The artisan from Paraíba, Silvana Pilipenko, 54, who lived in Mariupol, a city under siege in southern Ukraine, and had been missing for 27 days, was found alive, according to the Brazilian’s family, who has lived in the country for 27 years. The family had no news of the artisan’s whereabouts since the building in which she lived was bombed on the 2nd.
This week, the artisan’s son, Gabriel Pilipenko, managed to contact her by phone, says his sister, Rosimeri Vicente. “The internet is still very bad and he was able to speak for a few minutes,” she said. She claims that she has no information about Silvana’s health status. “The only certainty is that she was alive, and we are happy about that,” she said.
According to her family, the Brazilian is going to Crimea, a peninsula in the south of the country, with her husband, the Ukrainian Vasili Pilipenko, and her 86-year-old mother-in-law. Rosimeri says he still doesn’t know if Silvana will stay in Crimea, if she will go to other cities or even if she will return to Brazil.
Crimea is relatively calmer than the rest of Ukraine because the peninsula was annexed by Russia in 2014. Even without international recognition, it has been administered by the Russians since then and has not been affected by the current war.
Since the Russian invasion, on February 24, the artisan from Paraíba has reported the day-to-day of the conflict to family members in Paraíba, through video recordings and publications on her social network.
In one of the videos, Silvana mentioned the main difficulties faced by the population of Mariupol, such as the lack of water and electricity and the scarcity of food on supermarket shelves. In view of this, she even informed her family that she feared that in the following days she would not be able to keep in touch due to lack of internet.
The port city where she lived has been attacked by the Russians since the beginning of the war and has one of the most dramatic situations in Ukraine, with attacks on civilians and lack of basic supplies. The severity is such that even the International Committee of the Red Cross left the city on March 17. The most recent reports point to mass graves to bury those killed in the conflict.
On the Brazilian side, the family followed from a distance what happened after losing contact with the artisan who, before the beginning of the war, was in Brazil in January and was already scheduled to return on March 20 for dental treatment.
Silvana’s son, who is a naval engineer, was working in Taiwan, but decided to leave the Asian island and go to Europe in search of information about his mother. He went to Germany and intended to go to Odessa, a city in Ukraine, but he did not proceed with the series of bombings in the region.
THE sheet, the executive secretary of Institutional Representation in Paraíba, Adauto Fernandes, informed that he has been talking with Silvana’s son for ten days. “Last week, we attended a meeting with diplomat André Mourão, who is in Ukraine […] And yesterday we received the news that the Itamaraty, through the help of her son, managed to locate her”, he said.
Fernandes also said that the Paraíba, her husband and her mother-in-law are on their way to the Ukrainian border and that she will receive a letter from Itamaraty to leave the country with her family.
