Thousands of Ukrainian women, children and elderly people continue crowding their country’s border with Romania fleeing from the Russian military offensiveas Efe was able to verify at the Porubne border crossing, in the “oblast” (region) of Chernivtsi, in southwestern Ukraine.
“My clinic has been bombed several times; the russians have destroyed the intensive care department and the surgery departmentand they have also bombed the oncology plant,” Viktoria Klimenka, head of the pediatric department of the Kharkov University Hospital, in eastern Ukraine, tells Efe indignantly as she queues.
“What the Russians are doing is worse than fascism; the world must know, adds the woman, who has just arrived at the border with a friend in the car she bought to leave Kharkov. “We have passed through Poltava, Kremenchuk, Vinnytsia, Ivano-Frankivsk and now Chernivtsi”, she tells about her odyssey of more than a thousand kilometers.
Klimenka is 70 years old and was about to retire. From Siret, on the Romanian side of the border, she wants to get to an airport and fly from there to the United States, where her daughter lives. “I am going to stay there, it is time for me to be with my daughter and granddaughter, but I will continue to help Ukraine from outside,” she explains in English.
Crying children and fainting
Right in front of Klimenka, children and babies exhausted and scared after several days of travel cry inconsolably while their mothers drag their heavy suitcases without stopping to comfort them. A fine and persistent snow falls relentlessly on the covered heads of the refugees and the wet asphalt.
An older woman advances to the slow and unsteady rhythm of her tail supported by two trekking poles. Another woman, younger, asks for assistance from the volunteers who are advancing alongside the queue in the opposite direction towards the Ukrainian side.
“Someone has fainted, ask for help!” he says in English with a desperate gesture. Parallel to the queue of people waiting to cross on foot, sometimes with their pets, trucks with different license plates loaded with humanitarian aid cross.
Two volunteers travel 5,000 kilometers in a van, over and over again, bringing aid from Spain to Ukraine
volunteers at the border
At the height of the point where the queue begins, two Ukrainian volunteers offer food and hot drinks to those who arrive. Most prefer not to lose their place in the queue and wait a while longer until they feel safe again in Romania.
Under the blue awning where food is served, next to a dying bonfire inside an old rusty iron drum, those who have trouble crossing the border are looking for warmth.
Despair
One of them is Andriy, a middle-aged man living in Chernihiv, a city 150 kilometers northeast of Kiev where the Russians have bombed residential areas. “It’s horrible, there is fighting inside the city and entire areas have been devastated”he says nervous and scared.
The Ukrainian government has banned all its male citizens between the ages of 18 and 60 to contribute to the war effort against the Russian invasion. Andriy is therefore trapped in his own country.
“I want to cross and go to Prague and meet my wife, who arrived there two days ago, I need help,” he says with an anguished expression. He is willing to pay to be let across the border, but to do so he has to find a corrupt guard willing to take a bribe.
foreigners do go out
who have foreign passport are luckier. In front of the small volunteer tent, an Israeli businessman from the medical sector is advised to abandon his vehicle to cross to Romania on foot and fly from there to Israel.
“Don’t worry about the car, come with us and I’ll take care of the vehicle,” says professional Israeli-American rescuer Moti Kahana, who has led missions in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan and now works with his company, GDC, assisting governments and NGOs to get people out of Ukraine.
As soon as he passed the passport control of the Ukrainian police, an Indian student from Calcutta breathes relaxed and lights a cigarette next to the guards’ booth. “I study Medicine in Kharkov, in May I have my final exam”, he says with a group of colleagues. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
