Harrowing escape from The Donetsk

This is a story that was told to me lately that I felt needed to be told to others. I currently work with a number of people who have come to Canada from the Ukraine, some very recently, and some many years ago. This particular story was told to me by someone originally from Ukraine who has been living in Canada for about 10 years with her Ukrainian husband. 

This woman and her husband have a young niece that was living in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine which of course as you probably know is currently occupied by Russian forces. For the purposes of the story, we will refer to this young woman as Olena. Olena feared for her life, and knew she had to somehow escape her country if she was going to survive. She would have liked to have headed west into the part of Ukraine that is not occupied by Russian soldiers, but this is probably the most dangerous option of escaping the region because you would have to pass directly through the front lines of the war. This is not exactly a practical or safe option. So as frightening as it may seem, her only escape route was in fact through Russia. She crossed the border into Russia during the night, boarded a bus, which thankfully was not inspected along its route, and she made her way to Moscow.

Her friend in Canada gave her very specific instructions on how she could possibly leave the country. It would involve going to the Canadian embassy to obtain very specific paperwork, including travel documents. Then she would have to catch a flight from Moscow to Turkey, because of course flights from Moscow to Canada are no longer possible thanks to our embargo. Meanwhile she was instructed to stay out of the spotlight, because if the Russian authorities were to discover that a Ukrainian national was trying to escape through Russia, they very likely would have detained her and her future would be uncertain at the very least.

I asked this colleague how the family in Moscow was related to them and she said they were not. They were total strangers that had been found through Facebook. After 2 months of hiding with this Russian family, and constant pressure on the Canadian government to get the niece travel documents, she finally got the documents she needed from the Canadian embassy to board a flight to Turkey and went to the airport with a ticket she had bought for her by her friends in Canada. 

Unfortunately, the authorities would not let her board the plane. She went through the process of getting three different tickets for three different flights to Turkey, and in each case the authorities would not let her board the flight. She was panicking, losing her mind, and unable to imagine how she was going to get out of this situation alive. She had very little money and was now attracting far too much attention to herself.

Thankfully, the security staff that had been preventing her from boarding a flight changed shifts and whoever took over were more sympathetic to her circumstance and let her board the next flight using the fourth ticket that had been bought for her by her friends in Canada. Once she was in Turkey, she then had to fly to Toronto, and then finally to Calgary. This ordeal cost the friends in Calgary well over $10,000, but now Olena is safe in Canada and no longer fears for her life. 

It certainly puts our lives in context with how others are suffering. Consider all of the people stuck in the occupied parts of Ukraine that can't escape. We really don't have anything to complain about. Not really.