Tuesday, March 26

«I am in Plasencia, but my heart and my head have not left the Ukraine»


Now the nights are not spent awake and, although she still does not know when she will be able to sleep at once, Oksana Butsiak, the first Ukrainian refugee in Extremadura, assures that “I am beginning to rest a little”.

A week ago he arrived in Plasencia. She is the sister of Maryan, the Ukrainian minor who has lived in this city for eight years with her foster parents, Antonio Merino and Margarita Pardo. They are the ones who have made it possible for Oksana and her two children, as well as Dmytro, also Maryan’s brother, to leave the war behind and save their lives.

“I am happy about that, the truth is that I am glad that I made the decision to leave Ukraine, because I was very afraid for my children.” That is also why “I am very grateful for the help and the welcome that is being given to us”. Especially, “because being a refugee is not easy, I have many mixed feelings; so much so that, although I am in Plasencia, my heart and my head have not left the Ukraine».

Because not only are her parents and siblings and her friends there, but her husband has also stayed there, the father of her children “and the Russian bombardments are approaching our village and I am very worried; he is fine, we talk three times a day every day, but the situation is getting more and more complicated. She knows this because she is still aware of what is happening in the Ukraine. “Because I talk to my family and they tell me, but also because of the social networks where my friends post videos and because of the messages they send me.”

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Oksana dreams, as her children do, that her husband can soon be with them and start a new life in Plasencia. «I like the city, the truth is that what has surprised me the most is that it is a place with a lot of nature and mountains, and I love this». She does not plan to return to her country, although «I know that if the Russians do not use nuclear weapons, the Ukrainians are going to win this war; I believe in my country and the involvement of the entire population in the struggle is absolute, because the hatred of Putin has spread throughout the territory».

She is clear that if she had not had children to keep safe from the bombs, “I would have taken a weapon and fought against the invaders who devastate my country.” And despite the criticism that has come from those who have stayed, because there are those who consider that what she has done, preventing her children from dying in the war, is treason against Ukraine, this woman makes it clear that, “Although a refugee, I will always be Ukrainian.”

“The windows shook”

The day Oksana made the decision to leave her house was when “we heard shelling nearby, so much so that the window panes in our house shook; at that moment we felt fear, I saw it in my children and I knew that I had to get them to safety.

Together with her husband they made the “very hard decision to separate, because we knew that he was not going to be allowed to leave, despite the fact that he has an autoimmune disease.”

«I decided to take my children out of there when the bombings made all the windows of our house shake»

“If the Russians don’t use nuclear weapons, we Ukrainians are going to win this war; I believe in my country»

However, he explains that due to the corruption in his country “there is no certainty that the medical report presented is true or false.” For this reason, “we did not want to risk it, because if upon reaching the border with Poland they had not believed that their medical report was real, even though it is, they would have sent my husband to the front.”

Now she doesn’t know whether or not she will have to fight, “because the truth is that there are so many people who have enlisted, that the government has already said that no one else should sign up for the moment, that there are enough,” says Oksana.

So she trusts that her husband can leave Ukraine sooner than later and start a new life with her and their children in Plasencia. “We want him to come, both of us start working, so that our children can study here.” Because Nazar and Andriy are getting better and better, «in fact they already have much less trouble sleeping than the first night we spent in Plasencia, than they had in the Ukraine». That is why Oksana is willing to start that new life as soon as possible, find a job “with which I can help my country and support my family.” As she used to do in Strilky, the small town where she lived about 40 kilometers from the border with Poland, a country to which Oksana went two or three times a year, “a month each time to work on campaigns for fruit picking”. She used to do it when her husband, who worked in a sawmill, had vacations. “Then he could stay with our children and I would go to work in Poland to also earn income for my family.”

Oksana assures that “I did not have an easy life, it was very hard in fact to have to separate from my children, it hurt them as now it hurts not being with their father.” For this reason, she assures her, “I am willing to fight for a better life here, so that they have a better life here, and I do not lose hope of being able to do so soon with my husband.”

For now, she has already started looking for a job and her children will go to school, in an attempt to start that new life that everyone dreams of and hopes to achieve. “We have an opportunity, like many other Ukrainians, because of the welcome that many countries are giving us, that Spain is giving us. Thank you very much”.


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