Turchyn found the man a few days ago through a messaging app promoting transport services for Ukrainians stranded in Russia. They made a deal: $500 to drive Turchyn’s mother and sister from Moscow to Przemysl in Poland. That’s more than most families fleeing the war can afford.
She wonders if it worked.
Turchyn turns and suddenly finds herself in her sister’s arms. There is a brief moment of joy, but no time to hug her mother. The smuggler now wants to be paid. He blackmails her for more money. She counts. At this point there is nothing she wants more than to be with her family.
The exchange is finally over and the three women are reunited in Poland. They embrace quietly and quickly.
However, it is dangerous for the Ukrainians who are now being displaced in Russia to flee to safety. Thousands of Ukrainians have been forcibly returned to the country that bombed and besieged them, Ukrainian authorities say.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began in late February, Turchyn, a Ukrainian-American medical student from Cleveland, Ohio, began frantically trawling through messaging apps, desperate to find information about her hometown of Izium, where her mother lives and her sister lived .
“I was trying to find crumbs of information,” she explains. “We have these Viber groups (messaging app) and everyone’s like, ‘Do you know where a rocket landed today? Do you know which house was destroyed today?'”
Her phone has been inundated with images of the city, which has been at the center of bitter fighting for weeks. Food, water and medicine shortages have created a human catastrophe for thousands living under constant air raids and shelling.
“It’s getting worse every day,” Max Strelnyk, MP for the Izium City Council office, told CNN in late March. “There has been no pause in the bombing raids – they started weeks ago – by the Russians. The dead are buried in Central Park.”
Izium sits on the main road between Kharkiv and the Russian-backed separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, putting it in the crosshairs of Putin’s brutal attack.
A few days after the conflict began, Turchyn lost contact with her family. Cellular networks in Izium have been deliberately disrupted or disrupted. She feared her mother and sister had been killed.
“Someone saw (on the messaging groups) that a missile actually hit my backyard and I cried so much because I didn’t know they might be dead already,” she tearfully recalls.
Unable to help her loved ones, Turchyn decided to help others and traveled to the Polish-Ukrainian border, where millions of refugees found safety
“I came to Poland to take that energy and turn it into something,” she says. “Because crying and being depressed and just sitting at home — nothing would change.”
On Facebook, she found Lesko House, a disused office building turned into a refugee center by its owner Wojciech Bryndza, who spent thousands of dollars out of pocket to provide food and shelter for dozens of fleeing families.
Turchyn decided to live in the shelter and do some volunteer work. Every day she tried to call her family.
Eventually she got a call back, but it wasn’t from Izium.
“I heard from them for the first time in a whole month and I was so torn. I was glad they were alive. But I was scared. They were in Russia. And I don’t know if I should be happy ? Or should I be sad?” She says.
Turchyn later found that her mother and sister, desperate to flee Izium, had found a local resident willing to drive them to the Russian border for a price. There was no way east, further into Ukraine.
“We only had one chance to break out of this hell,” Vita, Turchyn’s older sister, told CNN. “And we decided not to miss this opportunity. We decided to go there and find out later what’s next.”
When they arrived in Moscow, the two tried to board a train bound for Belarus but said they were prevented from doing so by Russian border officials.
Turchyn was desperate to get her out. She began reaching out to the Viber groups that had provided her with information during the war.
“Someone from Poland gave me a number and that resulted in another number and another number,” she says of trying to find a smuggler online. “They’re trying to keep it a secret because it’s obviously dangerous.”
Over the course of at least two days, her mother and sister traveled south through Latvia and Lithuania towards Warsaw in a large van with several other Ukrainians until they were reunited in Przemysl.
“Now they’ve given me the details, it’s worse than I thought,” says Turchyn, as her mother and sister recount details of their weeks under Russian bombardment.
“You can describe it in one word, it was hell. It was a nightmare you could never wake up from,” says Luba, her mother.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians living under Russian occupation face the same dire situation – cut off from Ukraine even on their homeland, the only way forward for those few who can find it is to Putin.
Editor’s note: The last photo incorrectly identified the woman hugging Mila as her sister. The caption has been corrected to identify her as an unnamed Ukrainian refugee rather than her sister.