ReportThey wanted to be a florist, a teacher or a lawyer: they fled their cities bombarded by Russia, abandoning their former lives on the roads of exile.
In the images on her Instagram account, Daria Konovalova, 15, from Kharkiv (Ukraine), dances with two girlfriends a meticulously worked choreography to music by an American rapper. She had posted the video on the social network, even if she had had the particularly frustrating feeling of missing gestures that she knew by heart. It was his life before. “When we spent our time on Netflix, TikTok and YouTube”. life before, “when we were talking non-stop between friends, blah blah and blah blah, about everything, and we wondered, laughing, what we were going to do together the next day! »
Daria shows these images, wrapped in a blanket donated by volunteers, inside a tent set up at the river port of Isaccea by the Romanian authorities to accommodate Ukrainians fleeing Russian bombardments. Like thousands of refugees, almost exclusively women and children, she took a huge barge in the freezing cold, which crosses the Danube and allows her to leave Ukraine to reach Romania. For her, then, it will be Germany. Just before the Ukrainian border post, among the queues of cars waiting on the other side of the river, she said goodbye to her father, 47, an engineer, who had accompanied her with his half-brother and his stepmother. He does not have the right to leave Ukrainian territory, like all men between 18 and 60 years old.
Kharkiv, where she was born, in the northeast of the country near the Russian border, is among the Ukrainian cities hardest hit by the bombings. Those who were able fled, beginning a long journey through checkpoints in Ukraine, then in the rest of Europe. The 21 students in his class left the city, joining Lviv, Odessa, Poland, Romania or Germany, as the case may be. ” I was so scared. The noise. The strikes. It’s terrifying. » His life seems to him suspended. She danced two hours a day with her girlfriends, street dance, with the hope of being able to make a living from it, perhaps, one day. She also dreamed of going to university in Odessa or Kiev. “It’s as if we can no longer think of tomorrow”she summarizes.
“No one has a choice”
The young women who cross the Danube join Germany, Romania, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria. They often tell similar stories. Stupor, first. “There was the 2014 war against Russia but it was a part of Ukraine and it seemed so far away to us, we didn’t really know what had happened”explains Iryna Paramonova, 26, on her way to Bucharest before heading to Turkey. “The day before the attack, it’s crazy, we were drinking champagne with friends in Odessa! I woke up the next day and it was like a nightmare.”says Christina Korablyava, 20, waiting for a solution to go to Bulgaria with her mother and her 4-year-old little sister.
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