Testimonies of the war in Ukraine: living underground to continue breathing a year later

It’s been 12 months since that February 24, 2022. That day a war began that has shown, once again, that the civil population is the great loser in these conflicts. Ukrainian citizens have not trembled when it comes to picking up their mobile phones to denounce the most unfair situations. Like the one of the 487 children who have died from the Russian attacks or the many others who have been forced to leave their parks and schools to try to survive in bunkers. These are his stories.

makarof 7 years, it is clear. He never intends to forgive Russian armyhe confessed hiding in a bunker in Mariupol last April. It is not the only small one that has remained long periods under the ground. Alice4 years old, wore 50 days in one of these shelters when she asked to be evacuated on camera. Along with her mother, she claimed to miss hers. Especially her grandmother.

There are also those who have not been able to be with their relatives nothing else to be born. That is the case of the 17 children born – a month after the start of the war – by surrogacy. Abandoned by their birth mothers in different maternity hospitals, they were taken to a basement of a building on the outskirts of Kyiv. These little ones have survived within their plastic cribs thanks to the care of three nurses.

In the same capital, some children sick with cancer They took shelter in the basement of what is their house, the Okhmadet hospital from Kyiv. Together with his parents, they continued with their treatments. Those for which they could not leave their lair. Always to the sound of sirens and shelling that fell on the outskirts of the capital. Fortunately, his hospital did not suffer the same fate as others. In conflict zones, more than 100 sanitary structuresincluding mobile units, have been damaged by the bombing, according to figures from Médicos del Mundo Spain.

Among them the Mariupol maternity hospitalattacked by the Russian army in mid-March 2022. A woman was rescued from its rubble. pregnant mother still hoping to save her baby. But when that hope came face to face with reality, the woman preferred to die. And so she let the surgeon know that she was trying to save his life. “More than 30 minutes of resuscitation of the mother produced no results,” the doctor explained. Mother and son died. Two other families rescued from this same bombed-out hospital managed to survive. Veronica and Alana started life surviving.

Survival was the goal of the group of children which in April had been growing for more than two months in the meter of Kharkiv. Valery, director of the toy museum and turned into a teacher for a while, he made that adventure more bearable through games and riddles. With these activities they turned the corridors of their city’s subway into a world full of colors and rainbows. A place in which to dream of the moment in which they can get out of that nightmare that has ended their childhood, the war.