Kristina Berdynskykh is a journalist. Here, she speaks about her work in the liberated territories, her emerging love for her native city of Kherson, and the many ways this war is changing us.
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First days of the war - thoughts, experiences, actions
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Kristina Berdynskykh stayed wide awake for the whole night of February 24. She calls herself a pessimist, and so she was already convinced that Russia’s invasion was inevitable. She bought a load of food in advance and asked her mother to do the same. On February 23, Kristina’s Western colleague wrote to her that the invasion was most likely to begin the following night.
“I read the news until 4 am,” Kristina recalls. “After Putin’s address about the so-called ‘People’s Republic of Donetsk and Luhansk’ I realized that his aim was to capture the whole of Ukraine. Yet the night was still calm, and I sighed with relief.”
Ten minutes later, though, his second speech concerning the start of the full-scale invasion was released. Kristina turned it on immediately, while the first explosions were already sounding through her windows.
Later in the morning, Kristina rang up all her friends and loved ones, gave them instructions to follow and went to support her mom, who lived in another district of Kyiv. Then it turned out that a 16-year-old relative of theirs was staying somewhere on the outskirts of the city that day, so Kristina called a taxi for her. In that way the three women survived the Russians’ advance upon the capital city together.
There was no bomb shelter in the apartment block where Kristina’s mother lived, and the neighbors didn’t let them stay in theirs, so the family decided to spend the nights in the metro. It was not so loud and not so dreadful there. They sat up all the first night on a single blanket laid on the floor, then brought themselves suitcases and slept in the trains, to find at least some refuge from the cold. Kristina and her family spent seventeen nights like that. She had a dream of stepping outside one day and breathing the air of freedom when the Kyiv region was liberated.
“My mom, who is almost seventy, and our teenage relative perceived the war differently,” says Kristina. “Me, I could have slept at home, but I was responsible for two more people, so we went where it was safer.”
Kristina longed for work. Her bosses did not disturb her for the first four days. Then she began to take comments over the phone and work remotely, although she was still too afraid to go to the border with the occupying forces near Kyiv, like some of her colleagues had done.
By mid-March, Kristina felt like she was getting used to the war. Her first face-to-face interview since the beginning of the full-scale invasion was with the Ambassador of Poland to Ukraine. He was perhaps the only foreign diplomat who chose to stay in war-torn Kyiv. They talked in the embassy's big, almost empty building. Kristina ate soup, and finally had the pleasure of meeting her interlocutor live in deserted Kyiv. The ambassador said that he did not want to flee while Ukraine was suffering, and offered a great deal of support from Poland.
Later she made her second report from the Ohmatdyt children’s hospital, where the operating rooms were relocated to the basement: the doctors remained there 24/7 saving kids.
Kristina was very impressed by the stories she heard from many Ukrainians about how their relationship with their relatives in Russia had changed. She posted on the social media that she was looking for such people and got a whole avalanche of messages. Mostly they referred to brainwashed ignorance and cliches like “it’s only to liberate you from the regime” or “Russians do not shoot civilians”.
In April, Kristina got to the liberated town of Bucha. It was a press tour, and initially, she had no clue how she would work among so many colleagues.
“But what had happened there was so huge that everyone we met had something to tell us,” Kristina recalls. “The first man I talked to was twice subjected to mock execution. He also offered to take us to the basement of a neighboring apartment block to see the dead body of a young boy with his nose cut off. I was following him and thinking, ‘Do I really want to see that?’”
By the time they got there, the police had already taken the body away, so Kristina felt relieved. After that, she and dozens of other journalists went to the place where six more dead bodies had been set on fire. Thereafter, Kristina gave up on any attempt to understand the Russians.
It seemed to her that, since February 24, her whole life had transformed into one continuous day of war. Each morning, Kristina tweeted about how many days Ukraine had already been holding on. She began to visit the liberated towns and villages of the Kyiv region and witnessed how the capital city came rapidly back to life. Her family trio had gone their separate ways, and therefore Kristina could allow herself to go on reporting trips to different regions.
The social distance between the military, journalists, officials, and ministers was quite close then. For instance, Kristina went to Kharkiv together with Yulia Laputina, the minister of veteran affairs of Ukraine and a former counterintelligence operative. Despite her fear, she decided that it would have been inappropriate to talk about the war somewhere in Kyiv. Her fear had gone over time, and Kristina made herself some new rules for work, the most important among which was to always listen to the military.
“In these seven months, I’ve been on many trips, but I’ve also had tons of work in Kyiv,” says Kristina. “There are many stories from liberated localities and victims of bombardments. There are also the military, politicians, and volunteers. And, of course, the aid from Western allies.
These are all issues that must be covered. It seems to me that journalists now don’t have specializations anymore. Once, ninety per cent of my articles concerned politics, but today I write about everything. People have gotten used to life in wartime: until recently, they would have been shocked to read the news about some city having been shelled, but now they understand the meaning of such messages, they know what they will see in the photos – and they lose interest in it. And that’s OK because they must adapt to stress. Ukrainians aren’t even taking Putin’s statements on nuclear weapons too seriously: after all, anything can happen when you’ve got a neighbor like that. Our only chance is to defend and reclaim our land.”
“I’ve begun to notice some conversations which sound like they come from 2014,” she adds.
“The military, as well as civilians, can occasionally say something reproachful like, ‘Kyiv is having fun during wartime.’ Yet you never know how much money somebody in a café could have donated to the army. Or maybe they’ve just transferred a pickup truck to the forefront. Once in a while, people need to relax. Now there is more and more good news from the liberated areas, and people need this news too, for more confidence that Ukraine will surely win the war.”
Kristina is well aware of what coming back to peace really means. As soon as the Russian troops were flushed out of Kharkiv she went to the city to make a report, and was very upset at what she saw. People wanted to live their normal lives again, but the proximity of the frontline hindered that hope. The cafes, bookshops, and pizzerias were all empty, the city center was ruined, and the shelling never ceased for a night. Kristina saw that many places were opening not for profit, to try and saturate the city with energy, but to no avail.
She has not yet been to the liberated communities near Kharkiv; though, it’s the stories from the Kyiv region that Kristina is going to remember forever. For example, there was at least one grave in every courtyard in the village of Termakhivka. Two of them belonged to sisters born in 1931 and 1934, which shocked Kristina the most.
“I can easily imagine these two old ladies, who were born even before World War II. They’ went through so much, they lived in their own house, and now there’s nothing but two crosses left of them,” she says. “I can’t stop thinking about such an injustice. This should not be happening.”
Another story that Kristina cannot forget is about the bikes in Zelenodolsk, a town on the border of the Dnipro and Kherson regions. People fled their villages on bicycles which the town’s authorities had been keeping since then until the liberation of the Kherson region, hoping to return them to their owners as soon as they returned. It was also there that Kristina met a couple, about 65 years old, who literally ran fifteen kilometers under fire away from their occupied village in the Kherson region.
“That would be very much like Izium,” she speaks about the future liberation of the Ukrainian territories. “We are still to hear many more dreadful stories of Russian atrocities. What’s happening there today is, tragically, much like Izium and Bucha.”
Kristina has no doubt regarding the future of the Kherson region. Since 2014, she is convinced that, despite the corruption and the slow pace of changes, Kherson is a city with a strong Ukrainian attitude. So she has not been surprised by its six-month resistance. Yet it’s only now that Kristina has started to feel an emotional bond with her native city. She is planning to go and work there after its liberation.
“In seven months, the Russians did not even manage to establish a ruble zone in Kherson, even though they had all the power,” says Kristina. “But people exchange money, pay cash at the markets, and do everything possible to preserve the national currency. Today, the repression is tightening in Kherson because the Russians see our troops advancing, and feel the deepest disdain from the locals.”
Kristina has already heard many stories about terror in the villages near Kherson. The locals try not to leave their homes after 3pm unless they have to; they are waiting for liberation, but don’t see any immediate chance ahead, and this depresses them even more.
“I am quite sure that Kherson will be liberated, though it won’t happen that quickly,” says Kristina. “I’m trying to live just for the day, without questioning what will tomorrow bring. At the end of the day, everything will lead to our victory: it’s only a matter of the price. Russians have no respect for even their own lives, not to mention those of others. Hence, many good people will still die, both civilians and military, even if we get all the weaponry we require. This is the price of our independence. We are all mobilized and concentrated today, for it’s the only way to prevail over Russia. On the other hand, it’s unlikely that we have fully understood how much this war has affected us. We will still need a lot of time to get over it. The deepest wounds will not heal for a long time.”
Kristina already sees herself as having been affected by the war. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she has been abroad just once, participating in a program for war correspondents. It was there, in a German village, that she realized how hard it was for her, after a series of conversations with psychologists. Kristina cannot work in the same mode that foreign journalists do, as they come to Ukraine for two or three weeks and then take a month off. So she decided to continue doing her job at a slower pace. Nothing bad will happen if she allows herself to avoid getting totally burned out.
“I am convinced that Russia has already lost this war, though they still don’t fully understand it,” states Kristina. “They’ve always been so proud of their propaganda machine, and now even the news front is completely lost for them. In seven months, they haven’t even created their own pantheon of heroes, because none are out there. No gains, nothing to be proud of. Meanwhile we do have our heroes, dead and living. Our fellow Ukrainians keep resisting bravely.”
Kristina is still counting the days of the war. On February 24, she wrote that Putin won’t be able to bring Ukraine down. The next day, that it’s NATO that should apply to join us. Today, she’s looking forward to writing about the last day of the war, and the first one after the victory.
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