A Ukrainian woman’s family has welcomed five of her relatives into their Inverurie home, after they spent two exhausting weeks travelling across Europe to get access to a visa.
Tonya Russell’s sister Natasha and sister-in-law Olha, as well as Olha’s two daughters Liza and Sofiia and mother Luda, joined her husband and four children at the house on Thursday morning.
For the five travellers, it was the end of an arduous fortnight escaping Russian weapons outside Kyiv by train, bus and plane.
Natasha had fled the Ukrainian capital with her parents three days after first hearing missile explosions, and they moved in with her father’s sister in a village about 55 miles to the south-east.
However, after a few more days, her 71-year-old father made the emotional decision he wanted to defend his home in the north-east of Kyiv, and the three moved back again.
Escaping the capital
Mrs Russell and her husband Greig talked Natasha into taking the crowded 13-hour train from the city to the relative safety of Lviv in the west of the country.
Finding no place to stay or sleep in Lviv, she decided to take a bus to Krakow. Usually a two-hour trip, it took her 21 hours to arrive in the Polish city.
There, she met up with Luda, Olha, 14-year-old Liza and 10-year-old Sofiia, who had left Kyiv a day before her.
But because no centre in Krakow could do the biometrics needed for the UK’s Ukraine Family Scheme, the group of five faced yet another long journey to Warsaw, where they had to wait days for an appointment and then a weekend to collect their visas.
On Wednesday, they finally boarded a late flight to Edinburgh, and arrived in Inverurie at 3am on Thursday.
Mrs Russell said: “I feel much better. I’m very happy that they’ve come here.
“They get scared when a door closes, everybody still shakes because everybody thinks it is a rocket or something.”
She added: “I just want everything finished more quickly, and I want us to win and this to finish quickly so I can fly to Kyiv and see my parents, my father, my mother.
“I hopefully will still have a house when I come back. This is my wish.”
Those who stayed in Ukraine
Her dad and 69-year-old mum are still at their north-east Kyiv home, with Russian troops about 25 miles away. When the air-raid siren rings out, they climb down to their dank basement with mushrooms on the wall and wait for silence outside.
They are not the only ones who have stayed behind. Mrs Russell’s brothers and Luda’s husband and two sons have picked up arms and are close to the front line.
Mrs Russell’s nephew has joined the Ukrainian equivalent of the Territorial Army and is camping in a forest with 50 other men, waiting for the Russian army to advance so they can launch an ambush.
All of them regularly get in touch with the rest of the family, and keep them updated with their latest activities. Morale is high, they say, with President Volodymyr Zelensky inspiring their patriotism with stirring speeches.
But no amount of contact can ease Mrs Russell’s worries for those who stayed.
She said: “When I called my parents, my sister or Olha before, I saw these scared faces and heard this alarm noise, and I heard this boom-boom, so I was stressed.
“I sleep very badly. For everyone this is a big, big stress.
“Thank God we have two small kids, so our energy is spent with them and when you’re playing with kids you quickly forget about everything.
“My heart is still not happy, because I still have family there.”
