When I woke up and there was war in the country

I didn’t get out of bed, but flew out, my heart in my chest also trying to escape. There was no process of awakening, this phase simply evaporated, now I’m sleeping and in a split second I’m on my feet and frantically trying to figure out what to grab onto, put on my pants or run into the street in my underpants.

As a child, I lived near a military training ground, I knew how shells were fired and exploded, but I had never heard such sounds, what woke us up was so close that it seemed that the liver was vibrating from the sound wave.

At about 5 am, February 24, it’s still dark outside, my wife and I look out the window, peering into the night, the roads are empty, there are no people, no cars. We were awakened from bed by heavy, loud explosions. In the first seconds we clearly realized that this was WAR, but the brain did not want to believe it, the brain refused reality, this is not believable in the 21st century.

5 or 6 shots were fired at once, as it turned out it was the air defense against missiles over Boryspil, which we found out about 30 minutes later from FB. There was silence on TV for another hour and a half, there were no alarm sirens. Maybe this is a terrorist attack or a man-made disaster, the explosions have stopped, there are no flashes or fires, there is no traffic on the street. I'm shaking, my wife picked up the baby.

We were not prepared, we did not have a ready-made evacuation plan, the suitcase was not packed, the only thing that came to mind was to go to the shelter in the metro, meet other people, understand what had happened.

20 minutes later I read in a telegram about the bombing of military units in Ukraine, including a missile landing in Brovary, but why is there no air raid alert, why are they silent on TV? I grew up at a time when before lessons at school they gave information, during pre-war training we were told about sirens, about air raid raids, about bomb shelters, none of this exists at the moment.

But what we read in the telegrams confirmed our fears about an attack on Ukraine, and an hour and a half later, TV reported an invasion and shelling of Ukrainian territory, in different cities at the same time, at airfields and military warehouses.

I didn’t understand what to do next, I wanted to go to work, I wanted everything to go as before, but work had already called me and said it was a day off. Because of nervous tension I need to constantly do something, something to occupy myself with, I began to collect the necessary things, underpants, socks, a power bank.

There has been a tense situation in Ukraine for 8 years due to the presence of Russian troops in our country and the annexation of Crimea by the Russians. But we lived and worked, hoping for the wisdom of the 21st century, for the adequacy of the rulers of the countries.

A month before the invasion, in many media, and especially American, there were constant intimidations about the Russian attack on Ukraine. All this was fake for us, every aggravation in the south of Ukraine was accompanied by hysteria “Putin will attack”, you get used to it and don’t react, just let the politicians yell and intimidate the people, either with the crown or with the war, there is no faith in either the media or the politicians.

But some politicians and their children had already left the country, ordinary people were buying barrels of gasoline and generators, many had “alarm suitcases” ready in their cars, the dollar was slowly but surely climbing to the top, psychosis was gradually beginning to cover the entire nation.

After two weeks of this hysteria, I turned off the increased, heightened anxiety and switched to complacency and sarcasm, many joked about this topic, joked to relieve tension, but I started taking antidepressants after visiting the doctor, everything was very bad at heart.

Therefore, after the first explosions we were not ready, only my tourist experience automatically told me that we needed to pack it in a backpack and be ready to run to the subway.

Immediately after the news on TV, traffic jams and traffic jams formed on the streets. There were kilometer-long queues at shops, ATMs, and pharmacies. The day before the shelling, I also ordered two packages of my medications from the online pharmacy, with a reserve, but did not pick them up on the same day, and now I received an SMS with a cancellation of the order.

Everyone was fussing on the street, there were hour-long queues in the shops, not everything was working anymore, I didn’t even try to get to the pharmacy because of the queues, I decided to buy up essential products, I had already packed my emergency backpack. Later, I never found my medications.

Today is March 14, the 19th day after the Russian attack on Ukraine, Kyiv is surrounded, Kharkov is being bombed.

In Kyiv today, missiles flew into a residential multi-storey building, there were deaths.

More than 1,300 civilians died, more than 70 children.

Mariupol is surrounded, there is a humanitarian catastrophe in the city, residents are buried in mass graves.

The whole world is simply contemplating how the invaders burst into a foreign country, into a foreign territory, but our citizens now hate Russia so much that it gives us strength!

We will live, but the end of Rashka has already come!