The Displaced
Elderly rockers bearing radiation scars from Chernobyl. Youths, with their lives unfolding far away from their besieged homeland. So many mothers, with young children in tow, ready to take up arms against those who destroyed the peace they once inhabited. THE DISPLACED are the innocent victims of this war. Those whose normalcy--whose lives--were shattered by Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. They are spread far and wide across the world, seeking refuge. They have no homes to return to.The injustice of their situation is staggering. So is the tenacity of THE DISPLACED. Their burning commitment to living. Their love of Ukraine. Their historic bravery in the face of chaos and evil. 
“It’s Not Just Our People Dying, It’s Our Nature. Our Forests and Our Air:”
A Conversation With Giorki, Displaced Ukrainian Engineer Turned Driver
Giorki - Displaced Ukrainian Engineer Turned Driver
"We are Ukrainians. We want to have peace. We don't want anyone to get killed but we will fight until the end. We will fight to the end of every meter of our land. We won't let them take anything. Neither Russia nor anyone else. "We’d been drinking hot cherry cider at a Warsaw watering hole full of Ukrainian expats. The vibes inside were nervous, hard drinking, frantic and distraught. Most of the creative Ukrainian kids there had been working and studying in Warsaw, and suddenly, had no home to return to.
After saying goodbye to new and old friends, we called a car, walked to meet it and proceeded to get lost in the nearby maze of apartment blocks. Our driver, with much patience and grace, located and picked us up.
Named Giorki, our driver was a displaced Ukrainian. And this turned out to be no ordinary cab ride. Driving us through the backstreets around Nowy Świat, one of Warsaw’s main drags, Giorki told us his story: he and his brother played rock-paper-scissors back in Irpin, Ukraine to determine who would stay and fight the Russians in the territorial defense force, and who would go to Poland to work and support their families. On hearing that, we asked Giorki if we could record the conversation and tell us his story in full. He agreed.
His story has been edited and condensed below.
“I graduated from two universities. I am a dual specialist and have built lots of different buildings in Ukraine. I was honored by President Poroshenkio in Ukraine who came before Zelensky.
I left because I had to take care of my mother and brother’s wife because she has cancer. After forty five years of living in Ukraine and having a good job, I had to move to help my family by working as a driver.
Now, I’ve helped fifty families get here. I spent all my money. My brother is now in the Territorial Defense in Irpin, near Kyiv. And the battles there are very heavy right now. There was such a bad bombing, they don’t have windows or doors anymore.
There are so many people who want to fight, but there are not enough weapons to give out. Everyone--women, children, men--wants to go fight but we don’t have enough guns and armor to give everyone.
Everybody is together, like a family. Our spirit inside, our spirit to defend our country and our land is impossible to fight. The Russians can’t win. They will not be able to win.
We will fight to the end.
Lots of people all over the world don’t know the real situation in Ukraine because of Russian internet soldiers. Russian propaganda works that way.
And what we ask from the world: just close the skies.
We have to close the skies from the bombs because they are killing our children, blowing up kindergartens and schools.
It’s not just that people are dying. It’s our nature. Our forests and our air have been destroyed. Now it’s in very bad shape. Politicians must think of this also.
We are Ukrainians. We want to have peace. We don't want anyone to get killed but we will fight until the end. We will fight to the end of every meter of our land. We won't let them take anything. Neither Russia nor anyone else.
We will stand to the last Ukrainian breath.
Until victory.”
“Before The War I Had a Fantastic Life in Kherson. A Beautiful, Common life.”
A Conversation With Valeria, A Ukrainian Teacher Displaced By The War
Valeria - Displaced Teacher And Tutor From Kherson
"We were two young girls and two mothers. I only met them on the day before we left. One girl had a car and we found each other through group messaging. That day before we were very scared. We met each other and asked some questions. We didn’t sleep at all that night. When we left, we had to go through four Russian checkpoints on the way to Mykolaiv. "When we spoke with Valeria over Zoom, she'd hardly been in Poland for 24 hours. It was the afternoon of April 2nd, 2022 and the twenty-something Ukrainian teacher had left her hometown of Kherson on a harrowing journey just days before. Kherson was (and still is, at the time of writing) occupied by the Russian invaders.
After sheltering at her family home since the beginning of the war, Valeria and three other women--formerly strangers--loaded into a single car, passed through four Russian checkpoints, crossed over the frontlines and out of the war zone.
But in truth, Valeria’s journey was just beginning. On her way to Finland, where she hoped to find work that could support her family back home, Valeria faced the kind of uncertainty--and aloneness--that anyone is lucky to never know. And like so many of her fellow Ukrainians, Valeria confronted this chaos with rare grit and poise.
In our absolutely wrenching conversation, Valeria spoke with love of the “beautiful, common life” she once led. She shared her hopes for the future and the perils of her journey to Poland. She described the bizzarity and pain of having Russian relatives who believe Putin’s propaganda over the word of their Ukrainian relatives. But the thing that registered most powerfully in Valeria’s countenance--and the one thing that no amount of words or images or videos can convey--was the devastation that shone in her eyes, quavered in her voice and rolled down her cheeks.
Valeria’s words have been condensed and edited for clarity below.
“So before the war I had a fantastic life in Kherson. A beautiful, common life. I used to work as a teacher and tutor with children. I graduated from Kherson State University as an interpreter with a specialty in English. I was surrounded by friends and family and everything was OK.
Currently, Kherson is occupied by Russians. There are a lot of Russian soldiers roaming around the city, killing people. The first day was the most terrifying because Russian soldiers bombed my grandmothers house. She is OK, but it was so close to us because Kherson is a small city.
The morning of February 24th, I was alone in my flat. My mom called me at 5AM and said to get everything I needed, very quickly. I grabbed all of my clothes and things. I was crying and shocked. Then I went to my parents house and stayed there until I decided to go away from Ukraine.
We spent that entire first week in the corridor. My dad was in the bathroom with the dogs and the cat. After the first week things were OK. We got used to hearing it and seeing the soldiers. I don’t know. It sounds strange that it was OK, but we got used to it.
We were two young girls and two mothers.
I only met them on the day before we left. One girl had a car and we found each other through group messaging. That day before we were very scared. We met each other and asked some questions. We didn’t sleep at all that night.
When we left, we had to go through four Russian checkpoints on the way to Mykolaiv.
The first post was the most terrifying.
It was very scary and the Russian soldiers are…how can I describe them?
They are dirty.
They are ugly, if I can say so. Sorry about people…but yeah.
They tried to do something cool for us. They said “have a good day, girls,” or something like that. They were smiling while standing there with guns and cars they had stolen from our people.
After that, my dad went to a meeting in the city center with my godfather. Russian soldiers started shooting at people. They injured one old man and there was lots of blood on the streets. Also, they threw bombs. After that, the Russians started stealing people. They stole my best friend’s father and only yesterday he came home. He had a broken nose and a concussion. He wasn’t at home for nine days.
It was dangerous to stay there. My parents didn’t let me go out alone. So I would go out only once a week to the shop near our house.There were fights in the countryside very close by. I heard all these noises, all these guns shooting. I was afraid everyday, so I decided to go.
A lot of our friends said “don’t do it, don’t go, don’t leave Kherson”.
And even on the morning we were leaving, I didn’t want to go.
But we insisted on it, so we went.
At the first checkpoint, they took our passports and documents. They asked where we were going and let us go. At the second checkpoint, they took all our bags and suitcases. I guess they were trying to find something. At the third point, they were checking our phones. They were checking our messages and even our photos. But we knew about that, so before that we had deleted all of our photos and messages. And at the fourth checkpoint they just asked where we were going and let us go.
After that, we finally saw our soldiers. Ukrainian soldiers with Ukrainian flags. All four of us were crying in the car. Usually it takes three or four hours to get to Odessa. But we spent twelve hours on the road between Kherson and Odessa.
From there we went to Moldova, then Romania, then Hungary and now we are here in Poland.
Leaving the country was very very sad for me. I am constantly crying because I am alone and my family is left there amongst the constant fighting and bombs. My boyfriend is stuck in the countryside near Crimea because he couldn’t get into Kherson or anywhere else. My dad can’t leave the country. Also, he is a patriot so he doesn’t want to leave. Only if Kherson is turned Russian would he leave.
I feel very guilty because I am here and they are there. I don’t know how I will make it, but I will try. I understand that only I can help them right now because they don't have any work. So I should work and send money home.
And also--we have a lot of relatives in Russia and they didn't tell us anything about the war.
They knew about it. Because early in the morning on 24th of February my aunt wrote to me saying “Valeria, how are you? We know the special operation has started.”
So she knew, but she didn’t tell us.
It’s so hard now because they don’t understand. During the first week they really supported us, asking “how are you?” and saying “we love you.”
I believe that they really support us, but they don’t believe that all of this ruin has been made by Russian soldiers. They believe it was our soldiers who bombed us and were shooting at us. So I don’t know how to communicate with them at all about this.
They believe that everything will be OK and say “you should just wait a little bit” and “don’t worry, the Russian soldiers will save you.”
I’ve sent them a lot of videos. My videos. My personal videos and photos from Kherson. They used to visit Kherson when I was a child and they spent a lot of time in my grandparents’ house. So, on the very first day when my grandpaernts house was bombed by Russian soldiers, I sent them videos of our house.
They didn’t believe me. They said it was Azov, not Russian soldiers.
They even invited me to St. Petersburg, where they live. They said “come to us, it’s safer in Russia.”
I was shocked really…because how could you offer me this during the war in Ukraine?
After the 24th of February, how could they not see?”
“We Left The City On Foot.”
A Conversation with Olana, Kristina and Katya, A Family of Women Displaced from Mariupol
Olana, Kristina and Katya - A Family of Women Displaced from Mariupol
"We left the city at 4AM on foot. It was quiet, the Russians weren’t shooting, so we walked 7-8 kilometers. We wanted to leave the city through an area controlled by Ukrainian troops, but we were on the opposite side of the city so we had to go into Russian occupied territory. It was like going back to the USSR: flags and propaganda and pictures of symbols. "Situated on the shore of the Azov Sea, the city of Mariupol was one of the earliest and most catastrophic flashpoints in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Reduced to near rubble, the industrial city is the site of the now infamous Azostal plant, where a battalion of Ukrainian defenders rallied to fight an overwhelming number of Russian invaders in a harrowing and costly siege. While the eyes of the world were trained the defenders of the Azovstal plant, thousands and thousands of lives in surrounding Mariupol were upended.
For those of us enjoying the comforts of peacetime, the hellish moonscape of Mariupol is an alien reality. For Olana, Kristina and Katya--a family of displaced women we spoke to in Warsaw--this reality was just the other side of a terrible looking glass. The mother and two daughters fled the city in March on foot. After spending weeks in a bomb shelter with no water, they crossed into the Russian quarter of the city, where they described both scenes of destruction and an abundance of propaganda that recalled the USSR. The three young women went into the Russian Federation to stay at Rostov-on-Don with their family, before catching a ride to Latvia and onto Poland.
We spoke with Olana, Kristina and Katya at the Warsaw Central train station. The two teenage girls--one an aspiring actress, the other an aspiring engineer--listened to their iPods and teased one another. Despite the trauma of their ordeal, their sisterly banter was an island of normalcy amidst the rising tides of chaos that engulfed their former lives.
Their story has been edited and condensed below.
“It was difficult to understand.
Maybe, we didn’t want to see what happened on February 24th. We saw it on the internet and TV but didn't want to believe it. We expected it to be like 2014, when Mariupol was occupied a little bit: we’d move out and back, then out and back.
We left Mariupol on the 19th of March and just arrived in Poland. Five days before the war started, we heard explosions over the border in the Russian Federation. We live in the last district of the city, closest to Russia.
On the first night of the war, we didn’t sleep. We had the internet and everything until the 2nd of March. We lived on the first floor of an apartment building. After a bomb hit the sixth floor, we didn’t have internet.
The local college was destroyed. And the school, just two kilometers from where we were.
Before the war, the city looked awesome. Everything was fixed. And now the only thing you can see is destroyed buildings. All of the apartments-- all of the buildings around our building--are burned. So we sat in the shelters from the 2nd of March until the 18th of March. We had food but they didn’t have any water.
In the shelter there were forty people and all of them left.
We left the city at 4AM on foot. It was quiet, the Russians weren’t shooting, so we walked 7-8 kilometers. We wanted to leave the city through an area controlled by Ukrainian troops, but we were on the opposite side of the city so we had to go into Russian occupied territory.
It was like going back to the USSR: flags and propaganda and pictures of symbols. We went into the Russian Federation then, to Rostov-on-Don in the Russian Federation where we have family. Drivers took us from there to Latvia. Now, we are going to their father’s friend’s place near Krakow.
We feel so much pain. This war is so bad and so full of death. We just want to go home. We want to go home after victory and see our family in Mariupol.”
“How Does A Mother Feel, Having A Ten Year Old Baby And Nowhere To Go?”
A Conversation With Katya, Displaced Mother from Kharkiv, Ukraine
Katya - Ukrainian refugee and mother at Zachodnia Warsaw (Warsaw West Train Station)
How does a mother feel, having a ten year old baby and nowhere to go?The entrance to Warsaw Zachodnia train station is an angular glass-scaled arch that rises from the ground like the mouth of a huge fish, yawning up through the pavement to exhale tired travelers.
The adjacent Zachodnia bus station, however, looks like every other bus station in the world: it’s a squat, square building with high, grimy windows. The gray smell of dust and diesel hung heavily on the air. Pigeons flapped around amidst the coffee kiosks. Tired travelers hunched under big backpacks hustled back and forth with luggage trains and small families in tow.
Unlike every other bus station, however, hung banners written in Ukrainian offering free internet, translation help, food and services. Beside the station proper, stood a sturdy white tent.
Inside the tent, neon-vested volunteers distributed hot food and drink across a makeshift counter of card tables. Refugees cupped paper mugs of tea and hunched over plastic tables, chattering in the musical lilt of Ukrainian. The second most beautiful language in the world after Italian, we’re told.
Amongst the refugees there was a trace of relief in the air, but not a very powerful one. Mostly, this tent had the air of yet another waypoint on a forced journey towards the unknown.
There, we spoke with Katya--a refugee from Kharkiv--and her young daughters about their experience fleeing the Russian invasion.
“How does a mother feel, having a ten year old baby and going nowhere?The 24th of February was a normal day. We were going to work and school. My husband was in Kharkiv. We lived next to one of the biggest airports in Ukraine. At 4AM, we woke up to the bombs falling. We checked the internet because we didn’t know what it was. Some people said it was the trains. My sister called and said the bombs were falling. The children were crying and I was panicking. I held my baby and not knowing what to do, took documents and nothing else, then headed to my mother’s in Bovary. But Bovary was already hell. There were Ukrainian soldiers standing there and fighting. It was impossible to go anywhere by car. I was scared because I’d never seen so many tanks moving next to my house. Ukrainian special forces with rockets were shooting from the road. My husband drove us to the train station and joined the Territorial Defense Forces. Now, my husband says the Ukrainian soldiers are in a very good mood. They call us to cheer us up. Though no one believed this would ever happen, I’m very grateful to the Polish people for opening their houses and helping out. I and all of my fellow Ukranians are ready to go home and rebuild. If the skies are closed, we will defeat the Russians in days. The main thing is: Putin, go fuck yourself. Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” “If You Are Good With Other People, Other People Will Be Good With You.”
A Conversation With Valery, Displaced Musician From Pryvillia, Ukraine
Valery - Refugee en route to Kentucky from Luhansk, outside the PTAK Humanitarian Center
"If you are good with other people, other people will be good with you. You have to be a human, is the first thing.I have a big experience. Motherland is motherland. But if you’re a good person, you can live anywhere. If you are good with other people, other people will be good with you. You have to be a human, is the first thing. You can always learn a language.” “Before the war began, I was an invalid. I was in Chernobyl when it happened. I cleaned the trucks leaving the radiation site and was poisoned.
The first few days I was at home. My city, Pryvilla, is a little elevated, and Lubizne is a little bit down. I was looking at fights between Ukrainians and Russians with my friends from the window. I saw those battles. In a few days, those bombs started to land next to my house and I left. My legs brought me here because I didn’t know what to do.
“My wife is in Kentucky. I did all the documents and I’m waiting for the embassy here to approve them. I left Ukraine last Tuesday. I was in Luhansk when the first rockets and bombs started to fly. Phosphorous bombs, too. They are illegal. You can’t use them during a war. Small towns burned on the second or third day.
I wanted to go to my wife but I didn’t have any power to leave. When the bombs fell in my garden, I took a car then a volunteer bus and came here.
I’m a musician and I worked underground for clubs. I play guitar and drums and graduated from music school. I was in a band for the last fifteen years. We played concerts all over the state. Deep Purple is my favorite band. I started my life with this music. If someone asks me to show my talent when I get to Kentucky, I will show them with everything I have. After work, people need to relax. And music is the best relaxation there is. I like rock and roll. Right now, I am calm. But when I have a guitar I go crazy.
I’m sure everything is going to be alright. I am sure the war is going to end soon because the whole world is against it.
I have a big experience. Motherland is motherland. But if you’re a good person, you can live anywhere. If you are good with other people, other people will be good with you. You have to be a human, is the first thing. You can always learn a language.
