Olga Omelyanchuk

On February 24, Olga woke up in Kramatorsk. For some reason, her alarm clock, which she used to set to go off in sequence every morning, kept silent, so it was the explosions that woke her. Olga recognized the sound of an MLRS, and thought that it was either a Smerch or an Uragan. Once, she used to joke that she was afraid of missing the start of the full-scale war, but in fact, she deliberately went to the Donetsk region after having talked to some servicepeople and analyzed the intelligence data. The night before February 24, Olga got a message from an acquaintance of hers: “Seems it’s about to go down.”

So there she was now, listening to explosions. Her colleague from TV didn’t care since it was very usual to hear them in a town near the frontline, but Olga didn’t want to stay idle as the hotel windows began to vibrate from the blasts. She scrolled the news, read about Putin’s appeal to the Russian people and went to gather her belongings.

“It was shocking,” Olga recalls. “By then, I had considered Kramatorsk a peaceful town in the rear. We’d even gone to the bar there just the night before.”

In case the fighting escalated, the Come Back Alive foundation had a plan to evacuate everyone to Kyiv via the city of Dnipro. Olga joined a TV production team, and since then she has been working with CBA. The seventeen hours of the journey seemed eternal. Their car broke down: the driver was frightened, the news confused them, and the sounds of explosions in the seemingly safe city of Dnipro felt unreal.

Olga’s primary objective was to get home to Kyiv. She was determined to stay in her native city, and had not considered the option of leaving it unless it was totally occupied. Her parents and pets were there: Olga planned to evacuate them all and focus on covering the war, as she had been doing for the previous eight years.

“Some of my acquaintances think it inappropriate of me to stay in Kyiv,” says Olga. “They say that, as a woman, I should take care: but I have been working on war for so many years already. Basically, everybody accepts my decision. I also appreciate my parents’ support in my choice of profession and purpose in life. It’s important for those who are dealing with war to have support: they’ve got enough difficulties apart from condemnation from their closest ones.”

Olga herself knows how to support others’ choices: after February 24, her elder sister enlisted in the army and her younger brother began to evacuate civilians. Her parents wanted to join the military, too, but they were turned down. For a week afterwards both had been staying in their Kyiv apartment on the 22nd floor, going down to the basement each time the electricity went off in a blackout. Finally, they agreed to move to the Ivano-Frankivsk region and stay in the empty house of another journalist, Khrystyna Kotsira. Olga and Khrystyna did not know each other before.

“People help me gladly and I am always willing to help them in return. It’s cool,” Olga shares. “I’m probably lucky because that’s how my parents had raised me. They’d taught us to be of help at any opportunity and always stay humans. I cannot imagine a life without journalism or charitable work.”

The Come Back Alive foundation could have evacuated Olga and her relatives, but she gave way to others. Then, somebody passed her phone number to some people who needed to leave Kyiv, and she personified a hope of salvation for many. Olga connected those who wanted to flee with her acquaintances who were going the same way. And later, she involved her 20-year-old brother, who had been turned down for military service, in taking people and their pets out of towns and villages in the Kyiv region. Together with his friends, he even equipped a bus for evacuating disabled persons. This is how they saved more than one hundred people.

Day and night, Olga got countless calls. People were crying, blaming the authorities for not evacuating everyone, trying to speak out or make whatever sense of the situation. Olga provided them with petrol, gave them the volunteers’ contacts and continuously explained how the official evacuation proces worked, and why it could sometimes stop even if a bus had already been scheduled. Every time her brother took people to the western part of Ukraine for several days in a row, lots of strangers all around the country agreed to host them overnight.

“There was so many of them,” Olga recalls. “They’d written me, like, ’I live in such and such a roadside village, I’m already going to meet them.’ Day after day, I wept with joy to live next to such people. Today, I have the entire country in my contact list: if necessary, there’s someone ready to open their doors for you in almost every Ukrainian town or city.”

But in fact, many events, both good and bad, had happened throughout that time. For instance, there was an elderly woman from a western Ukrainian region who chose to host only young mothers while reporting their husbands to the local military administration. Some people refused to rent apartments to families with little children or pets, or even drove them away unexpectedly the very next day. Olga knows very well that everyone’s resource to help others is limited, but still she cannot understand this kind of treatment. Nevertheless, she gratefully recalls those supportive men and women who’d given her a true sense of community.

She’s always felt that way at the CBA foundation, too. As a journalist, Olga normally works in the genre of reportage, which requires thoughtfulness and concentration. Since it was hard for her to write in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, she decided to focus on her charitable work. After having worked there in 2017-2020, Olga rejoined the Come Back Alive team in February 2022.

There, she spent several months in a windowless office basement with low ceilings – something between a barrack and a cell. Life abounded all around, journalists came to file their reports, people connected with one another in meaningful ways. There was a washing machine there, as well as hot water and food, but Olga and her colleagues worked almost 24/7. Sometimes they didn’t see daylight for weeks. The team had to hold on, and make the right decisions quickly.

Olga is managing the communication department at CBA which works as a press service. She is also responsible for the foundation’s entire social media and website content. Olga has four subordinates and some freelancers and volunteers to help, but she’s still got plenty of work.

“I am a part of a super cool team, yet my friends and relatives have all evacuated and I’ve been left alone, face-to-face with human suffering,” says Olga. “No one can live like that all the time. I’ve understood that I should drag myself out of such a state at my own birthday party, while visiting my friend in Transcarpathia. I heard music playing in the café, children laughing, and suddenly, it became clear that I could no longer live in our bunker office without getting together with people. I wasn’t even able to talk with my therapist online or look after myself. I put on weight. I had to support myself first if I wanted to help others.”

This insight came to Olga in May. Kyiv had already become a much safer place by then, so she decided to get back home. Her colleagues did the same.

The Come Back Alive foundation is still working today. In 120 days of full-scale war, the team has managed to raise about US$110 million for the needs of the Ukrainian army (not counting cryptocurrency). People donate less money now than they did a few months ago, but Olga is okay with that because their resources are depleted, she explains. She doesn’t blame anyone for getting used to the war, since it doesn’t mean that the Ukrainians will become reckless and stop helping the military. And if needed, they will, of course, mobilize very quickly.

“We are inevitably getting used to the circumstances,” Olga says. “We aren’t that stressed about air-raid alerts anymore. Somebody may need to take a break and switch to some recreation, to come back later and ‘make a speedy death for the occupiers’ much more efficiently. However, the point of no return has been already reached. We’ll never be the same again. My parents had taught me to be a kind and open-hearted person, but the war has taught me to hate, and the hatred has been getting stronger every day since February 24.”

As a journalist, Olga has been covering the war since 2014 when she was 22 (and it was then she decided that she wanted to witness the victory). Since then, she has got quite a background in convincing editors that writing about the war is worth it, even if public interest may decrease in the long run. A third of her reportages’ protagonists have been killed since the full-scale invasion began, and what Olga hadn’t earlier seen anywhere except the Donbas has now grown to cover the entire country. Now there is a great demand for information, and Olga simply cannot cover all the current events. So she only does what she is capable of. She brought stories from the Donetsk, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv regions, although Olga worked very little in Kyiv suburbs: first, because she prefers talking tete-a-tete to her protagonists rather than roaming the towns in press-tours, and second, she was aware that the world would still learn about these tragedies without her.

Her only reportage from the Kyiv region concerned the Twelve Months Zoo, which was established by a couple of Olga’s friends. The team and the animals had survived Russian occupation and lootings, the workers switched the generator on for at least a few hours daily so that the hippo would not freeze; they did a zebra delivery, saved the frightened rhino from explosions, and more. There were about three hundred animals overall – and no more than a few people to take care of them.

Olga does not like to talk much about her work. In her belief, the military are going through a much more serious experience. Meanwhile, she notices the numerous mistakes made by her colleagues, especially fixers.

“Fixers can often speak foreign languages, but have no idea about the specific nature of journalism,” Olga goes on. “I would like journalists to be humane and prepare well for their trips to the frontline. War correspondents are usually paid big money and fast, but I wish they would respect the press officers who have been doing their job systematically for years. On the other hand, a helmet and body armor alone do not make you a war correspondent. For example, I never introduce myself like that. I am merely a civilian journalist who’s working in wartime.”

Today, as the demand for volunteering has decreased, Olga can dedicate her time both to the media and the CBA foundation. She doesn’t reject the idea that she will have to live in the bunker again, but next time she will be better prepared for it. Olga has a list of personally important things to take there, like facial cream, more clothes, or earplugs to work in quiet: they won’t help to resolve the global issues, but will give her comfort. If it’s allowed, she is planning even to take herself a pet.

In fact, the CBA team already have a living mascot: it’s a British shorthair cat of unusual color, and her name is Ms. Bulochka. Olga found her for Taras Chmut, the foundation director. Taras is fond of pets, so his colleagues decided that it was high time for him to have one. They’d agreed in advance who would take care of her if Taras was too busy, and Olga began to search for a kitten. She found Ms. Bulochka in a cattery on the outskirts Kyiv, where the sounds of explosions had been heard very loudly. Today, Ms. Bulochka already has her own account on Twitter, become the protagonist of a sock design for Dodo Socks, and raised about US$200,000 for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She’s also affectionally known as Taras Chmut’s deputy and morale officer at the CBA foundation. Olga claims that Bulochka, unlike herself, enjoys publicity.

“I have a variety of contacts as a journalist, but still, I try to avoid communication wherever possible,” she explains. “I just get much more comfortable this way. I could have made a name from the war, but I want my stories to be read because they are in-depth, not scandalous. Besides, the genre of reportage does not allow any publicity –just being able to think deep, and the skill to write well.”