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I lost my mother and my toes but I kept running
Link to tweet
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Bullets were still ripping into the car when Diana Yemelyanova rolled out and crawled to the grassy kerb. She saw her mother, Irina, hit in the stomach. “I wanted to bandage mum, so I lifted her jacket”, Yemelyanova, 20, told The Times. “And her whole side was torn up, her guts fell out. There was nothing to bandage.”
They tried to crawl to safety under a hail of fire, but Irina couldn’t make it. Reaching sparse cover by the side of the road, the student called back to her mother. “I love you very, very much,” Irina gasped in reply. Then she fell silent.
Yemelyanova’s husband, Oleksandr, grabbed his wife’s hand and dragged her away. Back in the car, his 15-year-old brother was lying motionless, blood running from his mouth and a fist-sized hole in his back. The family had run into three Russian tanks as they tried on March 9 to escape their home town of Chernihiv, a city of 285,000 people besieged by Kremlin forces since the start of the invasion more than a month ago. As one tank bore down on their shot-up vehicle, Yemelyanova and her husband had to sprint across an open field to escape. “I still don’t know how we broke away from them,” she said. “We must have been helped by areas of bog, some were waist-deep.”
Reaching the next field, she looked down at her foot and found she was missing two toes. Somehow, she kept going for three kilometres. “I was in shock, I don’t know how else to describe it.” They ran to the nearest Ukrainian position. “I didn’t feel the pain, it was like a dream. Only when I realised we were safe, it all hit me. It’s a catastrophe. I didn’t know and I still don’t know how to live without my mama”
… “Chernihiv was beautiful,” she said of her home town, which is more than 1,300 years old. Elaborate golden-domed monasteries and churches with green slate roofs, echoing with the song of Orthodox prayer, used to bring in thousands of tourists every year. “It’s a historic city, we have more than 15 churches and historical monuments.” Now it is being levelled. “Forty per cent of our houses have already been reduced to dust.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cc7d0e2c-aec5-11ec-8b8c-0207c0fd6104?shareToken=da3f2a28e263dc81ffdc733cfcf2b264
They tried to crawl to safety under a hail of fire, but Irina couldn’t make it. Reaching sparse cover by the side of the road, the student called back to her mother. “I love you very, very much,” Irina gasped in reply. Then she fell silent.
Yemelyanova’s husband, Oleksandr, grabbed his wife’s hand and dragged her away. Back in the car, his 15-year-old brother was lying motionless, blood running from his mouth and a fist-sized hole in his back. The family had run into three Russian tanks as they tried on March 9 to escape their home town of Chernihiv, a city of 285,000 people besieged by Kremlin forces since the start of the invasion more than a month ago. As one tank bore down on their shot-up vehicle, Yemelyanova and her husband had to sprint across an open field to escape. “I still don’t know how we broke away from them,” she said. “We must have been helped by areas of bog, some were waist-deep.”
Reaching the next field, she looked down at her foot and found she was missing two toes. Somehow, she kept going for three kilometres. “I was in shock, I don’t know how else to describe it.” They ran to the nearest Ukrainian position. “I didn’t feel the pain, it was like a dream. Only when I realised we were safe, it all hit me. It’s a catastrophe. I didn’t know and I still don’t know how to live without my mama”
… “Chernihiv was beautiful,” she said of her home town, which is more than 1,300 years old. Elaborate golden-domed monasteries and churches with green slate roofs, echoing with the song of Orthodox prayer, used to bring in thousands of tourists every year. “It’s a historic city, we have more than 15 churches and historical monuments.” Now it is being levelled. “Forty per cent of our houses have already been reduced to dust.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cc7d0e2c-aec5-11ec-8b8c-0207c0fd6104?shareToken=da3f2a28e263dc81ffdc733cfcf2b264
14 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
… to President Biden. 
🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻
