UAVoyager🇺🇦@NAFOvoyager
The author of this story is a woman from Kherson, Olga Chernyshova.
This is a very difficult read, but it deserves to be read and shared. This is the reality of life in Ukraine told firsthand.
“Fires broke out in the city center on May 15.
Several places were burning at once. A friend called me asking what to do. People had carried their belongings outside, their home was still burning, their hands were badly burned, and no taxi would come into the red zone.
Instead of being evacuated, people with blisters on their burned hands were desperately trying to call a taxi.
They saved whatever they could: clothes, dishes, a small cabinet, a plastic basin with an old iron, a tiny fan and plastic hangers inside.
A woman sat there with burn blisters covering her hands and charred debris in her hair from things falling from above. The man beside her had burned hands too. They sat next to their bags and plastic basin watching their home slowly turn to ashes. There were several families like that.
The next day, more buildings caught fire. Old wooden floors were almost impossible to extinguish under constant russian drone attacks and shelling. The fire kept spreading through entire blocks of the old city center.
We were carrying things out too, hiding from drones together with firefighters every few minutes. Smoke had already filled the building.
Then a young man walked out of a tattoo studio.
Shirtless, surrounded by smoke and sunlight, he just stood there smoking and staring somewhere into the distance while a building burned across the street. For some reason, my friend and I found ourselves looking at his tattoos. The image of that calm guy with a cigarette against the backdrop of catastrophe became burned into my memory.
Ten minutes later, he was gone.
Decapitated. Missing an arm. Torn apart by shrapnel.
The tattoo artist who had been working with him was taken away by ambulance. He was screaming and moaning in pain, alive, but apparently without legs. The girl who had been with them was also hospitalized as another round of shelling began nearby.
The young man’s body remained lying in the street. We covered him with a blanket and placed underneath it a phone we had found nearby.
On the lock screen was a photo of a smiling little boy, maybe five years old.
Fragments of the head of the man who had been smoking in the sunlight flew through the shattered windows and landed on the staircase of the tattoo studio.”
While much of the world scrolls past,
Ukrainians live inside this reality.
Every single day.