despite the fighting, these thousands of Ukrainians return home after several weeks of exile

Like many trains in Ukraine right now, the one Ludmilla and Victor are waiting for is late. But it does not matter: the important thing is that one of these blue wagons brings back their daughter. The couple, bouquet of flowers in hand, is impatient on the platform of the kyiv station.

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The locomotive brakes, the doors open. Everyone gets off, and Victoria, 18, falls into their arms. “That’s it, I’m back home! I hadn’t seen my parents for more than two months”exclaimed the girl.

Victoria was sent to the Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine at the very beginning of the war with Russia. Before that, she had never been separated from her parents for so long. And his recent life fits in two plastic bags: “I had to buy some things, because I left a little early, in March, with only two pants, two blouses… And a jacket!”

Like her, several thousand Ukrainians choose to return home after several weeks of exile. They are already more than a million, according to the UN, while Vladimir Putin promises victory for his country on May 9 “like in 1945”.

Ludmilla cries and smiles at the same time. “We are going to win this war”, she said, invigorated by the return of her daughter. And even if Putin’s intentions, on this May 9, worry them, explains Victoria: “Of course it would probably have been more reasonable for me to wait a few more days, for safety. But I couldn’t wait any longer!”

The sirens in the kyiv station remind us that war is not far away. So some who are back in the Ukrainian capital are just passing through: they come to collect papers, a cat… A dog, for Oksanna who is already planning to return, in about ten days, to Germany, the country that sheltered for two months.

Others, like the family who got off the Chernivtsi train, found this status of exiles too hard to live with. The mother says: “Yes, our morale took a hit. We had to go home.“Little Katia hugs her enormous teddy very tightly, on the quay. Glad to have returned from the west, despite the war.

And his mother adds: “Whether we’re scared here, or whether we’re scared there, in the end, what difference does it make?” She is already thinking of the future and… of the tourists, of the many visitors she predicts as soon as her country, Ukraine, is liberated.