On March 7, Tatiana Bland received the call she had been dreading for weeks. “They’ve hit our flat,” her sobbing mother, Svetlana, said down the phone. In a matter of seconds the place that held her childhood memories was destroyed.
Svetlana barely escaped the Russian artillery fire as it hit her Mykolayiv apartment, reducing the building to ruins and sparking a huge blaze. Some 2,900km away in West London, Tatiana “thanked God” her mother had survived but was also transfixed by grief: her mother suddenly without her home of 32 years and their belongings incinerated.
“My mum and my godmother were in the flat above and didn’t even know a fire had started. They were asleep and there were no sirens,” she told the Standard from her apartment in Twickenham, where she lives, 10 years after arriving in the UK. “The only reason she survived is because one of the neighbours called them to say ‘get out’.”
Tatiana spent a “normal, happy” childhood in a suburb of the port city near the Black Sea, known primarily for its shipbuilding. She recalls summers spent watching Crimean sunsets – “the most beautiful in the world” – and in the countryside with her family.
Life could not be more different now. On Wednesday, Mr Putin’s forces continued to pound Mykolayiv with artillery strikes – hitting an ambulance outside a hospital and killing a man and child. The city, seen as a strategically important asset for the Russian army as it advances towards Odesa, has now endured five weeks of shelling.
“Shortly after the apartment was destroyed, my mum tried to enter,” Tatiana said. “But she said she had to take medication for her heart after seeing it, it was so traumatising.
“She couldn’t face taking pictures inside, she just couldn’t bear it. When mum sent me a video of the exterior of the building afterwards, I could hear her crying in the background. It was heartbreaking.”
Tatiana had made numerous attempts to persuade her mother to move to western Ukraine, which has been spared from the worst of the fighting. Svetlana, 52, had visited London in January to spend Christmas with her daughter but – despite Downing Street and the Pentagon’s warning that war was imminent – she vowed not to leave her hometown.
Meanwhile, Tatiana’s father Aleksander, who had joined the Ukrainian military as a conscript several years before, was readying himself for the invasion. When Svetlana returned from London, Aleksander had already left for the east – narrowly missing the opportunity to bid goodbye to his wife before Putin’s tanks rolled over the border.
“She missed him by about two days and the last time they saw each other was in November. That’s why she couldn’t bring herself to leave Mykolayiv as she just felt so bad,” Tatiana said.
Tatiana and her father, 52, speak intermittently over the phone - but often his signal is cut off when Russian shelling intensifies.
“Sometimes, he warns us that he might disappear because of a lack of connection but it makes me panic. I think: how long will it take until I can speak to you again?”
When they do speak, the pair deliberately avoid any mention of war.
“I don’t tell Dad how worried I am as I don’t want to upset him,” she said. “In our messages we just say that we love each other, that we miss each other.
“We often discuss how we dream of meeting up again and going to the seaside together. He tells me how he will teach my daughter to swim.”
Watching the horrors of Putin’s war unfold in London has been difficult for Tatiana, who works as a quantity surveyor at a firm in east London. The past seven weeks, she said, have been a confusing mix of anxiety tinged with the guilt of not being there; of not being able to heal her parents’ pain.
“I sit here in a warm, sunny flat and nothing has changed. You go outside and everyone is happy, people are at the pub or the cinema.
“At the same time I am constantly monitoring the news. It feels surreal, as if it’s not really happening. You live in both worlds simultaneously.”
To help people stranded in Mykolayiv, Tatiana set up a GoFundMe page last month and has since raised more than £9,000. She believes it is important the west provides aid not just to refugees fleeing Ukraine but those trapped in besieged towns and cities as well.
The money raised is used to purchase food, clothing and medical supplies in the UK. These are then driven to Poland in a truck before being transported across the border to Lviv.
Volunteers from Mykolayiv-based charity ‘Dreams for Action’ (ÐÑÑй DIY) then drive the trucks across Ukraine and deliver the supplies to residents in the town.
However, the cost of sending the trucks as far as Poland can be as high as £2,000 – rising higher still to reach Mykolayiv. Tatiana has urged Britons to help in “any way they can” to ensure the war “does not just become a headline”.
“I would advise people to avoid donating to large corporations. Make sure the money is spent in Ukraine – there are so many domestic charities you can donate to from abroad.
“Keep raising awareness - our voices are loud when we stand together.”
Tatiana does not know when she will next see her hometown, but she spoke of her immense pride at how “united and strong” her country has remained in the face of Russian aggression.
“I am proud of my country, but within that there is a sadness because this should not have happened. I feel every Ukrainian death personally.
“They are heroes – but I want them to come back alive.”
Looking at footage of the wreckage of her home on her mobile phone, Tatiana said that she often thought of the “small things” – the fragments of their life that had been burnt forever.
“It’s not always the most expensive things you think about,” she said. “My dad did oil paintings which were left in the flat and my grandma also had a book that she cherished.
“I just wished I had taken them with me.”
