When russian soldiers opened fire on our car, I thought we were dead. It was 4 March, eight days into the invasion of Ukraine. My wife and I had hurriedly packed all our valuables that could ‚ t in one suitcase and a couple of carry-ons. We hired a driver, thinking we could make it to the train station in Irpin — a small village outside of Kyiv. Nearly as soon as we pulled away from the relative safety of the rural farmhouse we had ‰ ed to after the missiles had started falling, we ran into a group of Russian armoured vehicles.
“Weaponry!” screamed my wife, Iryna, who was in the front seat and spotted the Russians ‚ first. “Go back, go back!” she told the driver as he frantically tried to reverse.
It was too late. Without any warning, Russian infantrymen began spraying our Toyota Camry with automatic-weapons ‚ fire and started to chase after our vehicle. As I ducked behind the driver’s seat, I could hear the glass shattering into a million pieces as the bullets struck the windows.
The next few moments are a blur. Somehow we were able to jump out of the moving car, hop over a fence, and take cover behind a bright-blue Portaloo. Our Camry careened down an incline and smashed into a fence around a small apartment house. It was a complete wreck — and full of more bullet holes than I could count.
This story is from the February/March 2023 edition of Rolling Stone UK.
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This story is from the February/March 2023 edition of Rolling Stone UK.
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