Yahoo News Family who fled war in Ukraine share their story in Galloway People
It’s a little humbling to hear the terrifying account of how Vika and Firas Jouja, and their children, 14-year-old Alexandra – Sasha for short – Bogdana, 13 and Amir, aged nine, fled Ukraine after war came to Kherson region in February 2022.
The traumatised family arrived in the Glenkens that August from Poland, where they had stayed in a football stadium, a church, hotels and an apartment provided by a kindly Polish woman until their visas enabling their emigration to Scotland were approved.
Home now is a rambling farmhouse near Dalry, where Vika has prepared a beautiful Syrian dish of aromatic rice, chicken, peppers and lemon inside a soft egg-brushed pastry shell topped with cashew nuts, baked golden brown in the oven.
Over dinner I listen to the couple’s remarkable story, one which doubtless could be repeated thousands of times over by refugees from Ukraine in other countries.
It’s a very international union – a Syrian man and a Ukrainian woman, and Firas, who is 41, tells me he first came to Kyiv in 1999, having left his native Syria as a teenager for a better life in Europe.
“I came to Ukraine when I was 16, from Homs near Damascus,” he begins.
“I studied engineering at a polytechnic in Kiev.
“I was back in Syria in 2011 when the civil war started and had to get out and walked all the way to Aleppo, then travelled through Turkey and Russia back to Kiev.
“That’s where I met Vika, who comes from Kremenets, a town in west Ukraine not far from the city of Ternopil.
“We were working together in the storeroom of a secondhand clothes shop.
“Vika and I got to know each other – and we got married seven days later.”
Vika, 35, tells me she was born three years before the Soviet Union fell apart.
“That was a difficult time,” she says.
“My parents had no wages for six months.
“Then my mother left when I was six and I was brought up by my grandmother.
“I had a sister who was six years older than me, Irina, but she died 11 years ago.
“After we married in 2013, Firas and I moved to Kremenets, my hometown.
“We had an old house, not ours, which we rented.
“At the beginning we had nothing, only two chickens.
“But step by step we got a cow, grew our own vegetables and bought an old 1988 red Ford Sierra.”
The move from Kyiv to the Ukrainian heartlands of the west, Firas recalls, initially proved difficult socially.
Russian was spoken universally in the capital, but in Kremenets it was like a different world.
“When I got there I did not understand a word of Ukrainian,” he recalls in gently-spoken Russian.
“I could only smile at people and try to read their faces.
“Vika helped me understand the language because I only spoke Russian.”
For Vika, moving back to her home town from the capital was the exact opposite.
“When I was in Kiev nobody could understand me!” she laughs.
She and Firas then recall how war came to Ukraine in 2014 after the Donbass regions of Lugansk and Donetsk rebelled when President Viktor Yanukovych – elected by narrow majority in 2010 by huge support from the Russian-speaking east and south – was forced out in a violent coup.
Unlike the east, Vika explains, people in western Ukraine were pro-EU and wanted Yanukovych out, and enthusiastically backed the Maidan Revolution because they felt the president was favouring his core areas and wanted closer ties with Moscow.
“It was in 2014 that the war started, not 2022,” she says quietly.
“It all began in Kiev, with Maidan.
“People there did not like what Yanukovyich, the president, was doing.
“We were hardworking people but prices were going up and wages were very low.
“There was a lot of corruption and a lot of young people were leaving for western Europe.
“Nobody was paying attention to western Ukraine – the Soviet Union regarded it as a Carpathian country where nobody knows the Russian language.
“And when you talked to people over 80, they would say they had been like slaves.”
“Me and Vika were in Kiev in January 2014,” Firas continues.
“Our neighbour in Kremenets called Vika and said: ‘please come back home’.
“In one day the whole of west Ukraine – Ternopil, Ivano-Frankovsk, Khmelnitsky and Lvov – was taking cars, vans, everything they could find to go through to Kiev to support Maidan.
“On the way back to Kremenets, at Zhitomir around 160 kilometres from Kiev, were huge road blocks made of tyres.
“Once you were beyond that, the government police could not arrest you.
“If they came there was no way through for them.”
Listening to Vika’s and Firas’ testimony, it seems as if a faultline runs through Ukraine.
“We had friends in Kharkov, Zaporozhiye and Odessa,” Vika explains.
“And if you asked them where they came from they would always say ‘I’m from Russia’.
“None of them could understand the Ukrainian language.
“But in the west of the country it is freely spoken.
“Many people in Lvov and Ternopil can easily understand Polish also.
“Lots of people come on holiday from Poland, and German and Polish were the two main foreign languages.”
Out of the blue, Firas pulls up his jersey and shows me a white eight-inch scar low on his right side.
It’s a war wound, sustained at Lugansk airport, in 2016, 17 months after Firas was drafted into what then was a mostly volunteer army.
After Maidan, Oleksandr Turchynov became acting president, then, Firas tells me, Petro Poroshenko was brought in and set about trying to crush the Donbass uprising.
As a result, men with no military experience were suddenly drafted for the front, Firas among them.
Many bought their way out by bribing corrupt officers – but Firas and Vika couldn’t pay.
“They came for me one night at 10pm with papers and said “you have to come with us”, Firas says quietly.
“We had $200, all our savings,” Vika continues.
“I pleaded with the sergeant but he said “that’s not enough – I need $1,000”.
“If we’d had that $1,000 I could have got out of it,” Firas nods.
“They took me away to the front in February 2015.
“Our youngest Amir was three months old.
“At the front we had nothing – the guys were asking people to send all they could.
“Lorries would come out with meat, milk, potatoes, clothes, shoes – everything.”
It’s a sobering experience to hear Firas describe the horror or war in the trenches.
“It was terrible in Donetsk Oblast region,” he recalls.
“There were soldiers without heads – they had been cut off with a sword.
“There was no gap between their trenches and ours, maybe 10 or 20 metres at most.
“We’d say ‘you have captured 10 Ukrainians, please give them back – they are our friends’.
“They said ‘no problem’ and we went with a white flag to carry back the wounded.
“Then they shot at us and the wounded man on our backs would be killed.
“One Russian officer said to us ‘you are foolish!’
“We knew we must fight because if we did not go there today, they will come to us tomorrow.
“One time we captured a Russian soldier,” Firas continues.
“We were thinking, first – food, second – guns, third – anything else.
“And in his bag we found drugs, Captagon.
“We asked him “what is that?”
“And he said ‘when you fight, everyone is scared.
‘So I take this not to be scared. Every soldier does.’”
Firas tells me he managed to survive 17 months at the front – but in autumn 2016 his luck ran out.
“We were defending Lugansk airport and suddenly a Grad missile came in,” he recalls, the memory as vivid as his scar.
“I was beside a girl from the UK, a soldier, she was 34.
“She was beside me when the rocket hit and was blown to pieces.
“I was hit by shrapnel in my head and side.
“They took me to Kiev for an operation.”
I ask the couple’s opinion of Volodomyr Zelensky – and the response is caustic.
“Zelensky is a clown,” Vika says bitterly.
“When he won the election in 2019 he closed down all the Russian language TV channels in Ukraine – and then the Russian schools.
“Zelensky himself spoke only Russian, even after the war started.
“On December 31, 2021 we heard from him that next year Ukraine will go into the EU and the country will thrive.
‘I will do everything to stop the war,’ he said.
“But we have seen all his comedy shows – he is an actor.”
