Even before the full-scale Russian invasion, Kateryna Markova's (Instagram - markova_ua) family knew that there would be an attack, so they were looking for ways to get their little son Markian out in advance.
On February 21, Kateryna bought tickets to Antalya for herself, her mother, and her son. To save $100, she bought tickets for February 24, not February 22. They wanted to believe that this trip would be just quick getaway to somewhere warm.
On the night of February 24, Kateryna and her husband Taras drank wine, watched an episode of Ozark, and went to bed quite late at around 2 am. Their things were packed.
"At 4 am, Marik woke up and just spun for an hour and a half. I was, to be honest, drunk, and I just hugged him, desperately wanting to sleep, because I had to wake up early and go to the airport. Looking ahead - since then, I always look at the news when my son suddenly wakes up at night," Kateryna recalls.
At 7 in the morning, her mother called her and said in a trembling voice: "Katya, baby, did you see the news? We won't make it [to the airport - ed.]."
Kateryna opened the news in shock, and woke up Taras, telling him "We have been attacked, and the whole country is being bombed," and began to repack things from the suitcase they had packed for the trip into their emergency go bag.
Like all Zaporizhzhya residents, they feared above all that the Russians would bomb the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station. Their house is literally next to it. Therefore, the family decided to move to their relatives' house on the right bank of the Dnipro with a good basement.
They stayed in that crowded basement for two weeks. Kateryna spent the nights with her son only in the basement. They hardly saw Taras at that point, because he was helping the Ukrainian military.
"My relatives say that all this time I was a textbook nervous wreck. Personally, I remember almost nothing. Only constant urges to vomit from nerves. And shame that my friends were volunteering since the first day while I was sitting in the basement with my child. And constant swings from "I have to go somewhere" to "I won't go anywhere from here," recalls Kateryna.
Kateryna and her family made their first attempt to leave on March 5, after the seizure of the Zaporizhzhya NPP. Half of Zaporizhzhya left at that point. But in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, the family was stuck in a terrible traffic jam, and it was simply impossible to find a room to sleep in. There was overnight frost, not enough fuel, and panic all over the country. Kateryna went crazy and made the call to turn back.
This ended up being the right decision, because when Kateryna, her mother, and her son made their second attempt on March 9, the highway was practically empty. They did not know where they were going. Simply to the West of the country.
In Uman, Kateryna asked her followers on Instagram to help her family find shelter. She got a response from a woman named Ulyana, who offered Kateryna's family an entire empty house in a village in Ternopil Oblast. Kateryna received other wonderful offers, but chose this one because it was closest to the highway, and her sister, who had also evacuated, was also nearby.
Kateryna's family spent almost 2 months in that house in their first evacuation. They waited for May 9 to get a better idea of what lay ahead.
"When we returned to Zaporizhzhya, many people criticized me. But I needed to be with my husband, who had already joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces. All summer, we were at home under constant air alarms and the sounds of explosions at night. That was until the real missile terror began in Zaporizhzhya in September. Every night, I started to make a bed for us in the corridor, and almost every night we had to run there," Kateryna says.
When, on the night of Markian's birthday, a rocket flew into the place where the family was supposed to celebrate, they took it as a conclusive sign that they needed to get out again for a while.
The family left for relatively peaceful Kyiv, which had long been living its usual life. However, as soon as Kateryna arrived there, the first massive shelling of critical infrastructure began. It was October 10, and they spent the nights in the basement again.
Renting expensive housing in Kyiv and living without electricity didn't seem like a very good idea to Kateryna, so they returned to Zaporizhzhya again with a plan to look for a place where they could spend the winter without blackouts.
So Kateryna left for Croatia with her son: "There is power here and no curfew, but we still don't go outside after sunset. We live by the sea, which we only dreamed about before, but we don't notice it because we are constantly reading the news. We're here alone. We are strangers here."
Of course, abroad, Kateryna feels better about her little son. They are safe there. However, she really wants to go home and is already planning their return in April.
This material was prepared with financial support from the International Renaissance Foundation.
