Marking Unity Day, EAST SOS Publishes Stories of Ukrainian Unity

Ukrainian Unity Day is more than a date in history. It is something people live every day – especially during war. The EAST SOS Charity Foundation is publishing testimonies of Ukrainian men and women who survived occupation, shelling, and evacuation, and who have shown through their own experience that that unity is not just a word. It is action.

In the most difficult and unexpected circumstances, people supported one another, helped strangers, and stood together in moments of greatest danger. These stories are about responsibility for one another, trust, and solidarity – the things that unite the country even in times of war. Some names have been changed for security reasons.

For many Ukrainians, russia’s full-scale invasion began unexpectedly. At that moment of danger, people felt responsible for one another – and above all, for children. On February 24, 2022, some parents brought their children to school, still unaware of how serious the danger was. Teachers stayed with their students until their parents came to pick them up:

“I had three students. We heard explosions, and the children were quickly picked up. My daughter, who is also a teacher, had one boy left whose parents didn’t realize what was happening quickly enough, so he stayed. The teachers’ meeting ended, and all the teachers rushed away because they had children too, but I stayed with that boy. I told my daughter, ‘Go, save your own child!’ You know, in those first minutes of the war, all I could think about was the child who had been left behind. When his father finally came running, he thanked me and said, ‘You saved my child,’” says Kateryna, a teacher from Siverskodonetsk.

Volunteers also showed what Ukrainian unity looks like. They helped those in danger, putting their own lives at risk. Their work proves that unity is found in real actions and in people standing by one another:

“When there were requests and many people needed help, especially people with limited mobility, Angels of Salvation and EAST SOS (charity foundations – Ed.) joined our evacuation trips. During the first five days, I was still counting, I evacuated more than a hundred people. After that, I stopped counting. For about a month in 2022, I went almost every day. We had five evacuation crews working with buses. Back then, we were still rescuing people from Lyman and we kept going into Kreminna until the very end,” says Roman Buhaiov, an evacuation specialist at EAST SOS.

Residents of Mariupol stayed together during the hardest days of the blockade in 2022. They helped each other survive and supported anyone in need. Despite constant shelling and destruction, people did whatever they could to stay alive:

“I ran to my mother’s apartment, but the doors were locked and blocked. The neighboring building was on fire, and cars were burning in the yard. She was trapped on the second floor, calling out, ‘Help, I’ll burn here!’ I couldn’t open the door. I grabbed a sledgehammer and tried to break it down, but the side bars were embedded in solid walls . It wasn’t easy. Then some men from the basement came with a hacksaw and tried cutting. That didn’t work because the metal frame was blocked above and below – it had been twisted by the explosion. Someone else tried to get in from the neighboring entrance. Then a neighbor also stepped in, and we are so deeply grateful to him. He was a metalworker, so he knew how these things work. He found not only a sledgehammer but all sorts of heavy iron tools to pry the door open. We rocked them together, three of us, and finally managed to break through,” recalls Yana from Mariupol.

Tragically, not everyone could be saved, despite every effort.Yet many fought for each other’s lives to the very end, even when chances were slim::

“The airstrike hit around nine o’clock. I felt it strongly – it happened about a kilometer away. The strike was so powerful that the building was completely destroyed. People screamed because their relatives were inside: someone was out by the fire cooking, someone went to get supplies. When they returned, the building was gone. A man came to us asking, ‘Who can help? We need to dig, there are children… and the residents of the entire house are in the basement.’ Everyone from our building responded. Together with men and the relatives of people whose house had been hit, we went to dig. My husband personally pulled out three children, unfortunately all of them were dead,” says Viktoriya from Mariupol.

For many people who survived the horrors of war, being near loved ones and among fellow townspeople is the greatest support and true happiness. In such moments, shared presence and care are far more meaningful than any material aid. The feeling of being among “your own people” gives the strength to continue even after the most devastating losses:

“I’ve been through so much that the greatest help for me now is simply being among my people. We, the displaced, have gone through a lot, especially when Grad rockets were shelling our city,” says Volodymyr from Bakhmut.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the EAST SOS Charity Foundation team has conducted over 1,235 interviews and documented 2,176 probable war crimes.

The documentation of war crimes by EAST SOS is carried out as part of the project “Support for War-Affected Vulnerable Groups and Residents of Remote Areas of Ukraine,” with financial support from the European Union. The content is the sole responsibility of the foundation and does not necessarily reflect the position of the EU (European Union in Ukraine).