“If I have to die, then at least in my country”: Like Tetiana Kocheva, Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Israel since the Russian invasion have fled the conflict with Hamas and returned to Ukraine, even though war is still raging there.
When Moscow’s forces invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, 39-year-old Tetiana and her three children, now ages 14, 10 and 3, were in Kharkiv (northeast), near the Russian border.
The city is under relentless attack and is one of the attackers’ first targets. The mother and her children remained housed in a basement for ten days before fleeing about fifty kilometers away.
In July 2022, she finally left Ukraine and went to Israel, where her husband was already working before the Russian invasion.
“I thought I would stay there for three months and then come back,” but “the war didn’t end.” Then she will settle for more than a year in Ashkelon, a city in southern Israel near Gaza.
On October 7, during the bloody attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Israeli soil from the Gaza Strip, “my hands started shaking and I had the same feeling as when it started in our country,” says Tetiana.
She describes the “endless sirens,” “the explosions that didn’t stop,” the nights in the shelters with her children.
“Scary”
“As it got worse (…), I panicked, I got scared and I realized I had to go home,” she explains.
She was evacuated to central Israel and remained there for a few days before heading to Ukraine, where she arrived on October 20 and settled in Kharkiv. The city is regularly bombarded by Russian bombs, but it has not been threatened by occupation for just over a year.
According to the Ukrainian embassy there on October 31, around 4,000 Ukrainians have left Israel since October 7.
“Here I go, this is my homeland, our flag, I don’t know how to express it, I’m happy,” explains Tetiana. “If I have to die, then at least in my country,” she says.
About 400 km away, in the capital Kiev, 8-year-old Diana dances on a carpet of dead leaves in a sunny park on the banks of the Dnieper.
The young girl and her mother, Anna Lyachko, 28, returned from Israel in mid-October after fleeing Ukraine in early March 2022.
At the time, they lived in a Russian-occupied city near Kiev, “where we were surrounded by explosions, without electricity, without water and without communication,” recalls the young mother, who has since separated from her husband.
“My daughter was very scared and I decided to leave” and join a cousin who was in Israel. She thought she would stay “a year or two.”
But on October 7th “the war began there too”. “The feelings were the same as on February 24th in Ukraine (…) I looked at my daughter and saw fear in her eyes.”
“I realized I couldn’t stay. I was very scared.” She and her child flew from Tel Aviv on October 14 with the support of the Ukrainian Embassy.
Two days later, “when I arrived in Kiev, I saw in my daughter’s eyes how happy she was to be home with her grandparents. She is so happy,” says the young mother happily.
“Quieter than in Israel”
Across the Dnieper, in a small office in the center of the capital, Oksana Sokolovska also says she is “glad to have come home,” even if “it is difficult to leave one war for another.”
She left Ukraine and the suburbs of Kiev with her three children on March 16, 2022. “When the war started, I had no moral right to risk her life,” explains the 39-year-old single lawyer.
She spoke Hebrew and chose Israel because “I thought it was the safest country in the world.” She settled with her children in Rishon Le Tzion, near Tel Aviv.
On the morning of October 7, when the Hamas attack began, “the air warning sirens were wailing massively as the bombing began,” and “all day we stayed in the bomb shelter with the children,” she says.
Very quickly she decided to leave Israel “so as not to endanger the lives of my children,” and they boarded the plane on October 14th.
“Currently the situation in Kiev and its region is calmer than in Israel (…) That is the only reason why I came back here,” said the lawyer.