Head down, thin face and hunched shoulders, programmer Oleksander Kharchenko, 40, says goodbye to his wife and children aged 6 and 10 at the Lviv city train station.
He said that what he would miss most would be the football matches at the end of the calm days they lived in the city of Kharkiv before the war started. The Ukrainian government has banned men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country, but Kharchenko says he would stay in Ukraine anyway.
“In the entire history of Ukraine, the Russians forced us to live as they saw fit. Now the world is different, the Soviet Union no longer exists, I have other opportunities, my children will have more opportunities than I do, we no longer have to wait for our lives are controlled by dictators,” he said. “What we want is to be able to be what we can be. That’s all.”
Kharchenko says he hopes that his wife and children, having nowhere to stay when they arrive in Poland, will be able to go to the United States, where an uncle lives in the city of Chicago. The programmer explained to his daughter that the country is at war, but did not say that she was leaving her family to join the military and civilians who are part of the Ukrainian resistance in Kiev against Russian troops.
​”Of course I didn’t tell them that I’m going to fight. I didn’t talk to my wife, but my daughter noticed and asked me what was happening. She asked me if in war everyone became soldiers, and I said she didn’t need to worry, women and children did not need to become soldiers.”
The trains leaving Lviv are never enough to carry all those who want to leave the country, and the city in western Ukraine has become the funnel where people squeeze in despair, fleeing areas where fighting between the Ukrainian army and the Russian occupation forces intensified.
“Ne plach, budʹ laska [não chore, meu amor, não chore]”, said a mother who was trying to calm the baby who was crying from hunger, sleep and cold in the midst of thousands of people crushed inside a corridor long in length, but only a few steps wide. Tired people, crying children, women with faces sad and sick elderly people clog the access corridor to the boarding gates at the station.
In the last 24 hours, Russian occupation forces have intensified attacks in various parts of Ukraine. Satellite images from the American company Maxar show that a 64 km long Russian military convoy is approaching the capital Kiev. In addition to attacks on the northern city of Kharkiv, Russian forces are also attacking Kherson and Mariupol in the Black Sea region.
Russia does not disclose its war casualties, and Ukraine does so partially. The last balance sheet in Kiev, until Monday (28), recorded 350 civilian casualties, without reporting on military personnel – the UN counted 102 Ukrainian civilians dead. ​Without access to the front lines, journalists cannot confirm what has happened to people like Kharchenko. One thing, however, is certain: many of the families, women children, daughters, sons and fathers are saying goodbye for the last time at Lviv station.
