Untold Stories
Crossing the Mexican border by foot, eight months pregnant.
“There’s no Ukraine I am used to. The Russians had destroyed it.”
In the months preceding the war, Anna’s inner circle brushed off any possibility of Russia invading Ukraine. They didn’t give it much thought as they watched the news of oligarchs sending their children abroad or witnessing the Russian embassy burn their files, causing a massive smoke. “It’s one of their tricks,” Anna told me during our Zoom call, referring to Russia’s modus operandi of misleading its opponents. Yes, the war in Donbas has been going on for eight years. Yet, Anna’s friends, family, and colleagues — nobody believed Russia was capable of attacking an entire country.
Anna remembers how two weeks before the invasion, she went grocery shopping with her parents and saw a middle-aged woman with messy hair piling up her basket with buckwheat, spaghetti, and other non-perishables. “It was funny to me, I mean, surely Russians weren’t that stupid. It’s the 21st century, for Chrissake….”
In the upcoming months, Russia’s war against Ukraine would kill thousands of civilians — amongst them hundreds of children — and displace millions of Ukrainians around the globe.
