After 48 days under Russian occupation, they were so used to seeing enemy soldiers on every street corner that they thought the first Ukrainian checkpoint out of Kherson could be a trap. Arriving in a long column of cars, filled mostly with women, babies and pets, Oksana Borisova and Alisa Poliakova (who are speaking under pseudonyms to protect their families still living in occupied territory), didn’t dare trust that they were safe.
For weeks, Russian soldiers had stalked them around the southern Ukrainian city in Z-marked vehicles, destroyed their livelihoods, imprisoned and tortured their friends and lobbed grenades at them at rallies. But after driving past seven Russian checkpoints over 10 hours to Mykolaiv – a journey that prewar would have taken an hour – and surviving a close encounter with a missile, they had finally reached what appeared to be a Ukrainian soldier.
