“I’m 27 and Vittoria almost a month and a half,” she says, looking at her daughter. “During the night of March 1718, there were heavy bombings in Kyiv. They seemed close to us, but they’ve been bombing for days, so I’m not saying we’ve gotten used to it, but we’ve certainly come to terms with it,” he says.
“In the morning Vittoria and I woke up as usual, I bathed her. For breastfeeding, I like to take her to bed with me, lift her up and hold her legs against her chest just like they are now, he adds, pointing to his position, half sitting in the hospital bed with her daughter in her arms and bent knees. “Thanks to this position, I was able to immediately bend over them during the bombing and save their lives. If she hadn’t been in my arms, if she had been lying in her bed, I think the epilogue of this story would have been different. I can’t even imagine it, explains Olga, returning to the horrible moments after the bombing.
“We didn’t think of calling the ambulance right away, but as a first reaction we left the apartment, I wanted to take her to safety. I had a head injury and blood was dripping all over it. At that moment I couldn’t. I didn’t understand what it was. My blood, I thought it was hers and kept screaming,” he says.
She and the little girl were then helped by some neighbors who got them into the first ambulance that arrived at the building: “They brought us here, they visited us. Vittoria is fine, she just has a scratch on her cheek and a few bruises”. When asked how she is, having sustained several injuries, Olga instead replies: “Well, if she’s fine, i’m fine My wounds will heal.”
After discharge from the hospital, Olga and her husband Dmytro will try to leave Kyiv together with their little girl. “We haven’t done it before because we were so unafraid to go on that kind of journey with her. She was only two weeks old when it all started. But now it’s time to go away, we’ll try.”
Story Olga and her husband Dmytro were injured in a Russian attack in Kyiv. Instead, her onemonthold baby was unharmed thanks to her mother’s protective instincts, who protected her with her own body. The snap of Olga breastfeeding her daughter from her hospital bed, published by Ohmatdit Children’s Hospital, went viral on the internet.
YOU COULD BE INTERESTED IN: