Friday, February 25, 2022, Kyiv. Sasha walks through a basement lit by harsh neon light. She holds her phone up to show her sister, Olga, the parking lot where she took refuge with her companion, Viktor, Yana, her best friend, and their mother. There is also Rom’, her little French bulldog, who is there, curled up in a camping seat. Yesterday, bombings woke up the whole country. Russia invaded Ukraine. In Paris, Olga is at the wine cellar where she works. Customers come in, she hurriedly gives me her phone to join them.
I stay planted in the back room, her laptop in my hands. On the screen, Sasha’s delicate and gentle face. I knew that Olga had a younger sister who remained in Ukraine, but I had never seen her. Sasha wears a thick white hooded sweatshirt and, over it, a kind of denim coat, her long blond hair is up. She talks to me as if she were continuing the conversation she started with her sister a few minutes earlier. She simply switched from Ukrainian to French. She doesn’t seem panicked, rather focused.
Olga and Sasha in chat with the readers of the “World”
Friday, February 17, from 11:30 a.m., the two Ukrainian sisters, Sasha in Kiev, Olga in Paris, with journalist Elisa Mignot, will answer live questions from Internet users about the diary they have kept for a year and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Sasha explains to me that they left their apartment this morning and drove like crazy to reach the basement of this residence where Yana (called Y. in their diary) lives. The car park, brand new, has two levels and is neither in the city center nor outside the city: it appeared to them to be the safest shelter. A huge column of Russian tanks is a few tens of kilometers from the capital. I’“large-scale invasion” – this is how it will be called to distinguish it from the war in the Donbass, which has been going on since 2014 – began. From France, his sister, Olga, followed everything, in apnea.
France was his country of heart
I met Olga in April 2014 in Kyiv (I write the name of the capital in Ukrainian, as they do in their diary). At that time, the huge Maidan square has been occupied since November 2013. A citizen revolution was born there in the name of freedom, European values, the rejection of corruption and Russian omnipresence in economic and political life. An echo of the “orange revolution” in 2004. A convulsion of independence in 1991 for this country that had melted into the USSR for almost seventy years. Olga was then 26 years old, she was a professor at the French Institute. I have three more and am looking for an interpreter to interview Ukrainians who were on the front line during the clashes of February 19 and 20, 2014. heavenly,” were killed by pro-Russian police.
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