Father Tadeus imparts the blessing to two parishioners whom he has taken in his car from Irpin after several days of siege by Russian troops. The farewell is quick on the road that leads to Kiev. This road has become a torrent through which thousands of people escape. Dressed in a cassock and stole, this 62-year-old Catholic priest turns around and returns decidedly in the opposite direction from the one taken by the exodus fleeing from the war and emptying the urban area. The priest assures that he has no intention of leaving his church.
The fighting has intensified in this town of around 60,000 inhabitants located about 25 kilometers from the center of the Ukrainian capital. The bombs have fallen this weekend next to the train station and a significant part of the population no longer has water, electricity or gas, according to the testimony of several of the citizens. “We have to stay to protect this city, even though I don’t have a gun,” explains Dimitri, 40, who acts as a volunteer driver for people who want to leave.
Detonations are heard frequently and plumes of black smoke rise to both the east and west. A missile crosses the sky triggering even more the state of nerves of those present. Groups of Ukrainian soldiers are heading to the front on foot, prepared to enter into combat with the Russians, who have been harassing this area northwest of Kiev for a week. With immense pain and a certain patriotic pride, the civilians who leave their city behind see them pass by. The inhabitants verify with incredulity drawn on their faces that the war has come to the very door of their houses. They don’t know when they will return, when they will be able to normalize their lives again.
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Even before reaching Irpin on the road that leads from Kiev, the dimensions of the refugee movement can be sensed by the large groups of people who walk along the shoulder and the bike lane. Artem, 30 years old, advances with his wife and a group of acquaintances. He says that the city is taken by the Army, but that he has not seen a single Russian soldier. “The worst has been the last three days,” he comments on the fighting.
The local Army divides the tasks in Irpin. At the front, try to stop the advance of the Russian troops. In the rear, they help with the militiamen to evacuate the population. Thousands of people crowded this Saturday between the remains of the bridge that the Ukrainian soldiers themselves dynamited last week to try to delay the advance towards Kiev of the Kremlin troops. The pillars that still support form a corridor under the road through which the refugees access the riverbed through a vomitory that remains narrow due to the large influx. Despite the crowd, only a handful of soldiers are giving way because, surprisingly, order is hardly disturbed in the tumult. Of course, the rubble of that bridge blown up in the town of Romanov now acts as a funnel when civilians need to escape.
This Saturday the testimonies of the horror left behind multiply. Like that of María, 22 years old, who comes almost with what she is wearing from Bucha, five kilometers beyond Irpin. That has been in the last week another scene of the fiercest fighting with images of a Russian armored column burned in one of the main streets. Maria, who hardly stops to talk to the reporter, tries to get with her cousin to the Kiev train station and then to Poland.
Young men in uniform from the Ukrainian Army are busy helping babies, children, the elderly and those who have fled with more luggage than they can carry by themselves. There are many who do not leave their pets behind. Dogs and cats are also protagonists of the getaway. For others, what should not be left behind are religious icons and the Bible. The most absolute incredulity is drawn behind the glasses of Shirley, originally from Hong Kong and married to Jan, a Ukrainian, like her, 33 years old. Both, residents of Irpin, go strongly hand in hand wherever the human tide takes them.
Anything goes to help move people with difficulties over the planks enabled on the Irpin riverbed. There are women, without the strength to continue advancing, who are lifted on blankets in the wildest part; others are directly picked up by the military and loaded onto them. Some need even more help, as they arrive in a wheelchair. Once over the bridge, there are several wheelbarrows that the volunteers pull with people who almost faint along the Romanov highway. Oxana, a military doctor, is attentive to assist those she sees most collapsed.
At one of the intersections, in front of a tank, about twenty people are waiting who can barely move on their own. They are patients evacuated from the Irpin hospital early on Saturday, confirms Sergei, 33, a double amputee who moves on two prostheses. He explains that they are waiting to be transferred to a medical center in Kiev. Many around him are on crutches or walk with prosthetic legs. One even wears his plastic leg on the sports bag where he carries his belongings.
Near the Romanov church, Vlod, a 19-year-old soldier, tries to calm the crying of Emma, a five-month-old girl that he is carrying in his arms. Julia, her mother, cries inconsolably because the situation is beyond her. She for a few moments she does not find her husband, Oleg. “These last 11 days have been the most terrifying of my life,” she says as they manage to fit her in the front seat of a van with the baby on her lap. “Our life was perfect in Irpin. Its parks… now it is a ruin. This is very hard”, laments Julia, her face still bathed in tears.
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