Survivor tells – “I thought normal life could start in Bucha”

For Oleksii Yahno and many other Eastern Ukrainians, the war started more than eight years ago. He comes from the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. His parents lived there, as did his sister with her husband and son. They all lived in the northwest of the city, a few hundred meters from the airport. In the spring of 2014, the conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russian militias escalated. “In the beginning, they proceeded quietly and unnoticed, infiltrating the local authorities,” said the 48-year-old. At first there were only isolated battles, then the war intensified. At the end of May, gunmen stormed the airfield, artillery shelling, the house where Oleksii lived was destroyed.

He fled to western Ukraine with his sister and cousin and his brother-in-law enlisted as a soldier. Jachno himself did not have to join the army, he is unfit because of a damaged optic nerve. also DDonetsk University, where the Ukrainian taught, was evacuated and moved to what is now Pokrovsk. In the city, which is also in Donetsk Oblast, but outside the separatist areas, Yahno continued to work as a political science teacher. He worked there for another three and a half years, his sister stayed in western Ukraine.

The war raged on and so did his parents, who lost all their possessions and had to flee. Jachno’s mother, who was already not very well, did not survive the rigors of the escape. She died in early 2019. That same year, Yahno came with his father Oleksandr to the city of Bucha, north of the Ukrainian capital, where he got a job as a professor of political science at the University of Architecture. “I thought that a normal life could finally begin in Butscha,” Jachno said in an interview with krone.at.

There was no time to escape
On February 24, the city was right in the path of the Russian invaders, who were advancing from Belarus to Kiev. The war overtook him and his 74-year-old father. Within hours they were in the middle of the war and there was no time to flee. There was heavy fighting around the nearby Hostomel airport. “There was shelling again, storm, same as in Donetsk,” says Oleksii Jachno, “but the big difference is: in Donetsk everything went on for months, in Bucha everything happened within two weeks.”

During the first days of the invasion, they stayed in their apartment. Then the shelling came closer, two shells hit the neighboring house. “It was on the fourth day of the war when we hid in the basement for the first time. The electricity grid hadn’t been destroyed and there was still water, so we went back to the apartment, even though it was dangerous then.” , says the Ukrainian. Soon Russian troops entered the city, gas, water and electricity were cut off. With more than 60 other people unable to escape in time, they hid in the basement of the apartment building. The neighbors helped each other, many brought food. It was early March and freezing cold. In complete darkness people had to sleep on the bare concrete floor, some also had folding beds and mattresses.

Temporary cooking was done in the cellar. “There was a construction site in the neighboring house, so there was wood there, so we made a fire with it. But cooking only happened in the light. It would have been too dangerous at night because the occupiers would have noticed that there were people there,” says the 48-year-old. Some boys took the batteries out of cars so they could charge their cell phones – and now and then there was a signal Then a generator was also found so that the residents could turn on some light While they were in the basement, the Russian soldiers raged in Bucha, shooting indiscriminately and killing civilians.

“The whole house was shaking”
Then a Russian missile flew into the adjacent building, destroying entire residential units. “Fortunately disguised” was that the rocket didn’t explode, otherwise it would have done a lot more damage. “The impact alone was so powerful that in the basement we thought the missile had hit us. The whole house was shaking,” Yahno says. His apartment was also damaged by the shelling, with windows and door frames bursting from the blast. “Just one rocket was terrible. But what must have happened in Mariupol is unimaginable,” emphasizes the Ukrainian.

On March 10, two weeks after the war of aggression began, they heard that buses were being used to evacuate. Oleksii Yahno and his father went to the assembly point. There they waited three hours in the cold with hundreds of other people, but no buses came.

A young man in plain clothes with two sheepdogs showed up and offered to go south to Irpin, which is still held by Ukrainians. They fled Bucha along zigzag paths. Thanks to the dogs, which smell the explosives, they were able to avoid mines. Along the way, Yahno saw numerous destroyed armored vehicles of the Russian column and also corpses at the station.

‘He not only saved us, he helped hundreds of people’
To this day he does not know who the man with the dogs was. “Maybe he was a soldier. He was probably a local because he knew the place very well. The dogs helped him spot booby traps. He didn’t just help us, he helped hundreds of people,” emphasizes the Ukrainian political scientist.

From Irpin they were taken first by truck to the suburb of Romanovka, then by bus to Kiev and finally by train to Yachno’s sister in western Ukraine. Now Oleksii and Oleksandr Jachno are in Austria. They now live here in an apartment in Bärnbach in western Styria. Oleksii works at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War in Graz. This came about through historian Peter Ruggenthaler, who conducts research here. The two know each other from their joint student days in St. Petersburg.

‘Millions suffered the same fate’
Jachno is happy and grateful that he survived everything. He emphasizes: “The fate of me and my family is not unique, it now affects hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.” In Styria, he and his father were well received, “The understanding and compassion that met me here is overwhelming. I can only thank Austria and its people,” says the Ukrainian. Does he ever want to return to his homeland? “Of course, but now a lot of things are so unpredictable. It starts with the question of when the shelling of Kiev will start again and goes to the question of how you can heat your house?”

Additional translation: Angelika Eliseeva