Denis Karlovsky was at a birthday party when the Russians invaded.
It was February 24, 2022, and Vladimir Putin had ordered his troops westwards – convinced that Ukraine would fall within days.
The 23-year-old was working as a journalist for a Kyiv-based news agency. But, unlike his colleagues, Denis was not in the newsroom but with his family for a party in his hometown west of the Ukrainian capital.
“Half of our newsroom was based in Kyiv, and it was hard to evacuate from the city by train and by car,” Denis said.
“[My colleagues] were stuck in the traffic jam on the outskirts of Kyiv while the Russian military were coming closer to the urban area.
“It was quite frightening at the time.”
He added: “The Western media were pressing home the message that all Ukrainian journalists were on the hit list of the Russian security services. The editor in chief of our news agency also received an intelligence message from the government that our journalists were under threat. I was lucky not to be in Kyiv at the time."
Denis remained in the relative safety of the countryside until April. When the Russian generals withdrew their forces from Kyiv that month, he was able to return to his home city and then, in early summer, go back to the capital.
Returning to Kyiv, the stain of war was everywhere. “Most of the buildings had some kind of bomb blast,” Denis said. The effect was ‘distressing’.
He moved to Oxford last August, having been awarded a scholarship to complete a master’s degree in public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government.
Part of the Oxford University’s Ukrainian Society, he and his fellow students will take part in a peace rally on Friday to mark the anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Ukrainian scholars studying in Oxford as part of the university’s scholarship programme, introduced last year following the invasion, are among those expected to be at the event in Radcliffe Square.
They will be joined by city and university officials, including Reuben College president Prof Lionel Tarassenko, whose grandfather was from Eastern Ukraine and who spearheaded the scholarship scheme for displaced Ukrainian students.
The rally will commemorate the thousands of lives lost in the war. In the past year, the United Nations estimates that at least 8,000 civilians have lost their lives in the conflict, although the true figure could be significantly higher. As many as 180,000 Russian servicemen are thought to have been killed or injured, according to the US military, while Ukrainian casualties have been put at around 100,000.
And while Denis accepted that some in the West might be experiencing ‘war fatigue’, he said it was important that focus remained on Europe’s latest war – and that the authorities did not give in to the temptation to broker ‘some kind of deal’.
He said of Russia: “This is a nuclear country, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. IT is supposed to be the to be one of those countries that maintain the security and order in the world; and we see that it’s happening otherwise.”
The Oxford Ukraine Peace Rally will be in Radcliffe Square from 1pm on Friday, February 24. For more details, visit the Oxford University Ukrainian Society's Facebook event page.
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