Olena and Andrii Tsebenko, both 33, fled their home in Lviv and headed to Poland the morning Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Olena was nine months pregnant with their first child, a girl she named Vira, or Faith in Ukrainian.
This Sunday, Vira turns two. And as the war stretches into its third year, it will be a bittersweet birthday.
The Tsebenkos arrived at Przemysl's Hotel Marko three weeks before Vira was born. She arrived at a healthy three kilos and 140 grams.
“What’s that noise, Mummy?”
It was a wintry day last December and they were standing in the apartment in Lviv where Olena and Andrii used to live. Vira squeezed her mother’s hand tightly as she waited patiently for an answer. Then she asked Olena again: “What’s that noise?”
Olena hadn’t been here since she and Andrii made a frantic rush out of the city on the morning that Russian bombs started falling across Ukraine. She was in a state of terror as they drove toward Poland, but they made it out safely. They stopped in Przemysl, a small city just over the border, where they had nowhere to stay until a generous couple from Warsaw offered their summer house.
Vira was born three weeks later in a local hospital.
For the next two years, Olena was too afraid to bring her daughter to Ukraine, even to see Vira’s grandparents who lived just 65 kilometres away from Przemysl, in Sambir. She kept putting it off despite repeated visits by family and friends from Ukraine. She just didn’t feel it was safe.
Finally, as Christmas neared, she got up the nerve to go. She and Vira headed off for a few days, with plans to visit Lviv and Sambir.
Now, as they stood in the flat she once called home, Olena fought back tears and explained to her daughter that the loud noise was an air raid siren.
Vira at seven months old. A Polish couple let the family stay at their summer house.
She’d told Vira all about their life in Ukraine. She shared photographs, videos, books – anything that would help her daughter understand her roots. Vira lapped it up. She loved her mother’s stories and loved watching short clips of her parents’ grey cat, Melisa, lounging on their bed in Lviv, and walking across Andrii’s desk.
But Olena knew nothing would compare to Vira seeing it for herself. “I wanted to do this desperately,” Olena said. “I wanted to show her our apartment, where we planned her, where we wanted to stay, everything. And when we came to Lviv, it was emotional.”
Vira took to the place immediately. She bounced around the apartment and pointed out everything she recognized from the photos and videos. As Olena closed the door behind them on their way out, she wondered if they’d ever be back. “It’s like I want to stay there, it’s my home,” she recalled. “But I cannot stay there.”
Sometimes when I sleep, I dream that I am already at my home and that Vira is laying on the sofa, or playing. I see it like it’s reality and it’s so sad when you wake up and you’re not at home.
— Olena Tsebenko
One day during their trip, they went to a birthday party in Sambir for a friend’s daughter. Amid all the hugs and cooing over Vira, Olena felt pangs of sorrow. Most of the women were alone with their children. Their husbands had gone to war, and no one wanted to talk about when, or if, they’d be back.
Olena was also on her own with Vira. Andrii had left Ukraine before the government banned adult men from going abroad and he didn’t want to risk returning and not being allowed out again.
Without their partners, Olena knew her friends felt an emptiness inside. “It was very happy that we saw each other and very sad because this situation is so hard and you cannot change anything.”
Olena came to feel increasingly alone in Poland as other Ukrainians returned home.
For months after they had arrived in Przemysl, Olena and Andrii felt certain the war would end soon and they’d return to their home in Lviv. After Vira was born, they made sure to get her a Ukrainian passport, and had her birth certificate translated from Polish to Ukrainian. They spoke to her almost exclusively in their mother tongue.
By August, 2022, Andrii told Olena that he’d like to return, and his mother predicted it would all be over by Christmas. “Our soldiers start to free the territories, it will finish soon. I feel it,” Halyna told her son.
Olena was still unsure, so they waited.
She started feeling more optimistic in early 2023, as the war reached its first anniversary and Ukrainian troops made rapid advances along the front.
Maybe this summer, she mused.
They even let themselves dream about a new home in Ukraine. Before the war they’d talked about buying some land and building a house. On Sundays, they started walking around different neighbourhoods in Przemysl, comparing notes on what kind of structures they liked most.
In Przemysl, the Tsebenkos became regulars at this Ukrainian-run restaurant, where they went to enjoy crepes when The Globe checked in on them in August of 2022. Since Vira's birth, the couple had spoken to her almost exclusively in Ukrainian, confident that they might return to their homeland soon.
But as the situation in Ukraine changed, it was only for the worse. For Olena, the news from the battlefield was depressing: the shortage of troops, the Russian successes and the loss of so many lives, including several friends.
”Sometimes when I sleep, I dream that I am already at my home and that Vira is laying on the sofa, or playing,” Olena said when we met last August. “I see it like it’s reality and it’s so sad when you wake up and you’re not at home.”
Now, Olena doesn’t even make plans to go back any more.
Andrii says they should start thinking about moving to a bigger city in Poland, such as Krakow, where Olena could resume her career as a teacher and where Vira could attend good schools. He’s kept his job with a Swiss-based technology company but he’s thought about pursuing work in Poland.
“At the very beginning of the war everyone was speaking like ‘when we will win’, ‘no doubt’, and so on,” Andrii said. “Now you are realizing what this really means. It’s not an easy win. That’s the sad reality.”
Olena stays quiet as he speaks. She knows they have to start making plans to stay in Poland, if only for Vira’s sake. But many of their friends have already gone back and she’s feeling more alone than ever.
When they left Lviv on the morning of the invasion, Olena describes how she wanted to scream out in rage: at the war, at the Russians, at the millions of upended lives.
“And now?” she says with a sigh of resignation. Her voice trails off and she stares out the window.
Balloons celebrate Vira's arrival in 2022. Since then, Olena has taken her to Ukraine just once to visit her grandparents and other relatives.
Vira turns two on March 17. They’ll have some cake, sing “Happy Birthday” and enjoy their time together.
But day to day, Olena finds it hard to celebrate much of anything. She’s emotionally drained and physically exhausted most of the time, and for the past three months she’s had a burning pain in her stomach. She’s tried to see a doctor, but the earliest appointment isn’t for another month.
She keeps a brave face for Vira. She takes her daughter to a play group at Ukrainian House, a local cultural centre, and records clips of Vira singing along with the children to show Andrii. She’s even thought about taking Vira on another trip to Ukraine, but then hesitates at the uncertainty.
“If you ask me if I want to go to Ukraine? Yes, for sure,” she says, but the shelling and the difficulty of getting there make her think twice.
Every night Olena and her husband say a prayer for Ukraine and for the war to end. Sometimes Vira listens to their pleadings and asks her mother what she’s saying.
Olena doesn’t answer that for her right now. But one day, when the war is over, when she has her strength and her hope back, she’ll tell Vira everything.
War in Ukraine: More from The Globe and Mail
Two years after the Russia-Ukraine war began, The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon spent a grim anniversary in Kharkiv. He spoke with The Decibel and answered reader questions about what is happening on the front lines. Subscribe for more episodes.
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