After making sure her 3-year-old son was safely settled in Poltava, Ukrainian photojournalist Alina Smutko traveled five hours back to Kyiv to go back to work at a Ukrainian public broadcasting company amid the war in Ukraine.
“I came back because my colleagues needed help,” Smutko said. “I have work to do here and I am more useful here than anywhere else.”
Before Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Kyiv, the capital and most populous city in Ukraine, was always bustling, with plenty of tourists arriving to check out the 1000-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral, one of seven UNESCO World Heritage sites in the world.
Today, Christians in Ukraine are being asked to pray for Saint Sophia Cathedral, as leaders have heard that Russian leaders are planning an attack on the shrine, and local Ukrainian leaders estimate that 2.5 million people, more than half of the residents in Kyiv, have had to flee their homes.
We at Mummyfique think that what’s happening in Ukraine is important to note and we’re grateful to Alina for taking the time to share some of the hard decisions she’s had to make to protect her home.
Tell us a little about your family.
My family includes my 3-year-old son, my 49-year-old mom who is a seamstress, 52-year-old dad who is a driver for an oil company, and 32-year-old father of my child who works in a music instrument store. We lived in Poltava, Ukraine, a city 350km to the East from Kyiv, but I moved to Kyiv a year ago when I found a job here.
My son used to live with me in Kyiv for two weeks a month and the other two weeks in Poltava with his dad all year before the war started. But when the war first started, he was with my parents in a small village near Poltava. We decided that it would be safer for everyone if my child lived with my parents outside the city.
Because the kindergarten is closed, my whole family takes turns spending the day with my child. I was with them for a few days at the beginning of the war, just making sure that Poltava is a safe place for now. We also discussed all evacuation options as a family before I came back to Kyiv to work.
Did you think about leaving your job to stay with your family in Poltava?
I came back to Kyiv because my colleagues needed help. I have work to do here and I am more useful here than anywhere else.
It doesn’t make any sense for me to stop working because there are already three adults caring for my son. I was with them for a few days and realized that I was useless there. My son is used to me going to work away from home. I went on my first assignment that lasted two weeks when he was nine months old.
My kid likes staying with grandpa and grandma, he’s safe there, he’s having fun. We communicate by video every day when there is internet in the evening.
Tell us a little about what life in Kyiv is like now.
Sirens sound in Kyiv every day, all 20 days of war. Sometimes, there are several sirens a day, sometimes up to 10 times a day. I don’t think people feel anything anymore.
Half of the residents have left Kyiv and the atmosphere here is now calm as fighting is taking place in the surrounding towns and there are almost no air attacks.
People have been assessing the safety of the place where they are for now, and some make the decision to move to underground shelters. We are going down to the shelter only for the night.
During the day, when we work, we ignore the sirens because we understand we are not near the areas currently being shelled. But in fact, we are also aware that we can never guess when it will hit us.
It is scary in the city when it is dark and the siren sounds when there is no one around. Especially if you don’t know if there’s a shelter near you.
Supermarkets remain open though they close earlier than usual. The hardest hit here are parents of babies who need to be fed with infant formula. There are long queues at pharmacies, and humanitarian aid doesn’t always arrive in time even though they often include some kind of meal for babies.
Parents of children who need medication on a regular basis, such as insulin, are also struggling.
Most of the colleagues I work with now don’t have children, because those with preschool kids were forced to flee to Lviv or other cities in the West, usually to relatives.
Some people still live in the subway because it is safe to hide there in case of air strikes, but the flow of passengers in Kyiv at train stations is much smaller than in the first days of war because of how many people have left.
If things get worse, our family has plans to move closer to the West, but for now we are just following the news closely.
My work keeps me going everyday and I look forward to the end of all of this. I try not to reflect about this, focusing instead on having to work and giving myself enough time to sleep. That’s all. Everything else will be after the war.
What’s something you want to tell the world?
This is a real war and people are suffering. Things are really hard, especially in surrounding cities of Mariupol, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and the already occupied Kherson. This is not fair in any universe. The people are innocent in all this and all that Ukrainians are doing now is to defend their home.
We are trying to defend against one of the biggest empires in the world. Ukraine isn’t a “part of Russia” and never was.
Nowadays, you’ll hardly find a person who really wants (even a little) to be a part of Russia here in Ukraine. If some people have doubts about this, I want to help you be sure – we definitely don’t want to be invaded, occupied or killed.
Already, 95 kids have been killed and a million have become refugees. Even more have become IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), and this is extremely unfair.
I have only two wishes right now and that is for this war to be over and to see Putin and his friends in Hague in the courtroom.
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At the time of this interview on 13 March, 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported 1,761 civilian casualties in Ukraine, with 636 killed and 1,125 injured. About 90 children have been killed and more than 100 children have been injured.
OHCHR also reported that most civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multi-launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.
The office believes that actual figures are considerably higher.
On February 28, 2022, an opera house, concert hall and government offices in Freedom Square in the center of the North-Eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, were hit by missiles and rockets, killing at least 10 and injuring 35.
“Every square of today, no matter what it’s called, is going to be called Freedom Square, in every city of our country,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “Nobody is going to break us.”
