Sergei and Egor Zakharov are father and son, they both have a passion for art. The first, 56, is a renowned Ukrainian painter, the reproductions of two works by him on the war, a load of gloom painted after February 24, are now on display at the Venice Biennale, outside the Kiev pavilion. The second is 22 years old and studies architecture, indeed he was studying, because a few weeks ago he escaped from the dormitory of his university in Mariupol. But they don’t have in common only the love for art: it is a life that they flee from persecution or from the bombs of the Russians.
In his studio in Kiev, Sergei, a native of Donetsk, leafs through a graphic novel, ‘DumPster’, in which he drew his story and which now helps him to tell without necessarily having to find the words. Too painful. “When the Russians entered the Donbass in 2014, I decided I had to do something.
I started with a street art of protest, I thought that if I moved in the early morning they would not see me. “But the Russians found him and arrested him. Thrown into a cellar in the headquarters of the secret services, he was beaten until his ribs broke, closed in a cube of steel, handcuffed to another companion in misfortune. “When they realized I had no information, they kept beating me just to erase my personality.”
Released after 12 days, he was captured again. But this time, “luckily”, he was put to work in the kitchen of the Liverpool restaurant, which fed the troops of Moscow. After another month he managed to escape from the Donbass, and “like me, thousands and thousands of other people”. They are called “the evacuees of Donbass”, Russian speakers but not Russophiles, who over the years have filled the other cities of Ukraine. “Now the Russian invaders are doing the same things they did to me. In fact, even worse.”
What they are doing now is told by Egor, who together with a group of fellow students resisted in the dormitory of Mariupol for a month. “We went to look for food from the volunteers, but we had to hide from the gunshots and bombs. We saw the corpses on the street, we passed by,” he says, showing some metal splinters fallen next to him, which he keeps in a small box in his pocket. They spent the night in the shelter, during the day with the bravest they went up to the seventh floor to cook something on an improvised barbecue on the balcony, on the horizon the smoke of the shots.
On March 26, 8 people decide to escape on foot towards Berdyansk. On the highway, other civilians load them into cars to the evacuation buses. “At every checkpoint the Russians searched us. The men were made to undress to see if they had tattoos that betrayed their belonging to any military body. Someone was ordered to delete the photos of the destruction from Mariupol from the phone.” After days of uncertainty, Egor managed to reach his father safely in Kiev. And with him to invent another life, as a displaced person in his country. “Here I cannot continue my studies. Ukraine – he says bitterly – does not recognize my diploma obtained in the Donbass”.
Source: Ansa
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