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Ukrainians in Berlin and Kyiv tell their stories
Hour after hour, day after day, trains from the East arrive at Berlin's main station, each carrying hundreds of refugees from the war in Ukraine.
Since Russia's invasion began three weeks ago, close to 3 million Ukrainians have fled, in the largest displacement of Europeans since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And so far, more than 120,000 of them have made their way here, to Germany.
The refugees are overwhelmingly women and children, since all Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are required to stay behind to fight the Russians.
So far, the German government and people have rolled out the red carpet. Loudspeakers at the station broadcast welcome messages in Ukrainian, while dozens of local volunteers have turned up to help comfort and orient the refugees as they arrive -- dazed, grateful, and apprehensive.
"Our main purpose is to let people know that they’re welcome here," said Matilda, 26, a German citizen volunteer who declined to give her last name. She and her colleagues guide the arrivals to essential services like bathrooms and food and rest areas, while handing out toys to the many children who have arrived on the trains as well.
One of the first things that the Ukrainian refugees must do upon arrival is get Covid shots. Even before the war, barely one in five Ukrainians was vaccinated, due to a combination of botched vaccine procurement by President Volodymyr Zelensky's government, and traditionally high vaccine hesitancy in the country more broadly.
To get the jabs, recent arrivals lined up at the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin, where some of them shared harrowing stories of escape from the war.
"We walked for 7 hours with a pregnant woman who was 5 months pregnant," one woman who preferred to remain anonymous told us, holding back tears. "After she stayed in Poland in a hospital she said “I can’t feel my child.” It’s crazy."
The refugees in Berlin are relieved to be safe, but they also worry about their relatives back home. "Our men are strong, our army is strong," said one woman, "but they need help. Please close the sky."
Meanwhile, speaking to us from a makeshift bomb shelter in the Kyiv metro, Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh told us that while she had debated leaving too, she decided to stay to tell the story of Ukrainians' resistance to the Russian assault.
As the modern European city she once knew was transformed overnight into a depopulated warren of barricades, sandbags, and Czech hedgehogs, she says, "I felt how strongly Kyiv would fight for itself, and I want to be here so that as a journalist I can tell that story. I believe that Kyiv, and all of Ukraine, will win – and I want to be in Kyiv when that happens."
With Vladimir Putin's armies stepping up their attempts to besiege and conquer the Ukrainian capital, she had a warning. "If they enter the city," she said, "it would be a huge battle, a sea of blood, a sea of death. Kyiv won’t surrender, the people won’t flee, they will defend it until the end."
“This is not a suicide mission” – the Wolverines of Ukraine
Faced with an invasion by the world’s fifth-largest army, Ukraine is doing everything to fight back, and ordinary civilians are now part of the mission.
President Volodymyr Zelensky recently promised weapons to anyone who wants them, and so far more than 25,000 automatic rifles and nearly 10 million bullets have been handed out in Kyiv alone, according to a recent video post by Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky.
Many of those weapons have been picked up by members of new volunteer defense groups that have sprung up in local communities. Under a new law passed in January, these groups are now legal across the country, and their leaders loosely report to Ukrainian army commanders. As for weapons? Their members bring whatever they can.
“It’s BYOG,” says Daniel Bilak, the leader of one such group, active on the outskirts of Kyiv, “that is: Bring Your Own Gun.”
Bilak, 61, is a Canadian-born lawyer with Ukrainian heritage who moved to Ukraine some 30 years ago. His own gun, he says, is an AR-15 that he recently bought himself in Ukraine.
The defense group he leads is called the Wolverines, a nod to the heroes of the 1984 movie “Red Dawn” about a group of American high school students who beat back a Soviet invasion of the United States. The scrappy, diminutive, blue-and-yellow clad Wolverine of X-Men fame might work as well, of course, but Bilak says he's never seen the comics or films.
In the weeks just before Russia’s invasion began, the Wolverines held weekend training sessions in fields and forests outside Kyiv. Now, with the battle for Kyiv raging, Bilak says they conduct nightly patrols to keep order and capture presumed Russian saboteurs.
For men over the age of 60, the age limit for army service, groups like the Wolverines are a way to get involved directly in the defense of the country, and they’re an important part of Ukraine’s bootstrap strategy for holding off a much larger and better-equipped Russian army.
What’s more, in the event that Russia does prevail on the battlefield, they could be the building blocks for a popular insurgency thereafter.
“If Vladimir Putin is foolish enough to try and occupy Ukraine, he will face a highly motivated and well armed population,” says James Stavridis, a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO. “Grannies go wild could end up being his worst nightmare.”
While groups like the Wolverines are showing Ukraine’s claws against the Russian war machine, human rights experts warn about the dangers of giving out weapons to civilians with limited military training.
“As soon as you pick up that weapon,” says Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, “you lose your civilian status, which means that you can be targeted. And it also means that you have to abide by the laws of war. And of course, nobody's had training on the laws of war.”
Still, Ukrainians like Daniel believe they are taking up arms not only for their country, but for something bigger.
“We are fighting for every democratic country,” he says, “certainly in Europe and for democratic and European values.”
And despite the long odds, he says, “this is not a suicide mission.”
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