Stories of Ukrainian women who survived the war while pregnant

The project "Daruvati Zhittya" was born from a personal experience that I went through when, at the beginning of the war, I left my native Mariupol pregnant. And I felt that the world should hear the stories of women who went through such an experience. I contacted the chat room of the Mariupol maternity hospital No. 3, where I was registered and planned to give birth. Later, a Russian missile hit this maternity hospital and is now destroyed. Pregnant women who left the occupied Mariupol and were in different cities of Ukraine responded to my call. They wanted to join the project and tell their stories. We also turned to the communities of expectant mothers in all cities. As a result, 27 women gathered.

I was six months pregnant when on the morning of February 24, we were awakened by a loud sound. I did not immediately understand what it was, and the man, to calm me down, said that the neighbors would slam the door very loudly. Then another sound; I understood that these were explosions. I read the news that gives me goosebumps.

The days mixed up, and we began to stay in the basement because it became scarier to go out. Light, gas, water, and communication disappeared. The street was extreme and constantly bahal; it was terrible.

Every day we thought about evacuation, I lost weight against the background of stress, my blood pressure dropped, my head was spinning, I didn’t feel the baby’s tremors, and my son asked: “Mom, what if you don’t give birth? Will you die with your brother?" At our peril and risk, we decided to go to Mangush (a village near Mariupol - ed.). The car has white flags and the inscription "children."

The situation was the same - cold, lack of gas, water, light, and communications. People in a panic do not understand what is happening; everything is at the level of rumors. The house was shaking from explosions; there were columns of equipment, one after another "Grad," and planes around the clock. Our Mariupol was on fire; there were black clouds of smoke and a pungent smell of burning.

Every morning was a holiday; waking up, we hugged because we were alive and it did not fly to us. In this tense situation, we sat in the search for products until March 14th.

The day before, crying, my son said: “Mom, I don’t want to die yet, because I still haven’t seen much in this world!” Early in the morning, they said goodbye to their parents and left again at their peril and risk.

The first stop was in Berdyansk on March 15; in the morning, we joined the column and went on. The road was terrible, dangerous, and challenging. Equipment is broken around, shells, a downed rocket in a burning field, fighter jets in the sky with their terrible roar, loud explosions, and flaming cars. Endless checkpoints, checking phones and getting out of the vehicle - execution without warning.

We were moving slowly, in front of Vasilievka, when we were going around the bridge, a mini car exploded in front of us, there was a woman and two children in it, it was terrible.

A column of about 40 cars gathered for us; an escort drove up and told us to go rut to rut; the whole field was mined. On the way, we all prayed and exhaled only when we saw the flag of Ukraine - it was our checkpoint. It was a hard four days of travel.

Today we live in Transcarpathia one day. We saw photos of our burnt-out warehouses; there is no apartment either. From realizing what happened, separation from parents, missing friends, and news of the dead, you go crazy. The other day there was a thunderstorm; our son, hearing thunder, ran and shouted: “Mom, where is the basement? Let's run for cover!" There is still no sleep; you shudder at every sound. We want to go home. You have to be respectful and move on.

02/22/22 is a beautiful date for my long-awaited wedding and the birth of a new family. It seemed to me that a new, happy life was beginning, but two days later, everything changed. On the morning of February 24, my husband and I woke up to the sound of exploding rockets.

Instead of coffee in bed and a delicious breakfast, a flurry of terrifying news hit us. All morning the TV did not stop, and we did not let go of the phones. We felt stupor and terrible fear. What to do next? After all, I was already carrying our baby under my heart at that moment. Is that true? Is it that serious? Maybe tomorrow everything will end?

After a couple of days, the electricity went out, and the apartment became very cold; later, there was no water. We constantly heard how rockets flew by; the explosions were more frequent and robust.

It realized that everything is more significant than in 2014 and much worse than we imagined. We started looking for shelter, collecting warm clothes and documents.

And yet, we tried not to lose heart, find reasons for joy, look for positive moments in everything, and, if possible, give good emotions to others. We lived in a shelter for a week, hoping that everything would end soon and we would return home. But this did not happen, and on March 20, we had to leave the city.

The goal was to get out alive and keep the pregnancy. Our baby is only 14 weeks old and should live. We left the city on foot, taking only a couple of warm clothes, four chocolate bars, and a folder with documents.

The road was so complicated that we did not believe we would get to a safe place. But the Lord gave me strength to go on.

In our beloved city, we left everything dear to us. I lost my favorite job, home, and the usual beautiful things. All this went beyond the horizon. Black smoke hung over the city; the sky was shrouded in smog. The sounds of explosions did not stop; the earth trembled underfoot and was all imprinted in mind, around broken equipment and flocks of black crows. A terrible fear all this time did not leave us for a second; time dragged on like rubber. I didn't even want to look back towards the house.

On March 25, we managed to leave Mangus. How much we rejoiced to see our soldiers! We felt like a mountain had fallen from our shoulders, and we realized that we were safe. Now I understand how much we have gained despite our loss. We have become more robust and learned to appreciate time, memories, moments, each other, and people. I learned to be more joyful and thankful for everything.

Carrying a baby under the heart is happiness and anxious expectation of a miracle. But such sensations lasted exactly until February 24th. Further, we woke up to the sound of gunshots and realized that the war had begun. From that day on, a test began for us, which will remain in our memory forever.

We already went through this in 2014, and I convinced myself that everything would pass soon and be fine. But on the 7th month of pregnancy, I ended up in the besieged Mariupol and realized that I was wrong and that everything was much worse this time. Hearing bomb explosions and flying aircraft, I prayed for only one thing - not to lose and save our child.

Every time a plane flew by, lying on the bedspreads on the damp cellar floor, I covered myself with my head, lay on my side, and hugged my stomach. I understood that nothing would save us if it arrived, but I could not do anything more. I just waited and prayed that all this would end soon, but it lasted 23 days for us. These were days of sheer nightmare, fear, and tears.

I left at the first opportunity, saving the most valuable thing - my baby. I was driving under shelling, flying planes with minimal gasoline, and understanding where to go. The main thing is to go where they don't shoot.

I was offered to go abroad, but I categorically refused, and many did not understand my choice; they asked why I stayed. I always answer that I am Ukrainian, love my country and hometown, and want my child to be born, even if not in Mariupol, but at least in my native land, Ukraine.

To save my child's life, I left everything dear to me - a house, a job acquired by my labor, and things so dear to my heart. In a word, I left my whole life in the past in exchange for my baby's future. And I will keep this saved life as the most valuable and the only thing I have left.

Perhaps this is not the best pregnancy story but not the fairy tale I dreamed of. But now, for me, the most important thing is that we survived, and now we have no right to give up! The children were not supposed to know what war is, but it has already happened to us. This story will forever remain in our hearts, and I will tell it to my child. Now I will never forget at what cost I got my greatest happiness! I dream today that PEACE will come as soon as possible because I want to live and raise my child in a free and happy country.

My husband and I moved to Mariupol recently, but we fell in love with this city as our own. We had everything: a great job, friends, a comfortable apartment, and most importantly, peace and mutual understanding. But now, most of that has just been taken away as a part of us.

On February 24, my husband left for work; I was still sleeping soundly and woke up from explosions - they began to bomb the airfield. My husband immediately understood everything but reassured me, and I went on to rest. We lived on the left bank, where this horror began from the very first days. I was on a powder keg all day and canceled all the cases. I just passed the tests; the plans included another appointment with an obstetrician-gynecologist. My husband called every hour and told me to pack my "alarm suitcase" and not go anywhere else. He was released from work earlier, like the whole brigade. His plant "Ilyich" has now been destroyed.

He immediately asked me: “Will we leave or not?” I believed that everything would end quickly and refused.

We stayed at home for a week. These were sleepless nights, worries, huge store queues, and constant explosions. She didn't go to the hospital anymore. When the baby moved, I calmed down and realized that I needed to be less nervous for his sake. My husband supported me in every possible way and was there, as he had already experienced a lot in 2014.

One morning we woke up from a sharp explosion and the feeling that the earth was moving out from under our feet.

They hit a neighboring house, three floors collapsed, and cars burned down. I realized that it would not end so quickly, and I needed to get out. At that time, it was already tough to leave.

There is no transport, and it takes two hours to walk to the center under shelling. The husband went out to investigate the situation and, by a lucky chance, our military brought bread to people. He ran to them and asked about the evacuation, explaining that I was in a position. Of course, they helped us. We took our backpacks and got into the car. For a moment, I felt safe, but I didn't know what lay ahead for us.

Leaving my home, I saw a lot of destruction in my native places: shops and stalls. Human corpses lay on the streets. I am a medical intern and can easily endure these types, but it was at these moments that I began to realize what was happening. The husband started talking to the military and asking how to leave the city, but they made it clear that the town was surrounded and we could not get out; too late. Arriving at the center, we spent the night with my sister. It was quieter there.

The next day we managed to catch a connection and learned about the "green corridor" near the Drama Theater. We packed up and started walking, but it was canceled halfway through our journey. I turn back and see how my city is burning, and we have nowhere to go.

My husband saw the maternity hospital and pulled me there, they let us in, but they said I could only stay. My due date was 23 weeks at the time. I decided I would not survive without my husband, and we left. I thank fate that I didn’t give up then; I didn’t succumb to fatigue because the next day, the connection was lost, and the maternity hospital was bombed.

We ended up at PSTU (Priazovsky State Technical University, - ed.), where we lived in the basement for 15 days.

The conditions were terrible: people drank technical water from pipes, caught pigeons at the Drama Theatre, and many children were poisoned, but everyone understood that one should not give up.

We all became family and friends during this time, and with many, we still communicate.

The days dragged on, but nothing was said about the "green corridors." There were many airstrikes on PSTU, a large number of wounded and dead, and a lot of destruction. There were moments when I thought that I had lost my husband - he was blown away twice by the blast wave.

I fell to the floor during the blows, windows flew out over me, glass fell, and walls collapsed. But only one thing did not let me lose my entire heart - this is our baby, and I dream of his happy future.

On March 15, we managed to get out, there was no connection, but people began to come to the shelter and look for their relatives. And then my husband realized they knew something: there was an opportunity to leave somehow. At his peril and risk, under shelling, he found out everything and firmly decided that we would try to escape. With her sister's husband, they could start the old car. It was practically not refueled and did not start for 2 hours. The fact that it started up is a miracle; we just jumped into it, leaving things that were no longer so important to us. The main thing is life!

We could get out, but artillery and aircraft worked all day. They moved very slowly, madly worried, but until the end, they believed they would succeed. In the evening, we were near Berdyansk, and a connection appeared; our phones were torn from messages and calls from relatives who thought we had already died.

Lots of tears and words to my parents about how much I love them. These emotions I still can not remember without tears.

After stepping out into the sunlight and taking a shower, I only saw how much our baby had grown. The tummy has grown so intensely despite everything else in my body.

He began to move more often and responded in every possible way to our conversations with him. And only this did not let us break!

We spent one night in Berdyansk and knew we wanted to go further, to our native land. We took an evacuation bus to Zaporizhzhia, where we traveled all day. There was a shelled column in front of us; we stopped on the way, turned off the lights, stood for an hour, and prayed that their drone would not notice us. Everything went well, and we arrived late at night. Thanks to volunteers, we spent the night in a kindergarten, and the following day we left for the Dnieper by an evacuation train, then to our parents in Kramatorsk to hug them.

We quickly realized that it was dangerous to stay there and decided to leave, but we failed to persuade them to come with us. We rented an apartment in the Vinnytsia region for some time, but we had to move. On May 5, we stopped in Kyiv and rented an apartment while some savings were still set aside for childbirth. I registered again, passed the tests, and saw the baby on the ultrasound. When we heard his heartbeat and the doctor said everything was fine, it was our happiest day. The baby is already 35 weeks old, and we are eagerly waiting for him! He will be the happiest boy; we will do everything for this!

02/24/22 was one of the most anticipated days for my husband and me - we had to go to the first ultrasound and look at our baby - such a welcome child, for whom almost everything was ready in Mariupol. But fate prepared a completely different, terrible test for us because already at 4 in the morning, we, like most Mariupol residents, woke up from the explosions. Then I realized that on this day, our plans would change.

For the first week, my parents, my sister's family, and I lived in our apartment with my husband; we all slept together in the hallway because there were no windows. Explosions were heard around, and water, electricity, and heating were turned off. And when a house caught fire opposite, and there was simply nothing to extinguish it, we realized that it was too dangerous to stay.

We decided to go to the bomb shelter at Azovstal. When we arrived, we saw a bomb shelter that went two floors underground and was reliable. For the first time, we felt safe.

In addition to our family, about 100 Mariupol residents, including children from 4 months old, women, older adults, and male workers of Azovstal, saved families. Each adult had their duties - the women prepared the food and cleaned, the men looked for water, and monitored security around the bomb shelter.

So we lived for almost a week. Then, in addition to the usual mortars and hail, powerful explosions of aerial bombs began, from which the walls of our reliable bomb shelter shuddered, and the fear for life returned. We decided to leave the territory of the enterprise in the city center. By that time, there were fierce battles around the city, and it was closed for travel.

Our next refuge was the art school near the well-known Drama Theatre. About 200 Mariupol residents were hiding here; most were older adults and children. Men kindled fires from old furniture; there was no drinking water, and food became scarce and scarce.

There were no medicines and medical care; people were dying almost daily. Amid all this despair and grief, there was only one hope - a battery-operated radio. It was the only source of information.

We were all waiting for the official "green corridor." Meanwhile, enemy planes were flying over the city, and men came and reported that air bombs had destroyed the maternity hospital, university buildings, and many more buildings in which ordinary civilians were hiding.

And we were all waiting for some clue - to go or stay. This clue was a shell that hit the school of arts, and we could no longer stay there, but simply at our peril and risk, under planes and explosions, we left the city. That evening we stopped in Mangush to spend the night with my father's friends. And in the morning, we moved on. There were very long lines of cars along the way; there was insufficient fuel. But there was no way out. Checkpoints checked our documents every half an hour.

And one of them, near the occupied city of Tokmak, prepared another test for us - we were forced to stop and spend the night in a field at 11 degrees below zero with a broken car window, which we had nothing to heat.

We were warned that if we turned on the headlights, they would shoot to kill us because it had already been 5 minutes since the curfew began. Fortunately, ordinary people helped strangers, just those who had such an opportunity - fed, warmed, informed where you can fill up the car to get to Zaporizhzhia. When we were already passing Ukrainian checkpoints, the military waved affably to all the vehicles from our convoy, and we felt relieved that we were finally at home.

I dream that every child awaiting birth would be born in Ukraine without war and see a peaceful plane in a soft sky over a yellow wheat field.

On February 24, like many in Ukraine, we woke up from the explosions. Our oldest baby was sleeping in his room - he was three years old. I was 22 weeks pregnant at the time. We were planning a big family to build a house, we had already poured the foundation, and the construction season was to begin in about a month. On March 5, we had air tickets to Tallinn, and from there, we had to get to Helsinki by ferry. A mini-vacation was planned as a gift from a man on March 8th. And at the end of April, we planned to have time to take off to the sea before the second baby was born.

But we ended up in the winter in the cold basement of our relatives in the private sector of Kharkiv because our apartment is on Saltovka. I saw tanks and black smoke from the balcony window.

In the basement, when we were fleeing the shells, our 3-year-old kid was hysterical, asking for milk and a Kinder surprise. Everyone got sick. In my 22 weeks of pregnancy, I also caught a cold and began to cough. We were scared. We had a stage of denial and expected that everything was about to end. But the sounds of MLRS, artillery, and fighters bombing the city only intensified.

The light was interrupted, there was no water, no Internet, and the heating was turned off in the apartments of high-rise buildings - the thermal power plant was bombed. It is good that the house of relatives could be heated with firewood.

We charged our phones from the car cigarette lighter to write a couple of lines to our relatives that we were alive. Products are running out. After ten days of hell, we decided to leave under fire at our peril and risk. There were massive traffic jams on the roads from the number of people fleeing the war. We didn't know where we were going—all our relatives were in Odessa. Volunteers sheltered us in another area. Time passed, but we still did not understand when it would end; I had to undergo further pregnancy examinations - ultrasound, doppler. And we moved to the district center, closer to medicine. This is not how I envisioned being pregnant. I wanted to buy baby clothes, go to maternity classes, go to yoga, and go to the pool. And we were at war. We have no plans for life, for vacation, for the weekend. We don't even know what will happen tomorrow. I want it to be simple. And it isn't enjoyed that, for many, it will never come. Sadly, many children will never hug their parents because of the war. Therefore, I took part in this project, and I ask caring people who have the financial opportunity to support children who have lost a normal childhood and the most precious thing - their parents. I believe that we will persevere and give birth to our children, and they will grow up in a peaceful Ukraine. As you know, difficult times give birth to strong people who create great nations. Love always wins. Ukraine will also win.

My husband and I were pleased when we found out about my pregnancy. And impatiently began to wait for the appearance of the baby. Then no one could imagine that a war could start in our time. And although we were warned in the evening that an offensive was planned, we ignored this and calmly went to bed.

But on February 24 at 5 am, we woke up to the terrible sound of loud explosions. And only when they heard them they realized that the war had begun. My first thoughts were that you shouldn’t worry about not harming your baby. But where without unrest, calm down and again explosions. I have never experienced such fear.

On February 25, my husband and I began to think about leaving, if only to preserve the pregnancy. We packed our bags in 20 minutes and, through the tears of our parents and our fear, left the city at eight in the evening.

The road lasted 33 hours, we had no food, and at the gas station, they sold only fuel with queues of 2-3 hours. They were already beginning to regret leaving. But then they realized that they did the right thing. Soon our village. Bolshaya Dymerka (Brovary district, Kyiv region) was occupied.

When we found ourselves in relative safety, we felt that our hearts were still excited for Ukraine because we saw how many innocent people suffer daily. This war made us rethink and understand what is valuable in this life.

It's been almost two months, and we are finally back home. Although the war is not over, we believe the Ukrainian victory is close. Take care of yourself and your loved ones.

Soon the photo exhibition of the Giving Life Charity Project will be held in the cities of Ukraine and Europe. Its purpose is to draw attention to children affected by the war. And the short-term goal is to raise funds for the purchase of Mood Backpacks in partnership with the NGO Our Choice Ukraine .