I Saw it All
I Saw it All
My name is Yana Rudenko, I am 24 years old, and originally from the central part of Ukraine, Cherkasy.
When the full-scale invasion started I was 23 years old and wasn’t living in Bucha. I only went just for a few days because my ex-boyfriend lives in Bucha. For a brief time before I went to Bucha I forgot that it was located in the North. I went to my boyfriend so I wouldn’t be alone, it was the stupidest idea to go to Bucha though. It was very famous during the first few days of the war for Russians to just drive about the civilian cars with their tanks, me being in Bucha was an accident.
I am now in the Netherlands and I started studying for my master’s degree in Public Administration. I’m not a politician but one of the biggest problems that people make is that they look at Ukraine and Russian relations, since 21st Feburary 2014. But they need to understand that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine dives deep into history.
It is all a systematic approach, it has been happening for years, and it is not because of Putin. That is the biggest joke I have ever heard. It’s not like Putin is not the problem, but this systematic approach is from Russia to their neighbours, erasing in the face of genocide.
When they kidnap our children they immediately teach them the Russian language. They teach them everything about Russia too, they are brainwashing them. Children and teenagers are very easy to brainwash, it is an easy change for them, and it’s the most terrible thing to do.
Photograph of Yana Rudenko
You need to zoom out and look at the history of all of it in a broader sense, and it’s a bigger problem because people don’t do this. All the shit that happens always comes from Moscow. Once you’ve killed the intellectual of the nation you kill the brain of the nation. It is all erased and it turns into a cultural genocide. For me, this is definitely genocide, they are targeting Ukrainians. When you go deeper into this, it goes towards propaganda, it is as if the Ukrainian nation doesn’t exist. In Europe itself there is one nation which is forgotten about, it is not recognised and hasn’t been for ages. It is Ukraine. A nation of roughly 40 million people. This is not a war for the land, nor for the resources, but it is a war against identity.
I am very socially active on social media. When I was in Bucha I already knew from the first day that my ship is sinking, there were also a lot of challenges for me as a person who was under the occupation. It wasn’t my choice to be under the occupation, but it happened.
The first day I was texting my friends, my first reaction to the war was to send messages to all of my friends, they replied by telling me
“We need to publish the story and we should text all of the Russians we knew so that they protest”.
I had hope in this. I feel it was very naive of me to think like this, I was really expecting them to protest. I only had one person who I spoke to from Russia, I was texting her for the four days I was in Bucha. I was in the basement and there was non-stop bombardment. I messaged her
“Katya, Katya, I’m in the basement, Im very scared. I don’t know what to do, you should tell everyone, share the information. You have a lot of friends, you are Russian, text all of your friends”.
She didn’t, she was silent for those four days. On the day that she decided to message me back
“Oh Yana, I saw your messages, but I didn’t want to reply to you. I don’t want to talk politics”.
Photographs showing the living conditions in basements Photos by Yana Rudenko
Russians are responsible for this. All Russians. When I say responsible, I don’t mean they should all be killed, but they need to take responsibility even if it is for the next 100 years, for each Ukrainian killed they should be responsible.
Being in Bucha I can see, emotionally, I can imagine both of my parents in this type of situation, I’m sure they were more destroyed than I was. No one trusted me, and no one believed what I was saying, I saw dead bodies on the street, I saw it all with my eyes, dead bodies on the street. The burnt cars, I saw it all.
Russia and we are very connected to each other. All Ukrainians not just I were texting their Russian friends. They did nothing. They don’t give a fuck about us, for them this is okay, and it will always be okay. “Stop the war, go to protest”
The problem is not Putin, there is a certain hierarchy in Russia, and they don’t see that something is wrong in the world. They are always under a ruler.
People in Ukraine are still working, they are earning money trying to live normal life. If no one will spend the money they have, the local economy will crash, and you need to support this economy. Of course, people are going to live their normal life, you as a human being can’t fight every day, you aren’t able to fight all the time. You can’t do it all the time, you need to rest. People are fighting, and this can affect a whole nation. You are getting emotional, tired and depressed, you get like this, especially during war. You are not able to function when every day you need to go to a shelter, every day there are airstrikes and you are not able to live. You are trying to live a normal life, and people are trying their best, we do this because our defenders fight for us to have this normal life, they are fighting for us to live, to have this life.
Imagine someone who has cancer, should they go to a restaurant and live a normal life? I think they should, this is a very good metaphor, imagine all Russians are cancer, you live with this cancer, every day you have it and you can feel pain, literal physical pain.
Photographs showing the living conditions in basements
Photos by Yana Rudenko
I cannot express to you what it means when you wake up because of an airstrike alert. You need to go to the bathroom or you need to go to the shelter, you cannot walk. You’re stressed, you don’t have the power to walk, and you are emotionally exhausted. Even having cancer you try to go to a restaurant, and you will try to refuel yourself, what if you will not rest? You will get more depressed, Ukrainians in general need to fight, they need to be positive.
I was under Russian occupation for three months, I was gone, and I wasn’t able to function. Now I’m in the Netherlands and I know I am feeling that I have more energy, I’m fighting online and I am sharing information because I have that power. Others in Ukraine do not have this power, they are depressed, they can’t work, and some can’t even talk English. I can promise now that even though I am in the Netherlands, I can’t listen to fireworks, I hate it so much. If I am asleep in the room and something will fall I jump, I’m similar to a rabbit. I’m scared of loud things, even though I know I am safe here, I have trauma from what has happened. I can feel
fear and it’s almost like it paralyses you, I cannot speak during this wave of fear and it will not just disappear. From the outside, it may seem like people are living normal lives, but you never know what is happening, they might be having bad dreams, or they might be scared of loud sounds. For example, it seems like I am normal like I smile all the time but people may not know that; I’m crying at home, and Im exhausted. I can’t concentrate. Russians must pay for all of this, people need therapy, they are going through trauma, and a lot of people have trauma.
I’m working very hard and I’m also proud of all the Ukrainians who are continuing to study as it is for our country. I published that our soldier defender said “Slava Ukraine” while he was digging his own grave, and then he got shot by 10 bullets, the first thing that Western Europeans wrote was “Oh, Yana not all Russians are bad,” They didn’t say “We are sorry, I’m sorry that you are going through this.” No empathy was presented, but they started to immediately protect the Russians.
Between Bucha and Kyiv there were a few bridges and during the first and second days, there was already news that they were destroyed. From the first day of the war, everything was impossible, during the second day, there was no connection, and it was very poor.
On the third and fourth days, there was no electricity, you cannot use the water, you cant charge your phones, and there is no type of connection. The neighbour whilst I was in Bucha came back to us all and said that the civilian cars were being targeted and destroyed by the Russians. How was I able to escape from Bucha if civilian cars are being targeted, I can’t just sit in a car because I risk my life. So we decided to just wait. We thought the safest option was to stay in the basement, and for days we stayed there. On the third day our neighbour was injured, from seeing this we decided to stay all the time in the basement day and night. We were living there. There was a moment when a missile landed in a building where my ex-boyfriend had rented a flat, we were in another building like 100 meters from that building.
My boyfriend and his brother went to go feed their cats and at that moment the bomb landed, luckly nothing happened to them. I can promise you this was one of the two scariest moments of my life. I am a young girl, at the time I was 23 years old, just imagine me in the middle of a war. I heard the missile and I knew that something big and very bad had happened, for a second you check yourself, you don’t believe that you are alive.
I was so afraid, I didn’t want to stay alone in the middle of the war. From Sunday we all decided to escape as soon as we had the chance to do so, we will escape as it wasn’t getting any better, it was just getting worse and worse. We made this decision as our building was destroyed, I said that we will see that it is not getting better. We must be alive and leave this place, we packed a few times an emergency backpack and we just waited, we didn’t want to leave all by ourselves because we knew that civilian cars were being targeted.
Photographs showing people adapting to the situation
Photos by Yana Rudenko
Whilst I did this I thought about my mum and there was this one time when it upset us both, my mum got sick from the stress, she wasn’t a direct target, but she was sick. I was in occupation and she got seriously sick, essentially she had an injury, a surgery because of this stress. It’s not written anywhere, but the Russians will pay for her surgery. She doesn’t function normally.
My mum used to lie in the bath, watching the news every day, like the whole day she was sitting and watching the news. A bird came to her window and started knocking on it and because of this, she thought there was good news. Everything was difficult, there was the construction of new buildings, they had generators, this was how people were charging their phones, and we didn’t have chargers in the basement. We could charge our phones because of the construction.
After some time we left, we were the first ones to leave our basement after we did this others decided to go as well. They were all evacuated and they were all safe. We were all alive. I kept thinking when they say green corridor, there shouldn’t be any bombardment, but even that... The bags and all the backpacks must go into this car. I remember standing in the middle of the road, there was bombardment, and the sounds were all around. I remember sending my parents a message, no one else knew I was evacuating, and I didn’t have time for it. We waited for 6 hours in the same spot, Russia didn’t allow the buses that were supposed to come to Bucha to arrive, and because of this, the official evacuation was disrupted. Some women and children waited outside in minus 5 weather, a bus came and we left, but the women and children had to stay, I can’t express how you have this biggest hope in your whole life and imagine if it doesn’t happen. It’s a huge level of... Disappointment.
I was praying, I remember that we were driving and there was death everywhere you were driving between cars, they were burnt and most cars crashed. I saw a red body of a dead cyclist, why was he killed, many more cyclists were killed also.
There was this huge shopping mall with Bucha, it’s totally destroyed now. Shops were also destroyed, everything was just destroyed. No small damage to the infrastructure, buildings, cars, especially civilian cars... They were just destroyed. Being in Bucha I already knew that people were getting tortured in the basements. When I was in my hometown with my parents there was this article that was posted by The New York Times, in March and it was about rape. I was there, one kilometre away from it. War crimes on yourself are just horrifying, I kept thinking how it could literally happen to me. I wish during this time I could have more photos, of the dead cyclists. The viral photo of the lady with the blue coat and the red nails was well-known online, but she was also well-known in Bucha, everyone knew her, and she worked on nails. By seeing these details, your brain tries to forget them, you remember some
parts but you don’t want to you only want to focus on the good. I’m a very emotional person, I cannot ignore these war crimes, and they can’t either. I refuse everything that has happened, I can speak about and I’m able to share.
My motivation through this whole disaster is to speak the truth, people might pass on the truth. I wish I knew that I could tell the whole world about our culture concerning cities and what is great there? But I have to speak about these cities because of the war crimes that have happened in them. So many people have died there. Trauma on trauma and trauma because there are war crimes on top of war crimes, Massacre are happening upon massacre, the world needs to know.
Photographs showing the damage to the civilian infrastructure in Bucha. Photo by Yana Rudenko