It is 4 in the morning in Argentina and 9 in the morning in Spain, Sebastián (47), Argentine, is with his wife Sophie (40), Peruvian, and their two children: Kevin (11) also born in Peru and Candy (9) born in Bangkok. In Spain it is winter and today it is very cold. Sebastián prepares a fire to heat the home, he is the first of the family to wake up. When the house begins to warm up, he picks up his phone to talk to elDiarioAR about how they lived through the imminence of the war and the days before leaving Ukraine from one day to the next. When they gave away everything and traveled.
For Sebastián, whether or not they invade the country in the coming months, Ukraine will be under constant pressure. “You live under the constant threat of an attack or perhaps that “separatists” also do something, so there can be any kind of attack. It was that set of reasons that made us make the decision, ”he says. “Until last week things were still the same despite the danger. Perhaps some people were a little more tense than usual, but they did not close stores or take other precautionary measures. Life in kyiv was still tense but normal, given what the circumstances were."
For a few months, Sebastián noticed that there was a lot of circulation of weapons in the Ukraine. He remembers that in the summer - when it was the 30th anniversary of independence from the Soviet Union - there was a military parade that lasted 2 or 3 days. Tanks, planes, war fighters, thousands of soldiers, missiles, he lists. “It was a demonstration by Ukraine and by the government of (Volodimir) Zelensky, because the Russians had in April and May a very large military exercise near the border, which was the prelude to this. Ukraine responded with a huge military parade. This was a few months ago, then you began to see many soldiers on the street, people in uniform and in camouflage suits.”
In 2019, Sebastián, Sophie, Candy and Kevin settled in kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. They define themselves as a "nomadic" family. In recent years they lived in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia. Also in Vietnam and Laos. “My son, Kevin, was born in Peru. My daughter, Candy, was born in Bangkok. We like for her education that they see as much of the world as possible. Since we had never lived in Eastern Europe, it seemed like a good idea, after living for a short time in Turkey, to go to Ukraine to learn a little about the culture there, meet people and continue with our experience as nomads living in the world. They received us very well, I had already traveled a lot in Russia, in Romania, in Bulgaria and other nearby countries”.
On Saturday, January 15, 2022, after living in Ukraine for a year and a half, they left the country. “We go out a little bit before it gets much heavier. Many Ukrainians, people who work in restaurants, in bars or people who work in IT (Information technology), asked me to let them know if I met someone who had work in other places so that they could leave Ukraine”.
Sebastian works on development projects related to tourism and travel. While he was in kyiv he was working on a project in Sri Lanka, another project in Thailand, and another in Japan, so Ukraine was just a base from which to do that. Sophie does design work and online content for different countries, so it doesn't matter where she is either. Her children attend an online school based in England, so they continue their education virtually. “Since we moved to Turkey they go to that school. So they have a class schedule, teachers, subjects, everything normal. What Sophie and I do is see that they complete their tasks. This education is useful for them because it doesn't really matter what country we are living in. And it also worked very well during the pandemic.”
From the first day they set foot on Ukrainian territory, Sebastián knew that they were in a place where there were conflict zones. “We were aware that there were problems in the Donestsk and Luhansk area, but it was a conflict that was under cold blankets, that is, it was noticeable but it was not something strong. From mid-December is when the situation began to escalate with the movement of Russian troops to the borders. I follow many international media, including the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and also talking to people in Ukraine, we began to realize that this time it was not just a military exercise by Russia but could lead to something bigger.
Sebastián had a hard time making his family in Argentina see what was beginning to happen. He believes that it is due to the fact that the country does not give so much international importance and therefore the information about what is happening in Ukraine is not well disseminated. “My family in Argentina, at the beginning of January, was not aware of what was happening, because if you read the Argentine media, almost everyone echoes the news they see in international media and this only started to come out there very recently. Although it already had coverage since December in some media. It took me a while to make my old man understand that things were really bad and that the wisest thing was not to stay and see what would happen but to leave. We explained to the boys what was happening and it was a decision that the four of us made, and we made it very quickly, in 72 hours”.
As an Argentine who lived until a few days ago, what do you think about President Alberto Fernández going to meet with Putin in these circumstances?
I would prefer not to comment, but it is the same as the meeting that they are going to have now with China. As they are closing alliances with Western Europe, with the United States and with the conflict with the International Monetary Fund, they need to have allies in any other place in the world. What I see is that Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China are autocrats, so I don't know if it's the right path in a world that should aim to strengthen institutions, democracies.
Sebastián tries to explain his vision of the conflict and how the Ukrainian people experience it day by day. "The conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a very complex issue, it depends on who you talk to, the answer you get will be different." For him, there are two sources of information that he considers key: the Winter on Fire documentary, on Netflix, and the Atlantic article: “The United States is naive about Russia. Ukraine cannot afford to be”, written by Anne Applebaum.
“There is a part of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia that is very strong, there are many centuries, the Kievan Rus began in Ukraine, which are the Vikings who later took the Orthodox religion. Orthodox religion for the Slavs began there and from there spread to Moscow. So for the Russians, kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, is somewhat the center of the culture of the Orthodox religion. Although they took the Orthodox religion from Constantinople, they took it from what is now Istanbul, there was a lot of relationship between kyiv and the south. It is a topic that has been going on for many centuries. If you go a little further to the present, during the time of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of the favorite republics, not only because of the people, because of the affinities, but also because of the industry. If you talk to people in Ukraine who are older than 45 or 50, that is people who have lived in the time of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of them speak favorably of Russia. If you talk to young people, who were born post-1991 or 1992, most of them are pro-Ukrainian, so it's a very complex issue."
The Atlantic just released a poll last spring, showing that about 30 percent of Ukrainians (and 46 percent of men) say they are willing to join an armed battle if an invasion occurs. In an interview in the Polish press, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko explained it this way: Ukraine wants to make sure that “every city and every home becomes a fortress. And that thousands of coffins are sent back to Russia." In this time that you were living in Ukraine, from what you heard and saw, what did the Ukrainians want?
Well, this also depends on who you ask and what region of Ukraine they live in, because if you put a map of the country in front of you, you will see that the part to the west of Ukraine, that is, the part of kyiv to the west, is a region in which the most Ukrainian is spoken, which has more connections with Western Europe. But to the east of Ukraine, and I would also tell you to the south, the Dnipro river basin, Russian is almost always spoken there, Ukrainian is not spoken. To give you a practical example, the ladies who were at the entrance to our building, who are kind of like the concierges of the building, were older ladies and they don't speak Ukrainian among themselves, they speak Russian, no more. Older people, those who were born before 1991 or 1992 are more Russian than Ukrainian. It is not that they are Russian by nationality but that they have grown much more within the Russian sphere of influence. Think I told you about the Soviet Union, but Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, 200 years ago, so the relations between Russia and Ukraine are very deep. The fact that Ukraine is independent, which it has been for a very short time, is something relatively new, so it is a very complex issue to deal with lightly. It seems to me that among the people of eastern Ukraine there is a large majority who do not take a dim view of a Russian invasion. It is not black and white.
LS
