Photo: OleksandraZubal/Twitter
On Thursday night, Oleksandra Zubal captured a vulnerable moment next to her sleeping daughter amid airstrikes in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine.
She posted the photo to Twitter, captioning it, “My daughter and I surviving the night in Ukraine. We are real people at war with crazy dictator and we need the world’s support right now.”
By Friday afternoon, the post went viral and got over 555,000 likes. PEOPLE spoke with Zubal, 36, via Zoom to talk about the photo and her experiences on the ground in Ukraine.
Zubal, an IT professional and co-founder ofMyDone,a platform to help business workflow, explains that she is now in a family cottage with her daughter, grandfather, and other relatives and friends. They are a few miles away from the city, where she shares an apartment with her daughter and husband.
She and her daughter left Lviv for safety, but her husband — a former police officer — remains in the city to protect it from the Russians.
The night before they left, when she took the now-viral photo, Zubal says they “received a notification that there might be an attack at around 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM in the morning.”
“And our airport is basically in the city,” she adds, saying that the airport is the major infrastructure point that the Russians could try to attack. “There are like five-floor, seven floor houses just behind the fence from the airport. I am, myself, five kilometers away from the airport. So it’s very, very close to the city.”
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“We prepared a basement with water, with wood for the fireplace, with food, with warm clothes, et cetera, just in case,” Zubal says. “And we also spent the night on the first floor, not the second floor as a precaution, let’s say. We just put a mattress on the floor and covered it with some sheets. So yeah, that’s where we spent our night with my daughter, and that’s where the picture was taken.”
“I started crying actually,” she says of the now-viral moment. “And then children saw that, and it felt really awkward because, you know, they can feel everything. And then the older ones started crying too. And my daughter, she was trying to hug me actually, and that was really awkward. So I kind of told myself that, ‘Children are watching. You got to be brave.’ "
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“We didn’t have any sleep basically. Everyone was panicking yesterday,” Zubal says of the general mood on the ground. “There was huge panic.”
Zubal also says that “lots of people” are “now heading towards those regions that are under attack, specifically Kyiv, because it is very important, it’s crucial that we keep the city right now. It’s the capital of Ukraine.”
A colleague called her on Friday and said, “My mother and my mother-in-law are making Molotov cocktails at the moment.”
Shortly after the first post, Zubal shared a video to Twitter of her daughter Emilia, who turns 6 next week, pleading in a soft voice, ‘I’m scared, please save Ukraine.”
The mother of one also has a message to those that are concerned for her and her family’s wellbeing, and for the situation in Ukraine.
“I would like them to know that Ukraine is a sovereign state. We’re an independent state. We have our own history, our own culture, and our own language that is not Russian, that is Ukrainian. We speak Ukrainian,” she says.
“And what Russians are currently doing, they are saying that they’re kind of ‘helping’ our people, but they are not. They are apparently attacking not only the military, not only the army, but also civil people, including kids, from today’s news,” adds Zubal.
“They are criminals and they are right now enforcing us to protect our land,” she continues. “And we are going to protect our land until the last drop of our blood. And we will never forget that.”
Russia began an invasion of Ukraine earlier this week, according to the Ukrainian government, with forces moving from the north, east, and south. The attack is still-evolving, but explosions and airstrikes have been reported, with threats mounting against the capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million people.
Numerous residents have been seen trying to flee. “We are facing a war and horror. What could be worse?” one 64-year-old woman living in Kyiv told the Associated Press.
source: people.com
