Guest editorial/Alyona Vyshnytska: Hell is everywhere but my people are also everywhere. And I know we will succeed.
This is what war looks like. This is what it feels like. Ukrainian journalist Alyona Vyshnytska had to flee her beloved Kyiv."Hell is everywhere", she writes.Alyona VyshnytskaWe’ve been living a nightmare for four days. I manage to sleep for an hour but the sound of sirens wakes me up - the threat from the air. I’m currently in Rivne, a city located 350 kilometers from Kyiv, not too far from Belarus.
Next to a village in the Sumy district where my grandparents live, there is shooting taking place and a preschool has been bombed. From their windows they see rows of Russian tanks. Over the phone, other relatives tell me that Russian military is looting grocery stores, which aren’t receiving any deliveries anyway. The shelves with vodka are emptied. I call my grandparents every few hours and am afraid they won’t answer the next time.
It took ten hours to drive to Rivne and every minute I thought I was doing the wrong thing. We passed Ukrainian military heading the other direction. I saw their faces - some of them still covered in teen acne. We went west, and I felt guilty about trying to get away from danger, guilty about my grandparents who live seven kilometers from the Russian border, guilty about the fact that I hadn’t gotten my license the year before.