Chris fled with family to air-raid shelter near Kiev: ‘I immediately said we had to go’

The confrontations with Russia are nothing new for Chris and his family. “We’ve been at war with them since 2014, so we’re used to something,” he says. But not this. They don’t go quickly to the bomb shelter at their new house under construction, in a suburb of Kiev. But now they had no other choice.

‘We have to go’

“I immediately told my wife to go when I heard the bombs.”

They packed everything they needed and left by car. They weren’t the only ones trying to flee the city. “We soon got into a very long traffic jam,” Chris says. “In total we took four hours over a 20-kilometer stretch.”

The family eventually arrived safely at their other home in Hostomel, which had an air raid shelter. They had enough food and drink for several days. The only thing they didn’t have were beds, but they took that for granted.

Bombing

The house is located near the Antonov military airport, which has been occupied by Russian troops this afternoon. Chris and his family hoped they would be safer here, but the situation wasn’t much better than in Kiev. “We’ve been hearing bombing for about two hours,” Chris says. “We saw black smoke rising and heard several fighter jets fly over.”

In the meantime, he heard from his wife that the airport had been taken by the Russians.

Anyway back

It seemed to calm down for a while. They planned to spend the night in the bomb shelter until bombs exploded near their house at the end of the afternoon. The family no longer felt safe and decided to move back to the apartment in Kiev. “That’s safer,” Chris says via an app. He does fear that the Russians will be in Kiev tomorrow. “At the ring we saw soldiers standing.”