Interview: Natalija Yefimkina, 03/22
“I am Katerina Malofeyeva, I am a freelance journalist living in Ukraine.
The last few weeks I have been reporting a lot from the front lines. The front lines is the whole Ukraine.
I was in Kharkov and I was in Mariupol before the siege.
It is a difficult story because my parents live in Donetsk.
It is not a new experience for me. I have already seen similar things in 2014/2016. But what is difficult, that is to go through the same horror again. This is the second time in my life that I have the traumatic experience of losing my home.
When this war started 14 days ago, I couldn’t grasp myself for 3-4 days, [I glad], I understood that everything I have built and achieved in the last eight years is now in limbo. What should I do, what is my plan?
For three days I was shaking, I was very scared and I tried to reach my relatives in Russia to tell them what is going on. I tried to tell them, you have to think, you have to stop it, you have to go protest because your niece may die and my blood will be on your hands.
My relatives have turned away from me, some have even blocked me on social media.
Most of my relatives live in Russia, in Moscow, in the South of Russia and my parents live in Donetsk and I try not to talk about politics with them.
Actually, it is just me alone who is on the Ukrainian side. I am equally worried about my parents and myself because working on the front line is not safe either.
It is absolutely a different war than the one I knew before, it is terrible because it is not only the war with bullets and heavy artillery – but it is also a war with drones and air strikes, and you can’t plan for the air strike and you don’t know where the danger is coming from.
What scared me is my ability to get used to the air alert, after three days I realized that this is now my new reality, which I already knew before, and I have to work in these circumstances. But I know that when the war is over, I break down because of the mass of stress and suffering you see every day, the mass of human suffering, wounded people, people in the morgue, people fleeing.
I know it will affect me in the future.”