Islam Melikov

The terrors of the war come to Islam Melikov and his family at night. At half past four in the morning, Russian troops start the massive shelling of Kharkiv, a metropole in Ukraine’s northeast. Panic spreads quickly in the city and also the Melikov family fears for their lives. Both parents and their two sons are sitting in their apartment and don’t know what to do. At six o’clock their daughter, her husband, and their toddler join them.

First, nobody believes it will be a long war. “We thought it would be over in three to five days”, Islam remembers later. The people of Kharkiv speak Russian and there’s a strong Russian influence on the city’s cultural life anyway. “There was no repression, who were they supposed to liberate?”, he asks.

But when the bombing continues, the family looks for shelter in the basement of a nearby school building. They stay there for five days and hear the gunshots and bomb explosions. It keeps getting worse. The walls of the basement shake when the bombs explode. One of their sons is so terrified that he faints. “That’s when I knew we had to get out of here”, Islam recounts.

The family leaves the basement in the morning and heads to the train station. They take a few things for the toddler but nothing for themselves. The clothes they’re wearing are now the only thing left to them. Pants, shirts, and clothing for winter. It’s cold in Ukraine in February.

At the Kharkiv train station there’s already a large crowd who want to leave the city and travel west. Everybody is scared. When a bomb explodes close by, panic spreads among the crowd, Islam reports. The family eventually manages to get onto a train headed for Lviv in Western Ukraine.