“I lost my family to a mortar.” There is no peace Serhiy Perebynis43yearold Ukrainian since he learned that his wife Tetiana and their children Mykyta and Alisa died during the death bombing on the Irpin Bridge, on the border with Kyiv. Overwhelmed by pain, he is now thinking about a mission: “I’m thinking about it, I have nothing left to lose and want to defend my homeland. We won’t go this time,” he says in an interview with Repubblica.it.
The tragedy
When his family was killed, Serhiy Perebynis was in Donetsk in proRussian Donbass to help his mother, who was infected with Covid. He learned from a photo posted on Twitter. “I smoked a cigarette on the balcony of my mother’s apartment in Donetsk and watched the bombs fall on the city. I had brought her the respirator because she had Covid. She remembers With Tetiana (his wife) we had studied in I detailed Irpin’s evacuation plan and followed his movements on Google by sharing the position. There was a small box, Tetiana’s ‘T’ appeared and disappeared on the screen: it reappeared on Hospital #7. Then I read a tweet and I saw the photo. I screamed with all my breath in my throat. From then on, a single thought: “See them one last time and give them a dignified burial.
travel
To reach Irpin, Serhiy had to cross Russia. The first stage of trip it was RostovonDon. “At the border, the guards took me to a room to question me. he says who I was, where I was going and why, they took my fingerprints. I told them what had just happened to me, they didn’t react . They kept me there for 5 hours grumbling. Finally they took me to another checkpoint. There were MGB (Donetsk Secret Service) agents, they snatched me out of the car, they wanted to arrest me. I showed them my wrists. Arrest Me, I have nothing left to lose. They too wanted to know how my Tetiana died.
From Rostov he reached the Moscow airport. Same scene: “Controlled by the Russian secret service he says ‘Who bombed your family?’. Same answer, same indifference”. The 43yearold then traveled to Kalilingrad by taxi to customs with Poland. “The only ones who felt sorry for me were the Russian taxi drivers he specifies they admitted that it was a war that did not belong to them. From there I went to Lviv and then to Kyiv.”
The funeral
Serhiy found his wife Tetiana had not survived the bombings when he landed in Rostov: “As soon as I left I had hope because it seemed Tetiana might survive in the hospital. she continues The boys, on the other hand, died instantly. I repeated to myself that maybe there was still a little light in this darkness. When I got to Rostov I knew it was gone. After traveling for days, being searched and interrogated by the Russian military at checkpoints, the 43yearold arrived in Kyiv. “I was in morgue number 1 for three days, the central one, there were too many bodies of Irpin and Bucha, you had to queue. he explains I asked the volunteers to take me to my wife to unlock her iPhone. It contains photos of my family, I wanted them. I took Tetiana’s cold thumb and put it on the screen, but it did not unlock, it only works with living people. After a while, they gave me three coffins. I Mykyta and Alisa dressed, I put on my Tetiana, I buried her in the cemetery of a village south of the capital.
The call to arms
Realizing that he has lost everything, Serhiy collapses in pain. But then, the To suffer has given way to the desire for revenge.: “Now they asked me to join the Territorial Defense Forces, to return to Irpin to shoot the Russians he says I think. I have a rifle that stayed in my house. ” . Only two bloody sacks are left of his wife, children and two dogs, who also died in the bombing raids: “I want to protect my homeland concludes the 43yearold I left Donbass back in 2014. I won’t go this time. “.