Albina, Odesa

The next day, Mom arrived with her cat, and for 27 days we have been living together. We’re trying to secure the house somehow. But in fact, you understand that
if it arrives, nothing will save you.

At first, I felt a sense of horror that the Russians did not believe us. I wrote about what was happening wherever I could, but I received in response that we or ourselves are bombing, or we deserve it ourselves, or the abstract “we are for peace, what do you want from us”. The funny thing is that friends who moved to Moscow and They work at Yandex, and relatives who live in Russia have never asked how I am. But I received a lot of support from different Europeans,
whom I met by chance at different parties.

Colleagues and friends who are in the same situation are also very supportive, like me. All the exes with whom I quarreled help me in any way they can.
All grievances are forgotten. In general, Ukrainian society is very much united.
The work of volunteers and the care for each other causes endless admiration for ordinary people.

I have received offers to go abroad or to Western Ukraine. But I don’t want to, because it’s difficult to do this with cats, and the walls help at home. My sister and the child have moved out, and now she says that it is very difficult away from home.

Since March, my company has been put on vacation at its own expense, and it is unclear when it will end, whether I will be cut because the work of an analyst is not strategically important for the company. It’s good that I have a small airbag. But in my mind, I already imagine how I will work as a cashier for pennies.

But most of all my heart aches for Mariupol. I have no relatives there, but I have friends and classmates.
Some have already managed to get out. And some of them have not been heard from for three weeks. And I’m afraid I’ll never see them again. Those who succeeded to get out, tell how they fled the city under the shelling of the Russian army, how they lived in basements for two weeks, how a shell killed a family of six people in the yard nearby when they were cooking on a bonfire. At this time I understand that I am in paradise at all: I have what I have, a warm bed, mom and the seals are nearby. And the absence of work and sleeping on the floor under an air alarm can be experienced.

An interesting fact is that back in 2014, when Russia has organized LDNR in the Donbas, my friends and I from Mariupol often quarreled because they were pro-Russian, and I was pro-Ukrainian. Now they have no doubt that it is the Russian army that is wiping Mariupol off the face of the earth.

Now I no longer have any hopes for the Russian society that it will wake up and overthrow Putin. I just want the Russian army to leave my land and leave us
alone at last, so that we can build the life that we like.
Now I understand that, despite the prolonged depression, I was happy before the war. I just started to get out of depression, I mastered a profession
that I liked, and I enjoyed working, which was not the case in my entire professional life. And now it’s all destroyed.