The clothes were hung to dry

The suitcases of abandonment

I am from Azerbaidjan and have lived in Ukraine for over 10 years. It was my home, my family’s home. I have a wife and a four-year-old child. The war in Ukraine forced us to abandon everything and leave.

I suspected the war was coming, so I asked my wife to take the child and leave the country as early as August 2021. But she wouldn’t believe me. At the time, I wasn’t able to convince her she had to leave Ukraine. In fact, no one believed there would be a war. But I think the authorities were aware of it much earlier. Their big mistake was not starting the evacuation the previous winter or autumn. But we can’t turn back time. We can’t remedy the error that followed.

The 24th of February, 4:30 in the morning, Irpen. Only three kilometres from Bucha. I was going to work, after convincing myself it had been pointless to anxiously wait for a Russian attack all night; relieved with the realisation, I went out on the balcony to smoke. There were many new houses in our town – new, relatively tall buildings. Five to 22 storeys tall. We lived at the second floor of a seven-storey building. A lot of fresh beginnings.

Just like that, as I was smoking a cigarette, I heard the first explosion of a bomb that fell on Kyiv, 40-60 kilometres from where I was, in a residential area. It was a strong blast – I could tell by how the ground and the walls of the house shook.

I immediately realised this was no belated salute in honour of the 23rd of February. I understood this was the beginning of the war. I drank my coffee and kept smoking. Out of inertia. As I was getting ready, about four rockets landed in Kyiv. I wasn’t counting, but I felt each one.

I heard explosions, two to four minutes apart. Just the way you wait for the thunder after the lightning, counting the seconds to figure out how far it was. My wife was with her mother, in a village 20 kilometres from town, and she had taken our three-year old son along. I finished my coffee, washed my face, got dressed and went to work in Kyiv. There I saw long lines in front of each ATM. People were anxious, the streets were crowded with pedestrians and cars, many tried to flee as soon as they could. Quiet panic was reigning over more than 10 million people.

On the very first day of the war, five million civilians left Kyiv. Before I got to my workplace, just 500 metres from it, I got a text message announcing that the store would stay closed that day. It was quiet, around 6.45 a.m. I realised I had to go back and take my family somewhere safer. In other words, it was time to get them out of Ukraine – nowhere in Ukraine was safe. I got on the bus around 7:15. I arrived back home in Irpin around 11. Traffic jams turned the usual 30-minute bus ride into three or four hours – the same route I used to take every day. I entered my apartment and took out a sports bag in which I had already put all my documents. All my clothes were hung out to dry on the balcony, freshly washed, in the winter cold. I realised there was no point packing them, they were wet. I took whatever was dry and clean. The pair of fatigue trousers I was wearing, plus a pair of jeans in the bag; the t-shirt I was wearing, plus a second one in the bag. The army boots I was wearing, plus a pair of sports shoes in the bag. I had one set of spares for each. All-wearther, easy to carry luggage.

I also had my hunting knife in the bag. The one weapon I took along when I realised anything could happen. There wasn’t enough time to save up and buy a sawed-off 5.45-mm AK-74u Kalashnikov. (Yes, what did you expect? I’ve been living in a war since I was three. As children, we didn’t play at being ninjas or piloting robots, we  had tanks and machine guns).

I left the house. I met a friend in the street. I convinced him to come with me to the military enlistment office so we could join the Ukraine military or local defence forces. I strongly wanted to defend my adoptive country. The life I had there. But at the enlistment office they told us ‘Go home, everyone. We won’t take any more applications today.’ And the enlistment office closed.

We sat down in the park and talked about what we should do next. At 13:40 we decided we had to leave town. I encouraged him. Then my friend and I said goodbye; he went home, I went to the village to get my wife and son. It was around 14:00. Almost 30 kilometres isn’t a lot to walk for me. But there wasn’t a moment to lose.

18 kilometres into the route, I stopped at a friend’s who had borrowed my car. I had planned to take it back, but what was the point? There wasn’t a drop of fuel left in the area. Just then, as I was passing Vorzel, Russian helicopters appeared in the sky – Mi-8, Mi-24, Ka-52. They were flying low enough for me to tell. I realised they were Russian, because we had no Ka-52s in service in Ukraine. That is Russian technology. The helicopters were flying towards Gostomel village.

A large-scale invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine had already started. There was a battle going on in Gostomel and Bucha, in Ivankov, then Borodyanka village was entered by Russian tanks and lorries carrying soldiers. I realised it was dangerous leaving our village then – we had to wait. All the boys and men got together and went to the local manager, the head of the village, to ask – how will we defend ourselves? Where are the weapons? Why are all the military enlistment offices in our area closed? Set up a local defence force. We want to defend our families, if no one else will. We were answered that no such orders had come from the central administration.

Go back to your homes, they said. So we did. We built shelters in our cellars. We sent our families down there. We formed a local defence force. We set up checkpoints at every entrance and exit to and from the village. I did my shift every day, close to our cellars, where our families were sheltered. On the second day of war, the electricity was cut off. On the third, it was the cooking gas. On the fifth day of war, we ran out of water and were completely surrounded. Nearby, five to seven kilometres from us, battles were being fought and troops were stationed. We were lucky they didn’t come into the village.

On the 5th of March, around 11:00 a.m. five rockets landed in our village. Two of them hit residential buildings. Fortunately, there were no casualties, as people had taken shelter. At the time, I was filling two 25-litre canisters with water from a well. One of the rockets hit the building across the road, a few metres from where I was. I managed to duck behind the well, but my neighbour, who was cycling nearby, had a piece of shrapnel pierce his leg. I helped him get to safety, then carried the water into the cellar. So people could have something to drink. That was the day I truly understood I had to leave the village.

On the 6th of March, around noon, my two neighbours and colleagues and I saw a powerful artillery strike hit one of the country’s main freeways, Jytomyr Freeway by its popular name, just outside Mykolaivka village, which was seven kilometres from ours. I took my son and wife, we got in a neighbour’s car, formed a caravan with seven more cars carrying families, and left. We reached Vinnitsa. It took us four hours to get there. It was relatively quiet.

In Vinnitsa, we were sheltered by the parents of the neighbours with whom we had left the village. We spent almost three weeks there. I was waiting for my salary to come in so we could afford the trip onward. I knew a humanitarian crisis would set in soon. That roads, bridges and many petrol stations were being blown up. It was unlikely food supplies could reach us.

We may not have been afraid of the rockets, which didn’t feel real, but we were scared by the thought of starving to death. We crossed into Moldova and from there into Romania. We had intended to keep going, but Romania welcomed us so warmly we didn’t want to. So we ended up in Bucharest. We are grateful to Romania for what it does for us! We will not forget this life-saving kindness! From volunteers, from the President, from the association, from everyone.

Testimony donated by Jahangir for the Musem of Abandonment, as a part of the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC.