Lakeside High School students got to hear a firsthand account Friday of what it was like to be in the middle of the Russian invasion of Ukraine when former Ukrainian exchange student Mariia Dudinova stopped by to speak with them.
Dudinova was a foreign exchange student at Lakeside during the 2019-2020 school year before returning to Ukraine after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. She shared some background on the country as well as photos and a video detailing its beauty and all it has to offer. She then showed photos of parts of her country that have been bombed.
"Unfortunately, this is what my country looks like right now," she said. "A lot of cities were bombed; thousands of people were killed."
On Feb. 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Dudinova, as a second-year college student living in Kyiv, was asleep in her dorm room when she awoke to the sounds of explosions at about 6 a.m. She shared a screenshot of her text message exchange with her host family in Hot Springs, Robert and Marina Mueller.
"He texted me and I said, you know, 'I'm just scared, I can't even get to my family,'" she said. "I woke up, I heard some explosions, and I heard people screaming. I was like, 'What's happening?' It's 6 a.m. And then I saw like 15 missed calls from my cousin. She was trying to tell me, like, 'Mariia, try to get out of there.'"
Immediately grabbing only her phone and laptop, she left to go meet her cousin.
"We were trying to get to my family because my home city is really close to the Russian border," she said. "And at that point, we didn't really even realize that the war started. I knew there were some explosions; I knew something bad started, but nobody could really imagine that somebody in the 21st century would just invade an independent country."
Video not playing? Click here https://www.youtube.com/embed/BWN5Td9KfFM
Boarding a train to go back home, she said the train ride, which usually takes two and a half-hours, took six hours only to go halfway.
"Because we never knew, 'Are there any mines?' 'Will there be any explosions?' So we had to go really slow. But halfway through, our train was stopped and we were told, 'You can't go further because there were tanks all over.' And even at that point, I was like, 'No, no. This cannot be happening,'" she said.
She said she called her parents and asked her father to pick her up at the city in which they were stopped. Her father told her, however, to go back to Kyiv because there were soldiers in their city and it had become a bad situation.
Dudinova was able to go back to her dorm room upon arriving back in Kyiv and packed a small bag with a few things as she and her cousin realized they needed to flee to Poland. After making it to the train station, she said they tried to get on any train they could because it was extremely crowded.
Finally getting onto a train, they traveled for 12 hours without a seat, not able to sleep, and with no food, until they made it to the city closest to the Polish border. During this time, there were sirens going off "all the time," she said, and they never knew if the next train station was going to explode.
"So it was Feb. 25 already," she said of their next layover. "It was very cold outside. Winters in Ukraine are extremely cold. Like, I was wearing my winter boots, my fur coat, and we were trying to get on the train and we didn't know if we would make it (to Poland). Our phones died. We just knew that the train is supposed to be somewhere there.
"So we were just holding our hands because we were all so scared to get lost. There were so many people screaming, crying, just waiting for the train. And we were lucky to get on a train. We were lucky not to be bombed. So we got on a train and fortunately, we were able to flee to Poland," she said.
In Poland, she and her cousin found a volunteer family who offered to let them stay with them. Just within the past few weeks, she was able to come back to the United States, where she is staying with her former host family. She is currently seeking to enroll in college.
She still worries every day, she said, about her family, which is still in her home city close to the Russian border.
"There is an app that I check every morning when I wake up to see, 'Is my hometown being bombed?' 'Is my mom safe?' Every morning I wake up texting her, 'Where are you?' 'Are you in a bomb shelter?' 'Are you in a basement?' 'Is everything OK?' And every time I go to bed, it's like 7 a.m. in Ukraine, I also text because I get these air raid warnings every, probably, two hours. And it's just terrible when you cannot help. I'm here in the United States. My whole family is there and there is nothing we can do about it," she said.
She said people ask her all the time why Russia decided to invade her home country. She said the only answer she has is that nobody knows for sure.
"First, Russia said that they were going to protect us from our government, which we didn't need," she said. "We really love and respect our president. Then they said, 'No, no, we attacked Ukraine because we had some information that Ukraine was going to attack Russia.' Then they said, 'We decided to attack because we didn't feel safe that Ukraine wanted to join NATO.' So there are many, many, many lies that they tell."