On March 7, 2022, Myroslava Svistovych and her daughter Lada managed to escape from the occupation of Irpin, Kyiv Oblast. At that time, there was heavy fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces in the city, so it was dangerous to stay at home.
The evacuation from Irpin was also highly dangerous and risky. Myroslava and her daughter were almost killed trying to leave the city.
"Our car sped down Tyschenko Street and turned onto Universitetska Street. At that time, a friend from Kyiv called me. "Taya, we are in a hurry to evacuate, I will call you back later." I turned off the phone and saw how the windshield of our car was blown away by the burst fire...", Myroslava recalls that terrible day.
The next moments happened for Myroslava in slow motion. She turned her head to the right, where her daughter Lada was sitting and saw that the window by her head had also shattered into pieces.
Instantly, like in a movie, Myroslava shouted at her daughter to duck. However, Lada couldn't do so, because on her lap was a large carrier with their cat, which had been injured the day before.
This may have saved her life, because if she had ducked, the bullet that hit her stomach may instead have hit her head or neck. However, at that moment, Myrolava didn't know that her daughter had been hit.
After a few more seconds, Myroslava saw their driver slowly lean to the left, opened the door, and fall out of the car. The car continued to move at a fairly high speed without a driver.
"I don't drive a car and I'm not a superman who can move from the back seat of the car to the driver's seat in seconds, so the only thing that came to my mind was that we also needed to jump out. Besides, they could have kept shooting at us. Therefore, I said to my daughter, "Lada, jump out!" Myroslava says.
After taking everything that could have trapped her daughter in the car, (2 backpacks, a laptop, and a bag with documents), Myroslava jumped out. At that moment, the car reached the left edge of the road, where the asphalt ended and the ground began. Thus, her landing was fortunately relatively soft.
"Actually, I don't remember how I ended up on the ground, but I didn't get a single scratch. It seems that all I did every day was jump out of the car on the go. The only thing I felt was the car turning from my jump and going to the opposite side of the road diagonally, passing over my right leg before that. But it wasn't painful at all," she recalls.
As she laid on the ground, Myroslava saw the car moving away from her and waited for her daughter to jump out of it. But she didn't. Finally, the car drove into a ditch on the right side of the road, and then Lada got out of it with a cat carrier.
Once she made sure that her daughter was alive, Myroslava began looking around in all directions to understand what was happening around her. She saw three Russian soldiers coming towards them. She again started shouting to her daughter to lie down next to the car, while she continued to assess the situation and think about how to reach her daughter on the other side of the road.
"The distance between us was about 40 meters across the asphalt road. If it were regular ground, I could have crawled, but crawling on asphalt didn't seem like the best idea. I decided that I would just try to run over, and if they shot me, I would fall," Myroslava says.
Crouched down, she ran to her daughter, and the Russians did not shoot her. Lying down next to her daughter, Myroslava told her that they would probably have to let their cat go, because they had to run away, and it would be more difficult while carrying their cat. But Lada flatly refused to leave the cat behind.
Since they could not run away, Myroslava continued to think about what to do next. She decided to call someone to tell them what happened so that in the worst case scenario, their relatives would at least know how they had died.
Since Myroslava's main phone was already dead, she took out another one, which she had bought just a week ago for a new business. It didn't have any personal contact, but it was fully charged. She asked her daughter to give her the piece of paper on which her husband had written important phone numbers.
Myroslava called her husband's friend Serhii and told him everything. At a certain point, she had to hang up, because the Russians were coming very close to Myroslava and Lada.
"At this point, the computer in my head was going through all possible options for what we could do and how they would react to it. I looked at the soldiers, then at my daughter, who was lying next to the carrier with the cat, and I understood that her life depended on my actions and words," Myroslava recalls.
A scream could provoke the occupiers to aggression, and a plea for mercy could prompt them to deny it. Then Myroslava remembered a situation from her life and decided to ask the Russians for help. Usually those to whom you show trust and ask for help will not do you harm.
So Myroslava raised her hand and said in Russian, "Please help." She said it as if she was asking them to help her lift a heavy suitcase. She didn't want to show her fear.
Her words surprised the Russian soldiers. They asked her who she was calling. Myroslava lied about calling her husband. The Russians ordered her to drop her phone and stomped on it. Then they asked if Myroslava and her daughter still had phones, and she lied that they didn't, even though she still had three phones in her pockets. Luckily, the occupiers didn't check.
Next, the Russians asked, "Who are you, and where are you going?" Myroslava answered that they were civilians on their way to evacuate. Eventually, the soldiers let them go.
Myroslava and his daughter went through the forest to Soborna Street. Myroslava carried the cat and the backpacks walking in front, while Lada walked behind her. Since the bullet-torn carrier looked like it was about to fall apart, the daughter stopped Myroslava and forced her to repair it so that the cat wouldn't jump out and run away.
"She did all this with a bullet in her stomach, which I didn't even know about, because her injury was covered by her jacket. I did not see that her shirt was covered in blood under her jacket. Later, she said that it was very difficult for her to walk, as if there was a stone in her stomach, she just wanted to sit down and not move. But she had to keep moving to get to the vet, where our injured cat would be saved. She didn't tell me a word about her injury," said Myroslava.
On the way, they managed to stop a car that took them to the blown-up Irpin bridge. Then they had to cross the river on the rickety planks laid down underneath the bridge. Volunteers helped them by taking their backpacks and the cat carrier.
Then one of the volunteers asked Lada if she was injured and if she needed to be carried. Lada finally said she was. Only when Lada was put on a stretcher on the other side of the river and the jacket covering the wound was cut open did Myroslava see that her daughter's shirt was covered in blood.
One bullet went through her right breast, and the other lodged in her stomach on the left. Each of these bullets, if it entered a bit further to the right or left, could have been fatal for Lada, as could the bullets that left holes in the hood of Myroslava's jacket.
Later, Myroslava and Lada learned that on March 7, at the same place where they almost died, several more cars were shot. But their passengers were not lucky enough to survive.
Mother and daughter eventually reached Kyiv, where Lada and their cat underwent surgery. The family ended up in an almost empty Kyiv, where most of the population left in the first two days of the war. But after Irpin, which became the capital's key line of defense, Kyiv felt like the safest place on earth for Myroslava and Lada.
This material was prepared with financial support from the International Renaissance Foundation.
