Jurga 🇺🇦

This is Volodymyr. He is 69. He is deaf. And he rode his bicycle out of an occupied city — all alone. He couldn’t hear the drones flying overhead. And he rode 60 kilometres in a single day, crossing the “zero line” — on a bicycle. Volodymyr Voichenko stayed in Polohy after russia occupied the city. He stayed because he had to care for his sick mother-in-law. And then hell began. “For several days in a row, russian soldiers came to my house and threatened to shoot me. My dog would sit by the doorstep all the time. They threatened her with a pistol, too. I was terrified,” Volodymyr recalls. They took everything from his home. The television, computer, appliances, dinnerware, and even his son’s tools from the basement. Everything they could carry — they took it all. For more than a year, he received no pension. The russians had emptied his bank account. He lived without gas, water or electricity, eating only what he could grow in his garden. He went to the post office for humanitarian aid, but was turned away. Then he witnessed something he will never forget. At a destroyed gas station near his home, russian forces had created a mass grave. “There was a huge KamAZ truck. Two russian soldiers would bring the bodies of people and simply throw them into a common pit. Their faces were all horrifying. After the soldiers left, we would come closer and see the bodies in the pit.” After his mother-in-law died, he realised he had to escape. He locked the door, packed his documents and a little food into a backpack, got on his bicycle and set off. Through occupied villages, across the frontline zone, past burned-out military vehicles and the bodies of soldiers. He avoided mines. Hid from drones. Near a river where there was no bridge, he spotted russian soldiers and Chechens. He found a plank and used it to get his bicycle across. At dawn, Ukrainian soldiers stopped him near Orikhiv. He showed them his deaf person's ID card and passport. They couldn't believe what they were seeing. “How did you make it through? There are drones flying everywhere, and the whole area is mined.” One of the soldiers crossed himself and said: “Keep going.” When Volodymyr finally reached Zaporizhzhia, an interpreter at the local deaf club could hardly believe he had made it all the way there on his own. They called his son. “Your father is here.” Vitalii was in shock. “How? He’s still under occupation.” They replied: “No, your father made it through the zero line on a bicycle. We can hardly believe it ourselves.” Now father and son live together in Kalush. Volodymyr says it is peaceful there. And Vitalii says he can finally stop worrying so much about his father.