Alina Dorotiuk: “We were occupied from all sides! Anyone who tried to escape was shot on the spot”
24 February 2024 09:08
Alina Dorotiuk has been working in secular journalism for 15 years. For the last 4 years, she has been the author and host of her two YouTube channels, Dinner with Dorothy and Alina Dorotiuk. Their format is somewhat similar to Katya Osadcha’s programme. Alina has conducted thousands of interviews and answered tens of thousands of bold and frank questions.
She always thought that she was not afraid of anything or anyone. That was until 24 February 2022, when the most terrible morning began for Ukraine, and especially for the outskirts of Kyiv and the capital itself. Read about 8 long days in occupation near Kyiv, about the biggest fear, about new meanings and values created by the full-scale war in an exclusive interview with 
as part of the special project Ukraine on Fire: Non-Fictional Stories.
Do you remember your first day of the war? What was it like?
I remember everything in detail. I woke up at around 11am and saw a bunch of missed calls on my phone – from my mum, sister, aunt. My first thought was that something had happened to someone close to me. Then I went to Instagram and read a message from a friend from Belarus saying that tanks were coming to Ukraine from there. We were at war. I live 20 kilometres from Kyiv, deep in the village of Buzova, off the Zhytomyr highway, and I hadn’t heard anything yet. I called my mother, she asked me to go to them immediately, because it was a private house, a cellar. I live in one of the three houses in the residential complex, which was later bombed. But for some reason I was in no hurry: I cleaned the house, prepared for the filming on 26 February with actor Max Devizorov, who is now in the army. And when it got dark, I put the cat behind my arm (the carrier had just broken), put on a warm tracksuit, took another one with me, two pairs of underpants, sports tops, a laptop, phone, and documents. For some reason, I forgot about the money. So I went to my parents’ house.
Could you have believed then that the war would last so long?
It seemed then that they (the politicians – ed.) would come to an agreement and everything would stop any minute. Even when the tanks appeared on the third day, active hostilities began, and I hid in the basement with my parents and the sheepdog – my stepfather, who was always interested in history, said that “they will decide everything there” and it would be over in a couple of days.
You stayed in the cellar for eight days! Enemy columns of tanks were moving very close by. What does a person feel at such moments?
At first, we probably didn’t feel anything. On the second day, we even went to a supermarket in Kapitanivka, which was later bombed. But on the third day, around noon, the village group received reports of a column of tanks moving towards us from Makariv. Russian helicopters started flying very low, fields and everything around them were on fire, flying into houses. That was the moment when I started to panic.
In my peaceful life, I had never imagined that I could be subjected to such total fear. I was afraid that nothing existed anymore – neither my house nor everything around me. We had only one phone left, and in order to save the charge, we called our relatives and friends early in the morning and late in the evening with the message “alive” and that was it.
One day I finally broke down and cried into the phone, asking for help… How can you help when we were occupied from all sides? Anyone who tried to leave was shot.
What was your life like in the basement? How does the body react under such severe stress? Where did you get water and food, given that it, like the battery on your phone, is rapidly running out in such conditions?
On the second day of the war, we spent a lot of money on food, but not the food that was worth it. We bought cereals, pasta, a lot of raw meat, vegetables for salads, which, like the meat, rotted away – on the third day, the electricity simply disappeared. My parents were saved by my mother’s stews. I was saved by her preserves. By the way, this was the first time I’ve ever eaten these twists. I used to yell at my mum more than once for spending a lot of time and effort on cooking them. I used to say that I don’t eat that kind of food. But it was these cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, which I washed down with compotes, that saved me. We also had a lot of eggs. My mother could cook them on a gas stove. Although during these 8 days I lost almost 10 kg. And for the first time in 17 years, I returned to the weight I had after graduation.
I know that on the 9th day of the war you managed to escape from the occupation. How did you do it, because the occupiers were still near Kyiv.
They started flying into neighbouring houses. Most of them were already destroyed. When a shell hit our cousins’ house, 20 metres away, my mother fell to her knees in the basement, covered her head with her hands – she started to have a terrible hysteria. I was very afraid for her health, because she is hypertensive, and I started begging my stepfather to take us out of here. He didn’t want to leave his younger son, who was also occupied in Berezov, with his grandmother. There were tanks behind the fence of her house, too. I understood my stepfather, but my son persuaded his father to take us out. When we left the yard and headed towards the Odesa highway, we prayed all the way that an occupation tank would not appear from around the corner and shoot us. Because it was everywhere. My mother took a white sheet, asked the guys from the terrorist defence to hang it on the car, and I remember they said sceptically: it won’t save you.
At first you stayed for a short time somewhere in the Khmelnytskyi region, then in Lviv. Did you consider going abroad?
No, all my family was in Ukraine at that time. My sister was hiding near Zhytomyr, where there were a lot of military units, and she had no basement or cellar. Her daughter and husband were liable for military service, and she took care of the younger one. One aunt remained in Kyiv, the other in a village in Zhytomyr region, so she did not consider going abroad. She wanted to wait for the de-occupation and return home. I have a good friend in Lviv who found us an apartment in the centre of the city, where we were accepted with a shepherd dog and two cats. This is valuable! Because a lot of homeowners said: throw away the animals and come, not with them. When we were driving through the villages, we saw a lot of cats and purebred dogs in an open field, in the cold, left to starve to death..
When the occupiers retreated, you returned home… What was the most difficult thing to accept in the first days after your return?
My residential complex was bombed the same day we left. I was convinced that nothing was left of my apartment because my neighbours were sending horrific photos. There are three houses in the complex, one behind the other. Tanks drove in and shot them at close range. My house is in the middle, so it miraculously survived thanks to the other two. The apartment remained relatively unchanged – the balcony was burned down, the glass and frames were blown out.
How did these two years of war affect you? What has changed dramatically in you during this time?
For me and my family, everything related to Russia has ceased to exist. We don’t watch Russian and Soviet films, listen to their music or any other product. A year ago, when it was not yet officially defined, we were already celebrating holidays in the new style. After the occupation, we started meeting with friends and family much more often. I finally got involved in my personal life, because before the war I lived only with my career.
Recently, there was another arrival some 800 metres away from me! It could have hit my house. So now I live in the moment – literally.
Author: Liliia Pryl
