“It was Thursday 24 February at 6am and my best friend sent me a message saying: ‘Today the war has started. I just wanted to say that I love you’.”
At that moment Angelina Nevzerova, a 26-year-old Ukrainian studying for a PhD at De Montfort University Leicester (DMU), knew life for her, her family and friends would never be the same.
Mum Iryna, their dog Donut, and Angelina in Ukraine before Putin's invasion
At first, she said, there was a sense of disbelief. For the past week the word in Kyiv was that a Russian invasion would not happen, despite Putin’s convoys surrounding the eastern border of Ukraine and taking positions to the north in Belarus. How could it happen? Why would it? It’s 2022. It’s impossible.
But the reality dawned when she made a phone call from her Leicester flat to her mum, Iryna, living only a short distance from the front line. As the two spoke, Angelina realised pragmatism had to replace the constant tears and the distress if her mum was going to find safety.
“My mum lives in an apartment near the centre of Kyiv with our dog, Donut, and two cats, Toshka and Morgik. I had to think about how she was going to get out of there.
“Her car was parked in the basement and me and my uncle were thinking she could take shelter there, but then we suggested she get to the petrol station first. That way if anything else happened she would have a full tank of fuel. My mum queued for four hours. People were panicking.”
It was 10am when her mum returned to the apartment and news reports said Russian troops were heading straight for Kyiv from Belarus – and they were going to be arriving soon. Air raid sirens were wailing and there were huge queues on all routes out of Kyiv.
After jumping into her car, it took Angelina’s mum five hours to get out of the city and several more to complete the 90-mile trip to the small western town of Zhytomyr.
“It was so stressful. I cannot even describe it,” says Angelina. “I was ringing my mum and my uncle and friends and then I would lose contact. We had shared my mum’s location on our phones and it would disappear, sometimes for an hour. All I could do was wait. And all through that hour I feared the worst. I would call my uncle and my friends to see if they had heard or seen anything. It was always no. It was horrible.”
Angelina managed to book her mum into a hotel, just to rest for a few hours, and hope the routes to the borders were still open when she woke. People in and around the hotel suggested a change of direction and to head to Romania instead of Poland. There were far fewer people heading that way, they said.
Angelina on the DMU campus with Ukrainian flag
Every car crawling away from Kyiv was stopped by boys in uniform who had erected road blocks in anticipation of convoys of Russian tanks. People were asked where they were going. ‘My mum told them she was heading for Romania. They waved her on and shouted ‘good luck’.”
After 11 hours of driving, Angelina’s mum reached the Romanian border, while her uncle messaged to say he and his family were out of Ukraine. But it was a case of so near and yet so far for mum. She could not see the border. It was 2kms away and cars were stretched nose to tail along the entire route and beyond. Nothing was moving.
Like all the tens of thousands of other women, children and elderly evacuees from Kyiv, Angelina’s mum was running out of water, in need of food and nowhere near a working toilet. The ground was flat and arid in every direction, with no forests to escape to. And her mum was travelling on her own with her pets.
Friends and family started trying to book accommodation for Angelina’s mum. There were no hotels, no apartments, no Air B&Bs. They could not connect her to other people evacuating Ukraine.
“I was so worried. My mum was scared, she was stressed, she was tired and she was crying. I was worried about her mental health seriously deteriorating. We knew she was in a relatively safer place in Western Ukraine, far away from Russian borders, but she was exhausted. She sat in a hotel lobby for two hours and because she was there for so long the receptionists took her to the staff room, cleared it out and said she could sleep there.”
When her mum got back to the car the queues had not shortened. Some people in the hotel said the border with Moldova was better so she headed for there.
At 9am the next morning the phone rang. It was her mum. “Angelina. I am in Moldova.”
Life before Putin's invasion - Angelina with her mum and their dog
The sense of relief was indescribable, Angelina says. She organised a flight to Bucharest to meet her mum and take over the driving. They decide to make the 24-hour journey to the Channel Tunnel because visa restrictions were being eased. Angelina is also a resident in the UK.
Now, two weeks later her mum is stuck in a village near Calais waiting for the visa. Angelina has been on BBC radio to bring attention to the problem. The Home Office says they are now looking into the case.
“The main thing is that my mum is safe for now. All that time I did not think I was ever going to see her again.”
Angelina, who works as a receptionist at DMU Leisure Centre, worries still for her friends. “I still cannot imagine how they feel being stuck in Ukraine. I speak to them all the time in Odessa. They have nowhere to go. They feel they do not belong anywhere. A friend in Donetsk says he is not running any more. He tells me, ‘I am just going to stay and fight’”.
Angelina continues to work and to study. She needs the income to support her family. Her mum is a property developer and had just renovated a flat in Kyiv. It was put on Airbnb the day before the invasion.
Limited income has started to arrive as people from around the world – France, Canada and the US mainly – are booking the flat but saying they have no intention of staying there. It’s a way to donate money to Angelina and support her Mum in France. The Moldovans, Angelina says, were incredibly generous too, literally pushing food into her mother’s hands.
Four weeks after the invasion and subsequent evacuation, Angelina is continuing with her PhD at DMU. Friends, leisure centre staff and academics have been incredibly kind and supportive. She also draws strength from her Mum. She has, however, changed the subject of her dissertation.
“I am now looking into the role that hotels have played during the invasion”, Angelina says. “I want my PhD to prove this has really happened. I want people to hear our story.”
Posted on Thursday 24 March 2022