Ukrainian teens take refuge in QLD after Russian troops loot their home
Two Ukrainian teenagers watched from their new regional Queensland home as Russian invaders trashed their home and took a joy ride in their mother’s bullet-ridden car. Read their shocking story and watch the video.
Mackay
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Two Ukrainian teenagers watched from afar as Russian invaders trashed their home and took a joy ride in their mother’s bullet-ridden car.
Ruslan Zubenko, 18, and younger brother Volodymyr, 15, fled to Mackay in June after waking to Russian bombing in the northern town of Kharkiv earlier in the year.
Less than an hour from the Russian border, Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city and their home town.
After the Zubenko brothers were violently uprooted, eerie footage that appeared on the family Google Photo account was a further twist of the knife.
On February 24, they and the rest of the world woke up to the reality of Russian aggression as troops and heavy bombardment surged towards their home.
“I woke up at four in the morning because of the rocket,” Volodymyr said.
“It was just like 200 metres away from the house.
“It was very loud.
“Of course, our house didn’t have any windows after this.”
Ruslan said their village of Tsyrkuny, just 10 minutes from Kharkiv, was left with no electricity, water or gas in a frozen winter where temperatures dip below -10C.
“It was bad,” Ruslan said.
“So the next day, Father was coming to our village and taking us out to the city.
“He sent us to his friend who has (an under)ground parking (lot) that was very safe.
“Then he went off to fight (in the Ukrainian army).”
Their father, also named Ruslan, had been a Kharkiv realtor before patriotically switching his business gear for military attire.
The boys spent a month in that parking lot under near constant shelling.
Their police officer mother, Oksana, and their grandmother had stayed in Tsyrkuny - expecting the fighting to end quickly - before they fled into Russia itself.
As the carnage continued, Oksana fought to reunite with her sons in Ukraine via Georgia and Poland.
By then, the boys had left Kharkiv for the western city of Lviv, a crucial city for supply routes and fleeing refugees where people were still “liv(ing) usual lives”.
“(There was destruction) in Kharkiv, yes, but Lviv was just usual Lviv,” Ruslan said.
From there, the brothers and their mother left Ukraine, passing through Poland and into Georgia to stay with “some good Ukrainian men (in) this apartment”.
Yet a looming deadline pressing down on the Zubenkos was Ruslan’s 18th birthday in September, when he would be conscripted into the Ukrainian army despite his desire to pursue an engineering degree.
So the family reached out to their only relative living abroad, Aunt Viktoriya, who had arrived in Australia 11 years ago.
Viktoriya lived in Mackay with her husband and five-year-old son and had only met Ruslan and Volodymyr twice before on trips home to Ukraine.
“I really wanted to agree that leaving my family would be the best choice, but in the end, there was no other choice,” Ruslan said.
Viktoriya’s home had limited space and could only host two more people, meaning another heartbreaking separation for the family.
“We lived with our mum our whole life,” Ruslan said.
“I can't imagine my life without Mum.”
With war already splintering their family, videos and selfies of Russian troops that appeared on their Google Photo account added insult to terrible injury.
In a group selfie outside the house, five Russian troops flex and thumbs up at the camera while holding what look like Kalashnikov AK-74s.
One video shows three soldiers listening to Russian pop music while taking Oksana’s car for a joy ride, filming the deserted streets through a windshield shattered by multiple bullet holes.
Another shows soldiers chatting, smoking, and drinking looted alcohol in the family’s backyard, where one of the boys’ bikes can be spotted in the background.
Seeing their home so blatantly destroyed and occupied made the boys “very sad”.
Volodymyr said when their mother returned to the village, a computer in the house had been stripped of hardware and was now “just an empty box”.
“Not very long time ago, something (was) trying to enter my account from (a) Russian city because of the computer”, he said.
The Kharkiv region was recently retaken by the Ukrainian army in news that has heartened refugees like Ruslan and Volodymyr around the world, but the ruins left by war still linger in their minds.
Unusually for many teens in normal circumstances, Volodymyr said he missed their school, Kharkiv Gymnasium No. 47, which bombing had reduced to rubble.
Apart from family, Ruslan said he most missed his girlfriend Maria, now in Hamburg, Germany, who he had been dating for three years.
Today, Ruslan and Volodymyr are year 11 and 10 students at Mackay North State High School, the transition to which they described as “very hard and different” not just because of the language barrier.
“In Ukraine, we can’t choose any subject,” Ruslan said.
“In Australia, we can choose a subject, whatever we like.”
Volodymyr said that it seemed “way easier” and “very free”, but also that many Australian kids were ignorant of their home country and what was happening there.
“When I was saying to some boys that I was in Georgia, they thought it was in America”, Volodymyr said.
“I think that was a little strange.”
Lack of knowledge of European geography aside, the teens said Ukrainian and Australian teenagers were much the same.
The teenagers are working hard on developing their English and are enjoying exploring Aussie pastimes like swimming at their new home city.
But they need help settling after arriving in Queensland with just the clothes on their back.
A PayPal fundraiser has been set up to raise money for Ruslan and Volodymyr’s new lives in Australia, most importantly laptops to help study for school.
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