The Ukrainian Yuliia Feihe (29) came to Berlin from Odessa in 2014. Even then there was fighting in their home country. Today the fear is greater than ever: the fear for her family.
Yuliia calls her mother every day. “Yesterday she was standing on the terrace and several military helicopters flew past her house,” says the young woman. She couldn’t tell whether they were Ukrainian or Russian.
Many Ukrainians, like Yuliia’s mother, receive both Russian and Ukrainian television. “A different version comes from both sides and fear is spread from both sides,” says the psychologist from Wandlitz.
She would like to hug her mother and bring her here. “She has already fled from Odessa to a village 200 kilometers away. I try to persuade her to come to me all the time,” says Yuliia.
But her mother’s hope is still too great that the nightmare will soon come to an end.
Julia is concerned. She witnessed the beginning of the conflict in 2014 when her hometown was bombed. 200 people lost their lives at the time: “The next morning I took the bus to the university. I saw dead people out of the corner of my eye. It wasn’t riots, it was war.”
The tension in the country was already high at the time. “I was talking in Russian in front of the university, and people in uniform came up and said we should speak Ukrainian because we’re in the Ukraine,” recalls the mother of two. In Odessa, however, most Ukrainians would speak Russian.
For Yuliia, her homeland has become a place where power games are played out. “Putin’s ego plays a big part in this,” she says.
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Her younger brother Igor (24) could soon be called up for military service. She knows he has mixed feelings about it and, like other Ukrainians, wants peace and security from the bottom of his heart.
Then Yuliia Feihe says: “Of course he would fight for his mom …”