The lucky ones are sitting on the blue plush of the rare Ukrainian intercity. Although they also sit in the narrow aisles, on their own bags, even on the filthy train toilet with the door open. Some doze off after a wrecked night of noise, fear and uncertainty. Others hoist their cigarettes on intermediate balconies. They don’t look very happy. Relieved at times, but mostly depressed. About what they left behind in the East and about what awaits them in the West. About what a full-scale invasion of their country means and about how long they will be displaced.
I have never crossed the border, except once on holiday in the Czech Republic. Now I am displaced.
Still, the few hundred people who managed to get a place on the express train from Kiev to Lviv, considered safer, are the lucky ones. The crowds that drifted adrift after the first Russian missiles fell on the capital’s civil airport around 5 a.m. has created a traffic jam from east to west. Air traffic has been completely paralyzed. Old-fashioned trains normally take twenty hours on the 550 kilometer route and are now delayed for hours – if they are still running. But this intercity sprints to Lviv on Thursday afternoon. The war causes a three-hour delay.
A decade ago, the express train was the symbol of Ukrainian progress and affiliation with the west. The railway connected the country more quickly with Poland, with which Ukraine hosted the European Football Championship in 2012, and thus with the rest of Europe. In 2022, such a train is the most efficient means of escaping a war that seems to have risen from the previous century.
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In a compartment for six, Halyna Romasjko (23) greedily drinks cola from a bottle and eats salty biscuits, while her neighbor across the street eats coarse brown bread with sausage. She shows the Mickey Mouse bag she already packed last weekend. Not much bigger than A4 size. “I purposely brought only the essentials: documents, a toothbrush, a charger, food and water.” Not because she thinks she will return to her student house in Kiev very soon. “But the last time I fled I had a huge bag with me and it was terrible to have to carry it with me all the time.”
For months in bomb shelters
Romashko comes from Donetsk and was also hunted there in 2014 by an invasion, “by Russians and Chechens who were supposedly Ukrainian separatists.” She spent months in air raid shelters or other locations rather than in the house where she lived with her parents as a 15-year-old. After months of bloody struggle, a demarcation line was drawn and her family just ended up on the Ukrainian side. This allowed her to study biology in Kiev after high school.
When she woke up very early this Thursday morning, she saw Putin’s declaration of war on social media just before she heard the first “loud bangs”. “Then I woke up my roommates, grabbed my bag and took them to the nearest subway station.” In the absence of sufficient shelters for the three million inhabitants of Kiev, the city council had recommended that they take shelter underground. On the spot a roommate came up with a train ticket to Lviv and now Romashko races “with mixed feelings” through the landscape of arid, yellow plains, interspersed with tufts of bare birch forest. She does not know exactly where she will sleep tonight “with friends of friends”. But she knows one thing for sure. “I don’t want to travel on to Poland. I don’t want to abandon Ukraine.”
Katalyna (38) sits in tears, staring at her phone, waiting for word from her children being taken west by car. She does not want to say her last name because she is afraid that a new regime – installed by Putin – could soon go after its own citizens in Belarus in the Belarusian way.
The last time I ran I had a huge bag with me, it was terrible to have to carry it around.
She handed over her sons aged 12 and 9 this morning to her ex’s mother, who drives them to a shelter. “My youngest is very scared. So I wanted to get them to safety and just go to work myself.” She is a pediatrician.
“But within an hour I changed my mind and bought the last train ticket I could find to chase them.” Her flight arose out of panic this morning. “The milk is still in the fridge as if we were going back tomorrow.” But she has already decided that she wants to be very far away from Ukraine. “My brother lives in Cyprus, maybe we can go there.
Her coupé mate Volodymyr (32), who also does not want to be traced in the newspaper, is extremely prepared. He set up his backpack months ago. When the first reports of Russian military build-up on the borders reached him, he feared bombing in Kiev. He called an old college friend in Lviv to make sure he could go there in case of an emergency. He booked a train ticket the day before Putin’s speech.
Yet he has no long-term plan for if there is also a war in Lviv. At the prospect of Poland, he kneads his eyebrows thoughtfully. “I went on holiday in the Czech Republic once. Other than that, I’ve never been across the border. And now I am displaced.” He also has little faith in aid from EU countries. “They just keep repeating that they “strongly condemn” Russia and do nothing at all.”
Lawyer Krystyna (35), who also looks startled when a journalist asks for her full name, takes this train to bring her cat Tiger with her parents in western Ukraine and then go back to Kiev herself. But in addition to the portable cat cage, she has three large bags and a large suitcase that she can use for months. Stuff provides guidance in a world where everything else is suddenly uncertain. She cannot comprehend that Vladimir Putin actually sent his soldiers to her capital. “What should he do with Kiev, where he is hated by everyone,” she wonders.