Friday, March 18, a strike targeted the area of the airport, located about twenty minutes from downtown Lviv. The inhabitants of the city, like the Ukrainians who have come from the east of the country to take refuge there, feel that they are no longer safe.
Since the start of the war, Olga has been trying to keep a normal life, but the 30-year-old can no longer take advantage of her daily walks in the streets of old Lviv. “For three weeks, we have been living in permanent tension. When you walk through the streets of Lviv, you don’t feel that there is war. do not leaveshe explains. The warning sirens go off every night and even when it stops, I can’t calm myself down, go back to sleep.”
“I have anxiety attacks, panic attacks. I’m afraid for my child, for my city, for the whole country.”
Olga, resident of Lvivat franceinfo
If Romana does not sleep at night, it is because this grandmother appeases the fears and the tears of her grandson, who came with his mother from Kharkiv, whom they fled under the bombs. “He keeps shouting Grandma, don’t leave me. He wakes up at night crying. He repeats ‘They’re going to kill me, they’re going to kill me’. I answer ‘No, nobody’s going to kill you here’ .” Same fear for Ela, 9 years old. When she has to go down to the basement of her building on the outskirts of Lviv, she takes her stuffed animals with her. “I’m scared because it could hit here. But it’s okay for now. Russia is waging war on us, it’s wrong!”said the little girl.
At night, she sleeps soundly, unlike the women and grandmothers, refugees or not, whom Yarena Andrushko, a psychologist, receives for free all day. Many, she says, suffer from great physical and mental fatigue. “We can say that the country has been at war for eight years and this psychological help is a permanent necessity. It will still be expressed long after the war. Afterwards, not everyone will have experienced the same things, between those who have seen horrors and those who remained in calm areas. So, we must also put things into perspective. But this trauma goes back a long way, has its roots in the history of the country.
“For eight years, Ukrainians have tended to silence their emotions. But this new war is reopening wounds that are starting to bleed again.”
Yarena Andrushko, psychologist in Lvivat franceinfo
Across the country, professional and volunteer psychologists are mobilizing to help Ukrainians heal these wounds.
War and psychological trauma in Lviv: report by Sandrine Etoa and Fabien Gosset
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