I have clear memories of standing behind my mother in clothes stores when I was a kid, waiting for her to finish finding me the right size in a sweater, or the right color in a t-shirt. I’m guessing you have too.
I remember the sound of her scraping the hangers back one by one on metal rails, quickly inspecting and then discarding each item. I would stand, mostly quite bored, waiting for this task to be completed on my behalf. I didn’t know how lucky I was. The classic steely determination of a mother getting stuff done.
Those memories came back to me this morning at an evacuation point in Kharkiv, as I came across Olena and her 12-year-old son Maxim.
He was standing obediently by with a lollipop in his mouth, watching our camera with interest. They were not in a warm department store with the promise of a home to go back to. Olena was instead rifling through boxes of donated clothes and shoes, asking her relatively unbothered son if he liked this shoe or that shirt.
There’s something extraordinarily powerful about a mother on a mission for her child.
We watched as she went methodically from box to box out in the yard at a Kharkiv community center. She said Her family had to flee Vovovchansk -- a town north of Kharkiv -- with literally only the clothes on their backs. By many accounts, it is being levelled by the Russian onslaught.
“It was horrific,” she tells me. “We had almost no time to get out.”
They saw incendiary bombs and described a kind of liquid that would cover a building and then explode in flames.
There is a parallel here with the events in early 2022, when Russian troops tried to make it to Kyiv. Thousands were displaced. Many -- as we saw in Bucha and Irpin -- did not make it.
The tragedy here is that these towns and villages had already been liberated by the earlier Russian advance. Ukraine had pushed them out. Some say they thought they were safe. They were wrong.
They blame this reversal of fortunes on the lack of weaponry needed to keep this region protected. Like so many Ukrainians we meet, Olena describes her hardship and then shrugs, returning to her task. She has found a sneaker that fits Maxim but must now find its pair.