It was just a few minutes past half past seven in the morning when Maria Kachmarska was woken up by a loud bang. She looked out on the balcony and saw in the distance the plume of smoke from the missile launched by the Russian army against the Ivano-Frankivsk airport in Ukraine. She panicked. Her parents live in a small village just one kilometer from the airfield.
“We took a bag, the documents and went to see if they were OK,” she recalls still shaken. “I was terrified for my son and only thought about saving him, so the next day I decided to escape. It’s the best decision I could have made, because here we are safe at my sister’s house,” she adds as little Matvii, two years and eight months old, runs happily among the fountains of Passeig de s’Alamera in Santa Eulària.
The journey of her escape was also harrowing. In fact, she does not remember with certainty if she spent “five or six days” until she reached Ibiza. The Russian bombing of her town took place on Thursday and on Friday her father got the car to take her and her son to the nearby Polish border.
Queues for kilometers
“There were 20 kilometer queues of cars and then she spent 20 hours in the passenger checkpoint with her son in her arms, her backpack and nothing else”, Kachmarska’s brother-in-law, Dmytro Kyiashko, specifies. The mother and child had to spend another three days in Krakow until they could get a plane to Barcelona. Finally, on Tuesday they were reunited with their relatives in Ibiza.
“They have left our children without a future and I will never forgive that”
“Now I feel very happy for having protected my son, because all I could think about was that we could be killed. Russia is bombing our country and has occupied our territory. Since the Dombash War eight years ago, I suspected that they were going to prepare some attack against Ukraine, but I never imagined that it would reach this magnitude,” he shudders.
“We are in the 21st century, in a supposedly civilized society. They are tearing families apart, they have left our children without a future and I will never forgive that,” says the 24-year-old.
“My son can now walk freely and lead a normal life. We will stay until the situation in Ukraine returns to normal.” She leaves behind her job as a journalist at the local television station in Ivano-Frankivsk. She also does not know when she will see her husband, a priest, again, like her brother-in-law in Ibiza. “The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is of Eastern rite and we priests can get married,” says Dmytro Kyashko, who only arrived in Iibiza three months ago.
This young religious, 32 year old, served for five years in Valencia before being entrusted with the religious assistance of the Ukrainian community in Ibiza, made up of some 260 people, which had been without a parish priest for two years. “Every Sunday about 60 people attend Mass in the Lourdes chapel,” he says.
A day of solidarity for Ukraine
Kyiashko estimates that, in addition to his sister-in-law, another ten or so Ukrainians may arrive to take shelter with their families. “This week I have met with the president of the Consell [Vicent Marí] to discuss how the Red Cross and the Church can help other refugees from Ukraine who have no home or family on the island,” he announces.
In addition to his religious role, Kyiashko does important work with the association Nuestra Ucrania to mobilise and organise the humanitarian aid collection campaign. In Santa Eulària’s Passeig de s’Alamera, neighbours continue to arrive delivering packages of all kinds of basic necessities, both at the stalls set up by the association and at the Civil Protection tent.
“Clothing is what we need the least, because the warehouses at the Polish border are already full”
“Clothing is what we need the least, because the warehouses at the Polish border are already full”, says the parish priest. Also arriving are company vans, such as the one from the Santa Eulària Cooperative. “The workers have gathered the products from the cooperative’s shop that were requested in the campaign, such as toilet paper, toothpaste, water and many canned goods,” says the manager of this entity, Xavi Conesa.
The heavily loaded vehicles are sent to the warehouse of the Santa Eulària parish house, where a dozen people are busy unloading, sorting and packing the avalanche of material that is constantly arriving.
Massive response
“People have come out in force to help us, and we will probably need at least two lorries to get it to the border,” says Olegh Voronny, who lives with his wife and two children in Santa Eulària, like most of his compatriots, where the youngest was born.
The vice-president of the Asociación Nuestra Ucrania, Maryana Lukynyuk, stresses that this citizen response encourages them to face the tragedy in their country. “It strengthens us. Seeing all this help, we know that we are not allowed to give up and we have to go on. The world is with us and together we must stop the disaster and stand up to Putin,” he said.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.