MOSCOW—Olga Volkova, the director of orphanage #1 in Ukraine’s breakaway republic of Donetsk, is in the middle of one of the darkest, most difficult nights of her life.
After Denis Pushilin, the pro-Russian leader of the separatist territory, declared a mass evacuation of women and children in the region at 4 p.m. local time on Friday, the director and her team were given just two hours to pack up the belongings of some 225 orphans and put them on ten buses headed to the Russian region of Rostov.
Five hours later, an exhausted and emotional Volkova spoke with The Daily Beast on the phone. She was already aboard one of the buses, and was unclear as to what awaits her and the hundreds of children under her care.
ADVERTISEMENT
“[It’s] a very tiring and stressful day and it is not even over,” she told The Daily Beast, exasperated. She described chaos in the streets on the way over, with massive traffic jams and panicked citizens jumping over cars in a rush to get out. The situation on the road is so bad that the bus carrying Volkova was still en route after six hours of driving to a destination that usually takes only two hours to reach from the orphanage.
The widespread panic among residents of this region is justified. Friday in Donetsk and Luhansk—which is located between Russian and Ukrainian borders—has so far seen explosions, shelling, and panic among global intelligence agencies that Russia may be planning a false flag operation to use as a pretext for a Russian invasion of Ukraine, one that could possibly involve targeting a bus full of evacuees. The looming threat of war is growing more likely by the hour, with Pushilin himself announcing that “The full-scale war can start any moment,” on Russian state television, and U.S. President Joe Biden saying he is “convinced” that Putin has made the call to invade Ukraine.
The evacuation process by Friday afternoon appeared messy, to say the least. According to a report from Znak media, Rostov authorities said they “know nothing” about the thousands of refugees that would be coming in from Donetsk and Luhansk after initial announcements of the evacuations. Many of the refugees have reportedly been placed on some 80 buses arranged by pro-Russian separatists, while others residents took off by private vehicles throughout the night.
When she spoke to The Daily Beast on the bus, Volkova was trying to catch up her breath. The evacuation call came at the end of her work day, which she described as “a shocking moment.” The 225 orphans she’s responsible for range in age between 7-18, and she had to make sure that each one of them was put on the bus by 6 p.m local time for the long trip to an unknown refugee camp in Roskov. “The [kids] have just little backpacks or sport bags with some clothes and things they need every day,” the director told The Daily Beast.
The orphanage staff, meanwhile, have had to rely on rumors to get a sense of where they’ll be staying once they reach their destination. Some have been told they might be placed at a sanatorium in Roskov.
On the bus, some children were asleep, while others were chatting. As for Volkova, she couldn’t help but recall horror stories from the 2014 war, in which a bus, like the one she was on, was blown to pieces.
“We remember the war too well,” she said. “A trolleybus was blown up with 10 passengers in our Leninsky district of Donetsk in 2015. One shell hit a football field on the territory of our orphanage, another the corner of our building, but thank God the children were away that summer.”
Volkova wasn’t the only orphanage director making the mad dash to the Russian border on Friday. Larisa Prilipko, director of the Teremok orphanage in Donetsk told The Daily Beast she was on a bus with 36 preschool orphans. The ride sounded grueling: “We are still driving across DNR, and we have not reached the checkpoint yet to cross into Russia. This is a hard road,” she said.
Neither Vokova nor Prilipko’s bus had crossed the checkpoint into Russia by 11 p.m. local time on Friday.
Children on both sides of the bloody Russia-Ukraine crisis have been orphaned. Across the so-called “contact line,” in the Ukraine-controlled towns of Zolote, most children are forced to stay at home after 5 p.m. “Many children do not see the moon, they do not see the stars,” the head of the Proliska-Zolote humanitarian group, Larisa Gritsenko, told The Daily Beast. “Children should not be living in the war zone.”
The war in Ukraine has already killed more than 14,000 people, both military and civilians, on both sides of the frontlines. Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch, told The Daily Beast on Friday that “With the hostilities escalating rapidly, there is increasing concern about civilians on both sides of the contact line, who have already suffered enormously throughout this conflict.”
Meanwhile, Volkova hopes that life at the refugee facility will be temporary. “We hope very much to be back to our city of roses, Donetsk, in a couple weeks,” she said. “Our children feel at home there.”
