Yuliia Skibina fled the nation days after the battle started. Her dad and mom determined to remain in their dwelling.
DALLAS — A year in the past Sunday, Yuliia Skibina boarded a packed practice solely realizing she wanted to go west.
“I talked to my parents [about] what I should do, whether I should go,” she mentioned. “Everyone was talking that we have to leave now because if you don’t do it now, it’s going to be impossible to do it after all.”
It was two days after Russia started its invasion of Ukraine with its eyes on Kyiv, the capital and Skibina’s dwelling. Exactly a year later, the lethal battle continues to assert lives day-after-day.
“When I left my home I thought, ‘ok, maybe it’ll be like 3-4 weeks and then I will come back,’” she mentioned. “I just took with me my documents, my laptop because I work online, four or five items of clothes, my cat and food for a cat.”
She’d purchased her house a year earlier than the invasion started. Her fridge nonetheless has the identical meals from when she left. Her home windows have been shattered by explosions and her house has additionally been flooded from water in the unit above her.
U.Okay. intelligence experiences as much as 60,000 Russian troopers have died. Ukraine officers say 13,000 of its troops have been killed together with 8,000 civilians.
“I can’t even describe the thankfulness that I have for all the countries all over the world,” Skibina mentioned.
She first stayed in Poland with a lady she met on her practice out.
“She was alone, and I was alone and in the most critical situations, you bond even stronger I think,” she mentioned.
Skibina later went on to Hungary after which again to Poland, ultimately arriving in Dallas final March, the place she knew mates.
She couldn’t get to her dad and mom who stayed in Ukraine and have been reduce off by bridges strategically destroyed by Ukrainian navy.
“It’s been a year. I don’t even have words to describe that feeling,” she mentioned. “I want to touch them. I want to hug them.”
They video name or textual content day-after-day, however she hasn’t hugged them since Christmas of 2021.
Skibina is now 28 and works as an IT contractor and at Whole Foods part- time. The U.N. experiences 13 million folks have been displaced because of the battle in Ukraine, together with 8 million refugees.
Skibina is likely one of the tens of millions hoping to at some point return dwelling.
“You have your life,” she mentioned. “You have your plans, long term plans, short-term plans. They’re all canceled.”
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