Concrete Sunflowers

Tag: iryna

  • The generator in Balakliia

    Henry: Also, this was the only spot that had a Starlink. So people from all over different villages, they would come here, because nobody had any connection. Like even the railroad signs and all that. I don’t know if I told you this before, but there was a sign that literally said, it was so…

  • Henry’s Balakliia stories

    Iryna and I were- the whole time she was telling me, like, Oh, she could drive. She could drive. Okay, cool. Mind you, she doesn’t have a- she doesn’t have a Ukrainian driver’s license. So what happens if we get stopped at a block post? But anyways, I didn’t let her drive. Nobody let her…

  • Tank friendly fire incident

    Iryna: So, in the beginning of the war when Russian tanks and echelons were just entering Kyiv, I was acquainted with a guy. He’s very young, he’s younger than me. He was probably 19 or 18 at that moment, and he joined the military forces right away. The Russian troops were already getting closer to…

  • Iryna on runes and playing cards

    Vic: So as a Ukrainian person, when you see people with the rune amulets or rune chevrons or tattoos, do those have any connotations for you? Iryna: Well, I grew up in a family where tattoos are banned <laughs>. So I think that people can, you know, have as many tattoos as they want because…

  • An attack on Kyiv

    Iryna: So this is our first time in Kyiv. We go there on a volunteer mission, and we exit the train station. We leave all the backpacks, all our belongings, at the train station, because we still had a few hours before we could check into our hotel room. And we’re like, “Yeah, let’s go…

  • Iryna and the bullet

    Iryna: Okay, so back in 2022 when they still had the security checkpoint in Kharkiv train station. We were going back from Balakliia, it’s like the- it was a recently liberated area. It was probably liberated within the last couple of weeks, and you could see all these different, you know, bullets on the ground,…

  • Iryna’s church dream

    Iryna: It’s probably the weirdest and the most strange story that has ever happened to me in my whole entire life. It was probably day three or day four of the full-scale invasion. I was super sick, super high fever, chills, I could barely go to the toilet. I lived by myself in a dormitory…

  • Iryna and the fish

    Iryna: So we were in Balakliia back in 2022 and there was this local market for the local people. It wasn’t regulated or anything, so the locals would go fishing and they would sell whatever they had in that local market. I got sick and I asked Henry to go and pick up some fish…