people who are sent to Russia, and I contact relatives and friends who might know something."

By chance, I interviewed Biletska on the eve of Viktor’s 57th birthday this week. The municipality says more than 5,000 people have died in Mariupol. She attributes Viktor’s silence to the disruption of the telephone network. “I know he is alive,” she says. “Some day he will walk through the door, and I will say, ‘I have been waiting for you to come back’.”