![]() There they joined 31 others, including children, many of them from families of retired Soviet military officers who served before the breakup of the Soviet Union. Soon after the war started, Alina and her mother, along with their three cats, moved from their nine-story apartment building (which had no air-raid shelter) to the basement of a four-story apartment building where a friend lived. Yet what she endured, for almost four weeks in a freezing basement in a once beautiful port city the size of Miami, is what tens of thousands of Ukrainians are enduring daily from Russian sieges. She traveled first to Poland, then to Denmark, where friends can host her while she seeks a visa to the United States or Canada.Įven though everyone expected fighting farther east in the Donbas region, “we didn’t think it would happen to us,” she told me last week via WhatsApp. So I was thrilled to learn last week that she finally made it out of that besieged city on March 23. 5, her city lay in ruins and she was hiding in a basement. Just three weeks after we said effusive goodbyes at the Mariupol train station on Feb. An IT specialist with an MBA from Lehigh University, she spent a high school exchange year in Williamsport, Pa.Īlina had never imagined what lay ahead for Mariupol. I met Alina Beskrovna on my February trip to Mariupol, when she worked alongside me as a translator and appointment fixer.
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