in Mykolaiv, Ukrainian families have no choice but to take refuge in garages

Igor, 35, a father, is a colossus with a tender heart. His house – in a village east of Mykolaiv – was destroyed on the third day of the Russian invasion. His village is currently on the front line. “There are terrible fights out there nowexplains Igor. Those who stayed tell us that it is like this almost every day. A resident has just been killed, they had to collect the pieces of his body. A woman has lost her legs. It’s like that every day.”

In Ukraine, half of the inhabitants of Mykolaiv had to flee the bombardments. The situation is even worse for those who live in the surrounding villages and find themselves on the front line. As people flee the strategic city in the south of the country, dozens of families, like those of Igor, have no choice but to seek refuge there in garages. Small buildings supposed to house cars and which now house whole families.

Igor had to find refuge in an unsanitary garage which he had to fit out somehow to shelter his three children and his wife. Igor is a mountain of muscle and continuous tears in his eyes: “I don’t even know how I feel anymore. We have no choice and here we are trying to prepare for winter.” The front door to the garage is a half-plank of bad wood to combat the damp eating away at the walls. Igor installed a small stove. A narrow staircase leads to the cellar. Makeshift bunks hang on the wall. Parents and children have been sleeping together for six months in these few square meters.

“We don’t feel safe here. The garage protects us from shrapnel but if a bomb falls directly on us. We explain to the children that an old and horrible gentleman [Vladimir Poutine] attacked us”.

Igor, Ukrainian

at franceinfo

Like all refugees, economic difficulties are now catching up with him. “We have almost no incomeexplains Igor. We try to sell products. My daughter just called me to say ‘nobody buys me tomatoes’. I told him no choice, we bought them for 60 grivnas, we sell them for 60 grivnas. It’s like that now.”

Igor knows that despite the counter-offensive, he will never find his village. “It will take years in the best case for the situation to stabilize. No choice, we have to bounce back here.” As if to encourage himself to forget his old life, this garage, he wants to call it proudly “our house”.