Huddled in the basement of their apartment block on the left bank of Kyiv, James Gibson and his wife Anna Matiunina had just 10 minutes to decide whether to stay or go.
Russian troops edged closer to the Ukrainian capital but making a break for a neighbouring country wasn’t without risk as the invading forces’ grip on the ground, the sea and the sky tightened by the minute.
Explosions pierced the eerie silence in between the chilling sirens outside their 25-storey tower block and the husband and wife opted to take the lifeline offer of a car out of the city with a person they barely knew.
The couple, married for three years, hurriedly shoved their lives into a single suitcase and two backpacks and sprinted down the 13 floors to the getaway vehicle.
Jammed into a Fiat Punto, Anna’s school friend, also called Anna, her husband Bogdan, their 10-year-old daughter Nastya and their dog joined them for the tense 24-hour ride west on Friday— a journey that typically would’ve taken eight hours. But gridlocked traffic and military checkpoints turned the sprint to safety into a marathon.
Huge tank convoys made up of Ukrainian military reservists headed to the epicentre of the conflict’s focus, Kyiv, while thousands fled in the opposite direction.
The armed personnel maintained a ‘positive’ veneer as they responded to clapping and cheering with waves to those grateful to be heading away from danger.
Jets blazed across the sky above them to a chorus of “nasha, nasha!?” in the cramped car which means “ours?”. They did not know if the planes cutting above them were hostile Russian forces or their own.
James, who lived and grew up in Kilmarnock before moving to Ukraine, told Ayrshire Live: “In those 10 minutes where we had to decide on what we were doing; we focused on survival. It sounds cliche but it’s fight or flight. If we don’t go now what will happen? What if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time or what if troops surround the city?
“The guy that drove us 24 hours was called Bogdan which means roughly, ‘sent from God’.”
After the epic drive to the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast region, the group spent the night in what was essentially a stranger’s house before heading to the Romanian border.
A full-scale symptom of the unfolding humanitarian crisis was laid bare as traffic stretched back more than six miles with massive crowds of bewildered and exhausted people waiting to be granted passage.
After more than five hours waiting among thousands of people, James and Anna, both 36, made it over the border on Sunday night where a friend of a friend agreed to drive them five hours to the Transylvania region of Romania where the couple are now waiting to travel to the UK.
James said: “That border experience was something else. You see these things on the news but we’ve maybe become desensitised to it because it feels so far away.
“To see that taking place in this day and age is remarkable. When we got there, there was a line of cars 10 kilometres long. We walked the 10km with a suitcase and when we got to the actual border there was a mass of people and we were there in excess of five hours.
“It was like a scene from War of the Worlds with some people not understanding orders from soldiers standing with machine guns.
“I thought, ‘are we going to have panic here? Will there be a rush or stampede?’ Thankfully it didn’t happen. It was surreal. It just wasn’t real to look at.”
While there’s an element of relief at escaping Ukraine, James, who met Anna while they were both performing on cruise ships, says their safe exit has weighed heavy on their conscience.
“We are living here on the charity of almost complete strangers,” the former Grange Academy pupil said.
“I’ve been struck by the generosity of Ukrainian people who are going through this as well.
“People we’d never met before gave us the key to their flat in another city and said ‘if you get stuck there, use our flat’. They don’t know us from Adam and they’re giving us the key to their flat – this was the family of the guy that drove us 24 hours across the country.
“Everyone has rallied round and I have friends and colleagues back in Kyiv and in a way you feel guilt that you’ve left and the way they phrased it to me is that, ‘we’re going to take up arms and defend our street’.
“They are tough as nails. Things that would panic and cause chaos in our country just don’t faze them.
“A friend of mine said, ‘I’m glad you made it out of the country, you’ve been through hell’.
“I said to him, ‘no, what we’ve been through is not hell. What the people that are still there are experiencing is hell. We only got a taste of it in the beginning.”
James has been told of homeless people on the streets of Kyiv collecting empty glass bottles to make molotov cocktails in preparation for the fight and has also been told of Ukrainian ‘neds’ called ‘gopniks’ who have reportedly been pulling Russians military personnel from vehicles and seizing them.
Anna’s mother is among those left behind in the capital, the issue around Covid vaccination passports playing a role in her decision to stay put.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” James said. “We chose to go and my wife’s mother is a very stoic Soviet woman said she didn’t want to leave.
“And one of the reasons she didn’t want to go was because she wasn’t vaccinated and she was worried if she tried to go somewhere else she wasn’t sure if those vaccine requirements would be waived.”
Anna, who’s a Ukrainian citizen, and James made the country their home after they tied the knot three years ago.
And the first sign of war arrived at their home, three metro stops from the centre of the city, in the early hours of Thursday morning. A blast outside triggered car alarms and woke the couple up.
“We were woken at five o’clock in the morning on the 24th with the sound of explosions outside the window,” James recalled.
“In the past I thought I’d heard explosions but until you actually hear a real one; you haven’t heard an explosion. It’s a harrowing sound to hear.
“Those missile strikes were targeted at Boryspil international airport, around 30 minutes drive, and that was loud enough to set off car alarms in our complex where we live.”
A group chat for the complex they stay in alerted the couple when they needed to head down to the basement.
They sheltered with other families, kids, cats, dogs and even guinea pigs. Two kids next to James and Anna sat on tyres to avoid sitting on the cold concrete floor.
The pair had bought train tickets to leave a day later than they did, but their decision to leave early proved the correct one as the metro stopped running and bridges were blocked, meaning they would’ve stranded in the city.
The pair now have to wait a wee while longer before making their way to Cluj and catching a flight to Birmingham later this week.
And while the couple may have fled their beloved home in Ukraine, they both say they have every intention of returning.
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