WITH her grandmother in a war zone, every day is filled with worry for Vlada Gorbunova, who lives in Ennis, having arrived in Ireland as a six-year-old child in 1997.
“You’re constantly worried that you could get that phone call or text message, to say something happened. It could be the worst, or it could be that she lost her home where she’s lived for 40 years or more, that she has nowhere to go and I can’t give her a hand because I can’t get that deep into Ukraine.
“It’s constant worry and constant stress and every time my phone rings I’m thinking it’s her ringing to say that something has happened,” she says.
Her grandmother is in Luhansk, in the east of the country, and fighting is happening all around her.
“I know they were shooting this morning, because when I rang her you could hear the gunfire behind her. She had to hang up very quickly and go down (to take shelter).”
She also has two cousins and an aunt in the area and all of them are living in extremely difficult circumstances.
“They’re down in the bomb shelters constantly. My grandmother tried to make a break from it by train, but they had blown up the railway down the line and they had to go back home.”
While hundreds of thousands have left the country, she is in the very east of the country, and getting across to Poland for example, would be a huge journey across a war zone.
“She is very stressed out and she doesn’t know what to do. Should she stay or should she go, it’s a big step. I think she was very shook up having taken that big step to go and then having got to the train station, made that big step, and then being told to come back off again.”
To her distress, there is very little Vlada can do. “I feel helpless, there’s nothing I can do about it. I tried to send her some money, but the banks are closed over there so I can’t even do that for her.”
When the invasion began last week it was a huge shock. “I woke up at 7am and I had two missed calls from my grandmother, which really worried me, because she was ringing around six in the morning. Then I got a message from her to say that Kyiv was being bombed. She had nowhere to go, she had been planning on evacuating, but the place she was going to was two hours outside of Kyiv and that was no longer safe.”
Vlada feels there was no real expectation in the Ukraine that the invasion would happen. “To be honest I think we were nearly more afraid than the people of Ukraine. I don’t think anyone over there thought Putin would go through with it.”
Much of the media focus here is on the violence around the two biggest cities, but Vlada says it is still very intense around her grandmother’s home, with the Russian army still not in control.
“There’s been a lot of sleepless nights, we’ve been getting phone calls at every hour of the morning saying we’re going down to the bomb shelter and we don’t know if we’ll be back up again, that kind of thing.”
Asked about her own feelings on the conflict Vlada says, “I’m extremely anger over the whole situation, I don’t understand what the greed is all about, why he feels he needs more land.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.