I was born of a Russian-Ukrainian alliance.
Aliona Kurilko-Kuznetsova speaks Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, and Chinese. She is a lawyer, psychologist and spiritual travel guide.
She arrived in Bucharest in January 2023, after the war took her all over Ukraine through the basement of an old, abandoned printing house, to a convent, to a deserted house on the outskirts of a Ukrainian village where she learned to chop wood in the forest to get warm and cook a delicious dandelion cream soup.
She worked as a therapist in Kiev as part of volunteer teams. She re-enrolled at university in Kiev and took the entrance exam under the threat of air raids. After the bloody New Year’s Eve attack on the city, she left Ukraine and took refuge in Romania. Here at first, she worked as a merchandise handler at Băneasa Metro Store and she gratefully confesses that physical exhaustion brought back the sleep she had lost at the start of the war.
She loves Bucharest and feels she came to a good place. She lives with a group of vulnerable people from Ukraine whom she helps and cares for in the evenings.
Until the last moment I refused to believe that Russia would attack us. My mother, Antonina Vasilievna, is from the Moscow suburbs originally. My father, Nikolay Nikolaevich, is from Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. They met, fell in love and lived in a harmonious marriage for 50 years. Just like they say – kindred spirits. I had a wonderful family and was very close with all my relatives, both in Ukraine and Russia. I didn’t believe until the last minute that war could happen. But it did.
